Great Britain has recently shut down its aging fleet of oil and coal powered plants which produced wind power. As a result, it will not have spare power which would act as a backup when the requirement of power generation would be the highest. Thus, the country would be heavily dependent on power sourced through wind power and modern natural gas fired power plants.

Recently, the government of Britain had declared that it had approved the licenses of several offshore related wind projects which had a potential of at least 32 gig watts of wind power generation. According to the government, enough power was needed as long as all the houses in Britain could be powered up.
However, the drawbacks which were discussed this week were  centered on the huge capital which was required towards the funding of wind power as apparently the current wind power production of the country had come to a cessation due to the weather problems like lack of wind, high pressure and cold air. In fact, the critics did not approve the idea of relying up these sources unless they had a strong backup as these issues were creating a pressure over the natural gas supplies.
The centrally located power grid operator for Britain recently issued “gas balancing alerts” to its industrial customer who were instructed to close their gas supplies source. According to the operator, these alerts are issued when the demand for natural gas exceeds supply. In the view of this, only three such alert notification has been issued in the last four years. Apart from these issues, the country does not have gas storage units which could contribute towards its conservation, therefore additional infrastructure was needed.

The local press reports claims that the scarcity of gas in Britain would have a significant effect on the country as it relies highly on natural gas towards being its prime source of power.
By 2020, Britain plans to have at-least 40 percent of its power derived from low-carbon sources, while 30 percent would be from renewable sources and the rest would be produced  from clean coal and nuclear power.

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