The good news – sort of – is that the energy market worked on Monday. Supply met demand and the lights stayed on. National Grid did not even have to deploy the two coal-fired plants that it had instructed to get warmed up. Those plants, remember, are only intended to be used as a last resort “when all commercial options have been exhausted”. In this case, the commercial option of paying through the nose to secure balancing supplies from French nuclear stations, or elsewhere, must have been available.
The bad news is that it’s only mid-December and there may be more cold and calm days ahead this winter. Indeed, some figures in the energy industry were surprised that National Grid even got as far as putting the coal plants on emergency standby. They had assumed an alert would be more likely to be triggered by, say, an unexpected outage within the UK’s nuclear power fleet (which was humming at full capacity on Monday for the first time this winter).
