UK facing rolling three-hour energy blackouts this winter

It urged households to ‘back Britain’ by using energy at off-peak times and said preparations were being made for planned three-hour overnight outages to help prevent the grid from collapsing and to keep the lights on for the remaining 21 hours.

The worst-case scenario – one of three outlined yesterday – is currently “unlikely”, the body that oversees Britain’s electricity network said.

Despite the embattled Prime Minister Liz Truss saying the UK has “good energy supplies” and “can get through the winter”, the Lib Dems called for an emergency COBRA summit to be held on the issue, and Labour said the warning “shows our vulnerability as country as a direct consequence of a decade of failed Conservative energy policy.”

Adam Bell, former head of energy strategy at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, said the possibility of blackouts is high in the coming months if there is a cold winter and the situation in Ukraine does not change.

He said: “The chances of a very cold January itself are quite low, it’s only 10 per cent or one in every 10 years.

"But in that scenario, given the constraints Europe is under, given the constraints our system is under, even with the interventions the National Grid already have planned, which includes reopening some coal plants and paying people to turn down their demand, you would likely see some rolling blackouts for domestic customers.”

In the other two scenarios for this winter, it is hoped by paying people to charge their electric cars at off-peak times and firing up backup coal plants the risk of blackouts can be offset.

But in the face of the “challenging” winter for European energy supplies following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the grid operator is also planning for what would happen if there were no imports of electricity from Europe.

To tackle a loss of imports from France, Belgium and the Netherlands, there are two gigawatts of coal-fired power plants on stand-by to fire up if needed to meet demand.

Although caused by different factors the threat of blackouts, a faltering economy and widespread industrial unrest will bring back unwanted comparisons with the 1970s for the Prime Minister, who faces immense challenges and daunting opinion polls one month into the job.

The last time planned blackouts were a reality in the UK was in that decade, in response to miners’ strikes and the oil crisis.

In the last year, 43 percent of electricity in the UK came from gas-powered stations.

But gas power plants are expected to use around a fifth more gas this winter, according to the outlook from the National Grid, because there is expected to be less electricity imported from the continent over the cold months.