Fire at Oxfordshire power station is a reminder of the energy security risks of centralised fossil fuel power and that all energy sources suffer from intermittency
Renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, is frequently criticised for being unreliable. But the major fire at RWEs Didcot gas-fired power station on Sunday evening shows that traditional energy generation is also intermittent. Moreover, accidents at coal, gas and nuclear plants frequently involve much larger amounts of electricity dropping off the grid and at much shorter notice.
The Didcot station was running at full capacity on Sunday evening, RWE told me. So the cooling tower fire, which forced unit 5 to close, led to the instantaneous loss of 700MW of electricity just after 8pm. That is about half-a-million-homes-worth of power that the National Grid had to find with zero seconds notice.