28/12/2022
Some simple facts that the public do not know about, 10% of our electricity is still generated by coal fired power stations, so what would happen if we stopped using coal? People would nationally be without electricity during peak demand times, so no electricity for 2 to 3 hours a day, No electricity would not affect homes or organisations with their own generators, so you might say, what about the wind farms? Sorry but they would have to be shut down untill the system returned to normal. There is a trip system that occurs in all generating systems, if the demand exceeds supply and the frequency (system speed) drops below the frequency of 49.5 Mhtz, if it does the generating system of every power station in the country would trips out, so unless this was controlled by disconnection of large parts of the country, we would all be thrown into darkness, not for just a few hours but for extemely long periods of time, for some areas. This would be for days. During winter that would be catastrophic for many people. Obviously National control of the power system would prevent this from happening, initially by reducing consumption, by reducing the voltage by up to 10%, (this is called a power cut or voltage reduction) this is done by maintaining system frequency, but reducing voltage and hence demand, this happened very rsgularly during the 1960's. Unfortunately in this day and age this would mean the microwave ovens, televisions etc would not work and most of the transmitters for mobile phones would not work, as they do not have seperate power supplies, I forgot to mention that a large proportion of our power comes from gas fired power stations, you might ask about the nuclear power stations? Well their total output amounts to 6,500 megawatts when they are at full output which does not add up to this country's demand of 36,000 megawatts. Unfortunately the total nuclear outputt hardly ever happens due to plant outages, pumps and the like that break down, which is why all power stations, nuclear as well have large maintenance crews, to repair plant that breaksdown.
You might ask how I know all this rubbish, well, before I retired I was in charge of the operation of some very large power stations.
