UK close to winter power cuts that would be ‘devastating’ for the economy

Expert Malcolm Grimston said cuts ‘unlikely’ but a government public information campaign is expected

THE prospect of power cuts during the winter is closer than it has been for many years which would be “devastating” for the economy, according to a leading energy expert.

Malcolm Grimston, senior research fellow at Imperial College’s Centre for Energy Policy, told GB News: “As described, it’s a reasonable worst case scenario. We are getting increasingly concerned about what happens if a number of things go wrong at the same time.”

He was commenting on a report which claimed that the Government is planning for four days of power cuts in January.

“If demand is higher than we expect, a cold snap in January, coupled with a low wind speeds – we had quite low wind speeds last winter which caused part of the current energy crisis – coupled with say a couple of power stations not being available, and if all those things go wrong at the same time, we are closer to power cuts that we’ve been for some time,” he said.

“The most likely outcome is we won’t get power cuts because it does take a lot of things to go wrong at the same time, but power cuts are so devastating for the economy, for our domestic life, freezeers full of food and so on.

“And of course in this electronic age a very short power cut can take a long time to recover from and so it is very important that it [government] does look seriously at all of these unlikely but possible scenarios and make sure we’re ready for them.”

Mr Grimston added: “I think most people in the country are probably already looking at where they can save energy use that otherwise they might not have thought about. This is one of the few benefits of high prices, is that it does make us take energy use more seriously.

“But of course, government does have information that could be of use to people for ways of reducing energy use they may not have thought of themselves.

“I’m sure that a sensible public information campaign will be coming down the road and the good thing too.

He spoke before Vicky Pryce, chief economic adviser with the Centre for Economics and Business Research, warned that power cuts in the winter are likely because there will be no gas in storage.

She said: “We’ve got a serious problem which is that the Government had decided not to support the continuation of gas storage, which was run by a private company, so in 2017 we got rid of the main place where gas was being stored.

“That means that right now we’re exporting gas to the continent to Europe,= because we haven’t got anywhere to put it.

“That really means that we’re going to be facing the winter without any gas storage at all. And that’s a serious problem for us.

“Other countries in Europe, which of course, are much more reliant on Russia right now are putting as much gas [in storage] as they possibly can.”