British electricity hit hard by wind outages and gas shortages – InsideSources

If you plan to travel to Europe this winter, be sure to pack your long underwear. Also a sweater or two.

Europe is facing the biggest energy crisis in decades. Some countries will simply not have gas for heating or generating electricity. Others will not be able to pay for the available gas because the prices are so high – five times what they used to be. Much of this is due to the fact that Russia severely restricted the flow of gas to Europe after a wind drought.

It is particularly bad in Great Britain, which is afflicted by a trifecta. It started with a major wind drought in the North Sea, usually one of the windiest places on earth. For most of the six weeks there was just not enough wind and the UK is heavily invested in wind. In addition, many gas storage tanks were never installed, which is a way of protecting against interruptions.

Great Britain has made a passion for decarbonisation, relying on its large wind resources in the North Sea, where the wind is measured by the Met Office in hurricane strengths. The notoriously rough seas off Scotland did not take their usual blow. Most European countries are 10 percent dependent on wind, but Great Britain for 20 percent of its electricity.

One result has been to drive gas prices into the stratosphere; as a result, the price of electricity has skyrocketed. Out of 70 UK electricity traders, 30 have failed and others are expected to close down too. These are not generators, but buyers and sellers of electricity under a scheme that was promoted by the government when it dissolved the state’s Central Electricity Board during the Thatcher administration.

Britain, which opened the world’s first nuclear power plant in Calder Hall in 1956, was undecided about new nuclear power plants. Those currently under construction are being built by Areva, a French company that works with the Chinese. This has raised questions at a time when relations with Beijing have soured in September over Hong Kong and China’s criticism of Britain’s right to send warships into the South China Sea.

Either way, the use of electricity from nuclear energy in Great Britain has fallen from a peak of 26 percent to 20 percent today.

Russia, which limits the flow of gas to Europe, is the main contributor to the problems facing the UK and continental Europe. Supply is down 30 percent this year, and Russia is likely to continue starving Europe if it turns into a cold winter as forecast.

Russia is in an open dispute with Ukraine, which depends on Russia’s gas giant Gazprom to deliver gas for the Ukrainian distribution system to other parts of Europe. At the heart of the Russian gas shortage is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which has been completed but is not yet operational. It carries gas directly – 750 miles – to Germany under the Baltic Sea and runs parallel to an older pipeline. Its effect will be to cripple Ukraine as a distributor.

The United States rejected the pipeline, but President Joe Biden reversed it in May. Ukraine feels betrayed and much of Europe is troubled.

In the future, Europe will be more cautious with Russian deliveries and less confident that the wind will always blow. The gas shortage in Russia has put pressure on international liquefied natural gas markets, and counties from China to Brazil are suffering.

The UK has its own crisis when it comes to gasoline, which the UK calls petrol: there is an acute shortage of tanker drivers to get the abundant fuel from UK refineries to the pumps. British petrol stations run out of fuel or face long lines of dissatisfied drivers.

This problem goes back to Brexit. Driving tankers is a tough, badly paid job – as is a lot of road haulage – and the British have stopped doing that. The average age of UK drivers is 56 and many are retiring.

The loophole was picked up by the Eastern Europeans when the UK was part of the European Union. But after Brexit, these drivers were sent home as they no longer had the right to work in the UK.

So the electricity and gas shortages are exacerbated by a gas shortage, which is a fairly separate issue but is adding to Britain’s suffering as a winter of discontent looms.

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