National Energy System Operator (NESO)

And of course, Great British Energy, which you may remember as having started up with a somewhat unlikely remit a couple of years ago, has travelled to the north because, of course, the assumption is that a huge amount of power can be harnessed from the wind, whilst the evidence points quite strongly to the contrary.

But this is Great British Energy 2.0. visit shetland and what they said of their proposed visit was it's an opportunity to better understand constraints including grid connectivity and energy affordability while identifying opportunities for collaboration and it's really the collaboration point that i want to focus on here the timing of course was unfortunate because it coincided directly with the shetland times happening to report on a large project already in existence in Shetland, the Viking Wind Farm, as having recorded constraint payments at their highest level since its early days back in August 2024, as the National Energy Systems Operator spent a record £505 million in constraint costs across the uk that's just over the course of a month and and we see absolutely laid bare that there is no doubt that the way the system is set up is absolutely to benefit the corporations at the expense of the consumer now amazon again is one of these because going back to shetland amazon recently announced they've added mossy hill wind farm to their portfolio of over 50 carbon-free energy projects now what's this all about they say that they are now the uk's largest corporate purchaser of carbon free energy and have been for five consecutive years their portfolio now represents more than one gigawatt of capacity and they say enough to power the equivalent of more than 1.3 million households annually well that's the sort of claim that can never really be entirely nailed down but what they're referring to here is the power purchase agreement ppa which is effectively a mechanism by which corporation may fix the price of energy over a set period far longer than the individual consumer may be able to do and in the process enhance their so-called environmental credentials because of course the energy pricing the energy fix or or the commitment is to a so-called renewable project which is exactly why the announcement about mossy hill now it's very likely In fact, it's almost impossible that Amazon themselves will be able to use the energy that they have purchased, which there are two sort of obvious points to come from that.

First of all, we've already seen that the curtailment costs associated with renewable projects, wind in particular, are absolutely considerable and they get passed on to the consumer.

Not just that, but of course, the businesses and homes that are supplied by the renewable projects, if Amazon has already apparently purchased that energy, means that they cannot, in effect, take any credit for the supposed decarbonisation that they might be undergoing.

An idea that we could step into planning controls and actually make sure investment happens before it's too late and losing international investors.

And therefore, the challenge I set almost is not to spend $4 billion, but is actually all to spend the $30 to $70 billion, depending if you've talked to Neso National Grid, that needs to go into our grid system.

But actually, we have some key UK projects that give investors confidence that the government will support big investments that will change our ability to actually be a world-class economy, have those AI data centres, have industries that provide jobs, have industries that provide well-paying jobs, and we step in and see that.

Don't be scared of getting involved.

That forecast says very little about what a business with British sites will pay to keep running through January.

The National Energy System Operator, NESO, set out its position in an early view of winter twenty twenty-six twenty-seven in June.

It forecasts a derated margin of five point five gigawatts, GW, or eight point eight percent of expected peak demand in an average cold spell.

Derating trims each power source to what it can realistically deliver under stress, so the margin is an estimate of spare capacity across the whole system.

NESO puts the loss of load expectation, LOLE, below point one hours a year, far inside the three-hour reliability standard, and expects to meet demand and its reserve requirement across a wide range of conditions.

The tight days, if they come, are most likely in mid to late January.

As of October fourteenth, NESO's Winter Watch page still carries the early view, with the full report promised for this month.

One day in January tells the story.

So there are so many problems with all of this, it's hard to know where to begin.

In terms of the specifics and where this is going, we'll just go back to a separate document put out by NISO Energy, explaining the costs of balancing Britain's electricity system.

And just in case... you're not quite clear on what this does actually mean.

They say that the balancing costs are increasing, and are predicted to go up from around 2 billion a year now to as much as 8 billion by 2030.

For the UK, we only look at CCGT installations, so when we're making those calculations, those are the assumptions that we use.

We also have to find out a number for grid intensity, and that comes from the National Electricity System Operator, and we use the 12-month average for the intensity that we have, and we use the max for max of that 12 months for our high case and the low for our low case.

And if we multiply all of those figures through, you end up with the emissions estimates that we were able to develop.

Right.