The only choice I can see is to renege on the agreement with the EU and keep the coal fired plant (and the old nukes) running until they fall apart by which time we might have replacements designed and commissioned.

The problem is that there hasn’t been any work on design for new base load plant except the gas fired CCGTs so, assumimg we’re happy to go on burning gas, there isn’t a problem. If we’re not then there is nothing much else apart from nuclears kindly supplied by EdF and coal fired plant maybe with carbon capture. Renewables won’t fill the gap in any sensible time horizon of 10 years. Don’t even think Severn barrage as the silt in suspension in the river will stop that one dead.

Job done.

In another story, the Libertarian solution would be to encourage bottom-up entrepreneurial innovation by removing structural impediments like taxes and regulation.

1. It needs to be cheaper to build and run a nuclear power station. Some form of bribery/coasean bargaining should take care of Nimby objections.
2. Great chunks of the national grid can be privatised. Ideally you want it to work something like the internet with packets of energy being routed across the country from areas of low demand and high supply to areas with high demand and low supply.
3. It needs to be cheaper to build and run any kind of power station. CHP on a neighbourhood basis is stupidly efficient. It should be profitable. It’s not profitable, otherwise people would be doing it. Why isn’t it profitable?

The EEU is never less than zero. It’s made that way. That’s not unreasonable: there’s no way of building a system that simply wouldn’t ever fail to meet demand in any conceivable circumstances. Grown-ups should understand this.
The scenario in Chart 25 is better than at least some scenarios envisaged two years ago, in the absence of the new government strategy, which you could spin as meaning that the strategy is expected to rescue us from a potential disaster. (Of course, that would be putting a silly partisan spin on the facts. Which we would never want to do.)
The DT report picks out the two single-year peaks in the graph, and presents those as if it were the future norm, which is quite clearly not the case. (If you believe the government’s figures, that is. But if you don’t, there’s no story in the first place.)
Finally, the potential outages in those two worst years would not mean “16 million families being without power for at least one hour during the year” as the DT implies. (By the way, does an average of 30–40 minutes’ power cuts per year sound like the end of civilization to you?) Observe their weasel words “the equivalent of” – industry and even (yes, really) government offices can take the hit, and it’s only “equivalent” to an accountant. At the point where they start talking about “the equivalent of the whole of the Nottingham area being without electricity for a day”, you should remind yourself that we’re talking about electricity supply across the whole of the UK for a year, so the comparison is utterly pointless. (Yesterday, the Guardian claimed that the amount of ice dropping off the Greenland ice cap was equivalent to “dropping a billion elephants into the ocean”. Top marks for inventive imagery, which is more than can be said for the Telegraph’s analogies, but nul points in both cases for meaningfulness.)

In short: a lazy – no, let’s be fair, a time-pressured– journalist for a right-wing newspaper has cobbled together a scare story based on a misunderstanding of a technical appendix and old-fashioned journalistic hyperbole and insinuation. It tells you absolutely nothing about the effectiveness or otherwise of government strategy on energy, or the effectiveness of government strategising in general. Of course, if you believe that all government planning is either evil, incompetent or both (and if it’s evil, of course, we should be glad that it’s incompetent), then you’ll carry on believing it. But please don’t cite this report as evidence for your belief.

Follow Stern’s reccomendations of taxing CO2 at $85 per tonne and then let the market decide how to generate electricty. The one thing we do want is for the world to be a lot richer as the climate changes naturally and power cuts aint going to help.

“[the events] did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them…”

The Libertarian solution is to reduce or remove State distortions, so by just ignoring the recent codswallop EU directives would be Libertarian.

One would need to remove prohibitions on use of and mining of, say, coal. I would think that the UK has enough coal to last it until Fusion is in production and hundreds of years beyond.

However, War is Peace, so the spooked up “oops” no power will be used as an excuse to TAX us, to CONTROL us, to MONITOR us and to make us ask permission for living.

I am coming to the conclusion that the Socialists/Fabians and Statists in general have not got over the “golden age” of Wartime Britain where they had the most control. Britain had an almost total War Economy, almost the entire means of production mobilised. Global Warming along with “Turrr” is the new Fascism. Oh! The irony!

So, if some nasty character at the end of a pipeline starts to turn it off, the customer can at last say: “Hah. I will simply get my gas from somewhere else, where they have democracy and the rule
of law.”

All is not lost then

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/6100536/A-new-age-of-cheap-energy-approaches.html

This is one of the two explanations that fit the facts, either:

1) Labour minister are exceptionally and unnaturally stupid and incapable of listening to a word of the advice their civil servants give them.
2) They are still revolutionaries, as they were in their youth, and are looking to generate a large crisis to justify an authoritarian socialist utopia.

I’ve worked around this area and can tell you everyone who has any dealings with gas and electricity supply has known a crunch is coming for at least 15 years.