London Paid a Record Price to Dodge a Blackout

[BoL]

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-25/london-s-record-9-724-54-per-megawatt-hour-to-avoid-a-blackout
"Last week, unbeknown to many outside the power industry, parts of London came remarkably close to a blackout — even as it was recovering from the hottest day in British history. On July 20, surging electricity demand collided with a bottleneck in the grid, leaving the eastern part of the British capital briefly short of power. Only by paying a record high £9,724.54 (about $11,685) per megawatt hour — more than 5,000% higher than the typical price"

I'm no expert, but surely these problems won't disappear next year, or the next. The amount of energy bought at that price was tiny, but perhaps a sign of things to come given the market for energy.

[rcjordan]

>won't disappear next year

Particularly as more and more air conditioning is installed.

[ergophobe]

The only way you can solve it is with huge amounts of excess capacity or huge amounts of storage or both and, as you say, that isn't coming this year or next.

Oh... and if you get huge amounts of excess capacity, you end up in the bind that California has had on rare occasions where, to keep the grid stable, you have to pay people to take your power (a year or two ago CA "sold" electricity to AZ for negative value... i.e. paid to drain it off).

[Travoli]

>The only way you can solve it is with huge amounts of excess capacity or huge amounts of storage

Long-term option 3 for many rich countries may be population decline.

[ergophobe]

There is also a lot of inefficiency and you could make it more efficient. But that just brings all the numbers down. It doesn't change the nature of the problem (unless it happens so fast that all existing capacity is still in play).

In other words, let's say your avg usage is 100 units but surge usage is 200 units. If you get more efficient and lose population over 50 years to cut demands in half, you probably won't keep all the existing capacity. So even though all those numbers are cut in half, the relationship still holds, it's just that instead of 100 units of capacity that are idle most of the time you have 50 units idle. That still makes those 50 units of capacity extremely expensive.

And I' assuming people get so much more efficient they reduce usage per capita. That's probably pie in the sky. Has that every happened? My guess is that population in rich countries will be offset by increased demand (think air conditioning in the UK for example).