A government minister has hit back at claims that households and businesses may face planned blackouts this winter. It follows a warning from the National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO) who said people in the UK could be hit with three-hour outages if power plants cannot be supplied with enough gas to keep running.
Planned blackouts last hit the UK during the 1970s in response to the miners strikes and the oil crisis, and there were also unplanned outages during storms in 1987 when over 1.5 million households were left in darkness. Unless the gas-fired power plants that produce 43 per cent of Britain’s electricity over the last year cannot get enough gas to continue operating, then the National Grid warns we may face a blackout in the 'worst case scenario'.
It is the most dire of three possible scenarios that the ESO laid out on Thursday (October 6) for how Britain’s electricity grid might cope with the worst global energy crisis in decades. The other two scenarios would see paying people to charge their electric cars at off-peak times and firing up backup coal plants which would potentially offset the risk of blackouts.
