MRS @ 88%

At the end of Gas Day 23rd Dec (a Saturday) Medium Range Storage was at 88% having taken another 7mcm from MRS.

At this rate MRS would deplete in January.

As expected LRS should be OK except for the fact that it passed through the same capacity constraint at Easington as Langeled (96-98 mcm/d). Bacton I am told has a capacity constraint of 158 mcm/d. I am not sure it is that high from the actions of NG on capacity - see the ANS messages.

After Christmas we will do a review of the flows to find out what is going on. Weather forecasts point towards warmer weather, but the control on GFS is going for a cold end of December.

The recent frosty weather has not been that cold. Demand has been high probably because 2Gw of AGRs are offline. Making an assumption of 50% efficiency (supposed to be 55%), that would be 96 GWh of gas which is only about 9 mcm so it looks as if there are other reasons for the relatively high demand.

MRS withdrawal on Tuesday

244 GWh (about 23 mcm) was withdrawn from Medium Range Storage on Tuesday. This was probably a bit higher because Rough had to be scaled back - I will check the detailed figures on this later.

The point about this is that it is not actually that cold as yet.

I really don't like the way the GBA calculations are done as they don't seem to adjust for reality. It also remains that we take gas from storage rather than importing it.

Rough is most likely to last the winter without problems simply because there is so much gas in it. The challenge this winter is MRS and LRS because the demand is higher because the AGRs are offline and we need the CCGTs to generate electricity.

Whoops - and this a big whoops

It looks like there are capacity constraints at both Easington and Bacton. This means that the key sources of substantial amounts of gas (Rough, Langaled, BBL and the Interconnector) are now constrained to a physical maximum.

What effect this has on total supply has not as yet been calculated. Luckily it looks like it is getting a bit warmer.

Biggest gas test so far this winter today

Forecast demand is 373 mcm/d which is substantially higher than any other time this winter. It is a starting test of how the new infrastructure will react. At the time of writing it looks like only 350 mcm/d is going into the pipes. This means either that the predicted demand will come down or that there will be an extraction from linepack - not sustainable.

A warm december

If it wasn't warm then there would be concerns. The big issue is that there are a couple of gigawatts of AGRs out this winter. This means that there is less space for the CCGTs to go off line. Rough at its maximum rate now would have until late Feb. The question is, therefore, what happens when demand shoots up.

If it gets cold we will find out.