They could have cut the headline at Rewiring Britain because, alt-energy or not, the job has to be done, just to meet the current - so to speak - need, much less the coming demand..
From the New York Times, April 14:
National Grid, which owns the high-voltage electricity grid in England and Wales, is rebuilding it in a government-backed drive to attract investment and tackle climate change.
In a career spanning more than 30 years, John Pettigrew has seen big changes in the electricity industry. He started out in 1991, working to introduce natural-gas-fired power plants to the grid, gradually replacing polluting coal plants.
Now, once again, he is managing a tectonic shift to an electrified economy that runs on renewable energy like wind and solar power. But these sources of power generation are far trickier to manage than their coal and gas predecessors.
“Effectively, what we’re doing is reconfiguring the whole network,” said Mr. Pettigrew, chief executive of National Grid, which owns and operates the high-voltage electricity grid in England and Wales.
Mr. Pettigrew was emerging from a tunnel nearly 20 miles long that National Grid has bored deep underground at a cost of about 1 billion pounds (about $1.3 billion). The shaft, which workers ride through on bicycles, will carry new cables to feed the power-hungry offices and residential communities of London.
Mr. Pettigrew and his company are in the spotlight these days. The Labour Party government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, which came to power in July, is taking a close interest in the electric power system, which it sees as a primary vehicle for delivering political and economic goals.
A more robust, versatile grid will be crucial not only for tackling climate change but for securing Britain’s place on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, which requires vast amounts of power to run data centers.
The government aims for 95 percent of Britain’s electricity to come from what it calls “clean” sources like wind and nuclear by the end of the decade, up from about 60 percent in 2023. At the same time, demand for electric power is expected to surge.
“We haven’t started to think about how seriously we need to invest in our core infrastructures for the resilience of our economy in a digital world,” Dieter Helm, a professor of economic policy at the University of Oxford, said in a recent podcast.
The price tag for an electricity system that can handle such changes is around £40 billion a year from 2025 to 2030, according to the government. National Grid alone has filed documents with regulators to spend as much as £35 billion over five years.
National Grid was founded in 1990 when the Central Electricity Generating Board, which managed the power network in England and Wales, was broken up in an era of privatization. (The company, which is listed in London, also has a large business managing power networks in the United States.) Mr. Pettigrew has run National Grid for nearly a decade, but he may be facing his greatest challenge, industry experts say.
“I think there’s a big question about how can they build rapidly enough all this new infrastructure at the same time as maintaining the same standards,” said Edgar Goddard, a former National Grid executive and now a director of EPNC Energy, a consulting firm.
Last month’s fire at an aging 1960s-era National Grid substation led to the closing of London’s Heathrow Airport and raised questions about the management of critical electric infrastructure.
An electrified economy will require a highly reliable grid for a host of reasons, including national security, analysts say. At the same time, critics of renewable energy say that relying on sources of power like wind and solar, which are by their nature variable, creates new challenges for the system.
On April 2, a parliamentary hearing on the Heathrow outage became a venue for executives from the airport and power companies politely dodging blame. Electricity executives said there was sufficient power available. Alice Delahunty, National Grid’s president for transmission and a key aide to Mr. Pettigrew, conceded that the fast-changing demands being made of the power system called for a careful rethinking about its resilience.
Britain’s high-voltage network, like those of other countries, used to be relatively simple, bringing electricity from large generating plants — often near where the coal burned in them was mined — to London and other cities.
Now Mr. Pettigrew is extending National Grid’s tentacles toward the coasts, sometimes through scenic areas, to capture new sources of electricity like the giant offshore wind farms being built in the North Sea....
....MUCH MORE
