ONE million homes narrowly escaped a power cut last month as bitterly cold weather placed a massive strain on Britain’s creaking electricity network.
Shutdown was only avoided because a gas-fired
station due to close by next winter came to the rescue. Last night
experts warned that life-threatening blackouts are increasingly likely
as “we head downhill – fast”.
Alistair Buchanan,
the outgoing head of energy regulator Ofgem said: “On Wednesday,
January 16, due to unplanned outages and cold weather, National Grid had
to find power to supply roughly a million homes to keep the lights on.
“Fawley, an oil-fired plant in Hampshire, was one of the power stations that responded. Next winter Fawley will not be there.”
And
as a spell of bitter cold once more hits the UK, the near switch-off
which came so perilously close on that freezing afternoon, underscores
the magnitude of the energy crisis.
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