Leader: National Grid’s move is not panic – it’s pragmatism

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. National Grid came under fire this week for handing out contracts to two coal-fired power ­stations – Fiddler’s Ferry and one of the remaining coal units at Drax – for unspecified sums. The so-called black start contracts see the power stations paid to remain on hand and capable of starting up without electricity from the grid in the case of a national power outage. It’s an unlikely scenario, but one that could happen and must be planned for.

Conveniently, the contracts have been awarded just in time to keep Fiddler’s Ferry open for another year. National Grid won’t say when it usually awards black start contracts, or how many it hands out, feeding suspicions that these contracts have been signed with the ulterior motive of keeping Fiddler’s Ferry operational until 2017 at least. National Grid has thus been lambasted in the national media for keeping coal online after its natural extinction date, in contravention of stated government policy to be coal-free by 2025; and accused of being in a “blind panic”.

But let’s turn this on its head. Say National Grid had awarded the black start contracts elsewhere, and Fiddler’s Ferry had closed, just ahead of the upcoming, long expected capacity crunch. National Grid could quite fairly have been accused of failing to look at the system in the round, and failing to use all the means at its disposal to keep maximum capacity operating at a time of extraordinary (and temporary) need.

It’s no secret that the power system is in the throes of transformational change. Indeed, it is government policy – hence the capacity market, and a raft of other interventions. The crunch time comes over the next couple of years as traditional forms of generation go offline before the system is fully geared up to cope with the intermittency of renewable forms of generation. For National Grid to be keeping its options open at such a time looks more like pragmatism than panic.