Wholesale electricity price normally fluctuates up and down quite a lot, but usually in the £0-£200-ish range. Yesterday afternoon it spiked up to £1400 briefly, then came back to normal. Unlucky to those paying dynamic pricing!
I can’t find any news or reporting about this. Any idea what happened?
I did notice that gas usage was really high, at about 26GW at one point, and wind was very low. So maybe it was simply high demand combined with low supply, now that we don’t have coal power? 😕
Closing the last coal stations was a terrible idea. Coal made up most of our black start capability. Keeping them as a backup until we have enough batteries to restart the grid would have been a better idea.
National grid have already done the trials to show the grid can be restarted from renewables and batteries.