LEAKY TRANSMISSION CABLES NEGATING MASSES OF CLEAN ENERGY POWER GENERATION.
Britain’s electricity grid has been leaking large amounts of power, with households footing the bill. According to clean energy firm Enertechnos, the UK’s current grid infrastructure is not up to the many challenges the country is facing right now, as it moves away from fossil fuels like natural gas. According to Government figures, losses through these inefficient cables in the UK totalled 26,412 GWh, which is enough to power about seven million homes for a year, while the company notes that this figure is only set to increase with the growing number of electric cars and heat pumps demanding more electricity. This is also a major issue for tackling climate change, as according to the International Energy Agency, globally losses in grids resulted in around 1 gigatonne of carbon dioxide emissions in 2018. Enertechnos CEO Dominic Quennell warned that because there were a lot of inefficiencies in the UK’s cabling, it was “leading to unnecessary losses in energy that’s been generated before it gets to the point of consumption”. To tackle this problem, the IEA highlighted the need to have more efficient power lines. As a result “We lose as much in a year in the grid as we import from outside, so everything that we import gets lost. It’s a colossal amount of energy.” Figures show that in 2021, the UK imported 28.7 terawatt-hours of electricity, from countries like France, the Netherlands, Norway and Ireland. This figure is only slightly more than the 26.4 terawatt-hours of power that it wasted through leaky cables in 2019.Over the past winter, scarce electricity supplies across Europe led the National Grid to warn that it could be forced to impose three-hour rolling blackouts if it fails to secure adequate electricity supplies.
