Here: Kriel Power Station falls over and takes 2000MW with it, because of [checks notes] “heavy mist”:
And there: after the local joy that was felt at loadshedding almost happening in Australia last month, it turns out that the UK only just avoided the same fate last week.
Struggling with an aging and long underfunded national grid that was crying out for investment and updating (sound familiar), there was almost not enough electricity to go around last week, and loadshedding was only avoided by paying a frankly ridiculous price to secure some electricity from Belgium:
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 — did the UK avoid homes and businesses going dark. That was the nosebleed cost to persuade Belgium to crank up aging electricity plants to send energy across the English Channel.
Sounds like a lot anyway, but then especially when you compare it to what they usually pay:
The absurdity of that level is apparent when comparing it with the year-to-date average for UK spot electricity: £178 per megawatt hour.
We don’t have the luxury[?] of a Belgium right next door, so we couldn’t have lobbed out the R196,611.50 /MWh that would have been required to keep the lights on. So our lights would have gone off (like they probably will this evening), and like the UK’s very nearly did:
If Belgium had not helped, the grid would had been forced to “undertake demand control and disconnect homes from electricity,” says a grid spokesperson.
Of course:
“Demand control” = “Rolling blackouts” = “Loadshedding” = “Misery”
Thus, it can be deduced that when it comes to shaky electricity systems, the UK, Australia and SA are all basically the same, but our local (occasional) electricity provider is the only one that follows through on actually flicking the off switch.
