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given the way our current rulers lurch from crisis to crisis with no planning
Good news is we don't have to rely on them to make decisions, it is all planned out by network operator and they have a very defined plan in what order things get restricted and shut down. They don't just turn bits off in a reactive way as balancing pressure is a major issue.
prioritise industry over consumer this winter due to something no-one has thought of, such as Winscale starting to cook-off
A bad scenario for the grid is a very cold snap lasting multiple days once the clocks have changed, as that will often see wind production plummet and gas having to come online and heating and lighting demand up very high from 4-7pm. In that case you are likely to see industry responding to shed electrical load, this is fairly common in winter the last few years, standby diesel generators get turned on to move large users off grid, assets turned off etc. It becomes a bigger issue if any other types of generation have to go off for a prolonged and unforeseen reason, last winter a large amount of french nuclear all had maintenance and caused major issues for imports.
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greentricky
I think the issue there is that we don't have a clear view of the second and third order effects - for example, the fertiliser plant shuts down due to gas prices, which knocks out the supply of Co2, which we use to stun animals prior to killing them. We already have a problem there which is going result in 150,000 pigs being killed on the farm. What other issue are there? Well, beer - although apparently they made moves last time this happened to extract Co2 from stages in the brewing process where it was previously released.
Our nuclear reactors are cooled using Co2 - which they may make themselves, but wasn't something I knew before the fertiliser plant shut down.
Anyway - point is, I suspect we don't understand the impact of restricting gas from industry, and given the way our current rulers lurch from crisis to crisis with no planning and no learning it would not surprise me if they have to prioritise industry over consumer this winter due to something no-one has thought of, such as Winscale starting to cook-off.