UK power grid needs investment to keep lights on in future

The lights stayed on in the UK last winter, despite thin supply margins and outages at important base-load power plants. But the country’s capacity crunch isn’t going away, and utilities will have to work harder to optimise their output in future, argues Genscape's Jonathan Dale

UK transmission network is under pressure

Cast your mind back to late last year and the UK power supply situation looked decidedly worrying. A series of long-term outages over the summer period, nuclear plant closures and fires at the Didcot and Ferrybridge thermal power stations gave rise to the lowest supply margin for eight years. Add in the forced closure of many older thermal plants during the past five years – a result of the European Union Large Combustion Plant Directive – and the prognosis became even gloomier. The result was