MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

UK National Grid warns of possible rotating three hour blackouts this winter

Households are being encouraged to help avoid blackouts, “save money and back Britain” by using more energy during off-peak times.

UK's National Grid has warned that rotating blackouts could happen this winter in the extreme case of gas shortages and reduced electricity imports from Europe. Households could experience a series of three-hour power cuts under this worst case scenario.

If this emergency plan is set into motion, consumers in different parts of the UK would be notified a day in advance of three-hour blocks of time during which their power would be cut off, in an effort to reduce total consumption by 5%.

To avoid this, households are being encouraged to help avoid blackouts, “save money and back Britain” by using more energy during off-peak times.

That could mean putting on the dishwasher or washing machine overnight or charging an EV at off-peak times.

Consumers with smart meters could get paid for using power outside busy periods, as was trialed by Octopus Energy earlier this year.

National Grid hopes this service will free up an extra 2GW, enough to power about 600,000 homes, if enough companies and households participate

If a lack of gas meant UK was forced to limit supplies, households would be prioritized and curbs would first fall on large industrial users and power plants.

But this nightmarish scenario will only come to pass if the gas-fired power plants that produced 43% of Britain’s electricity over the last year cannot get enough gas to continue operating.

The forced blackout is the most dire of three possible scenarios that the body that oversees Britain’s electricity grid laid last week, for how the UK’s electricity grid might cope with the worst global energy crisis for decades.

In the other two scenarios, the operator hopes that by rewarding people for charging their electric cars at off-peak times, and by firing up backup coal plants, it can offset the risk of blackouts.

The network operator stressed it was “cautiously confident” that there would be enough electricity to meet the demands of businesses and consumers this winter but that the unprecedented and uncertain situation in Europe had led them to look at a range of scenarios.

National Grid said it expected gas and electricity prices to remain high through the winter.

Planned blackouts hit the UK during the 1970s in response to the miners strikes and the oil crisis. There have also been major unplanned outages in storms, including in 1987 when over 1.5 million people were left in the dark.