“It would take an improbable concatenation of events to put the lights out nationally,” the Lords’ Science and Technology Committee said in a report on the Resilience of the Electricity System, and the group did not expect lights to go out this winter or next. Instead, it saw “an increasing array of options for managing tight conditions”.
However, the report raised concerns that extra capacity “was put in place at short notice, at considerable cost, and in a way which conflicts with the decarbonisation agenda” and said it was unacceptable to “sail so close to the wind”.