Reading Wiki, I find that the 1882 Holborn Viaduct power station, (DC) was not the first public power station in the UK, which actually was installed in Godalming a year earlier. The snip below (and the one below that) comes from The Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review for October 1, 1881.

Faure accumulators were the original Powerwall it seems (I note that householders are to be offered power banks at a discount, or free. As exciting as a free thing may be, someone else is paying for it. It is in fact demanding money with menaces, and then giving it to someone else (no doubt very deserving…). Naturally, some of these units will ignite. I won’t be having one).

Why is Jit going down a whimsical road to the Victorian Era, you may wonder? Well, I was interested to know what our grid was like in bygone days. Of course, the first occasion that electricity was supplied to the public was not the first day that the UK had a grid. If you pull up this page on Archive.org you can find a span of old issues of “Statistical Abstract for the United Kingdom” going from the middle of the 19th century through to ten years ago (for the “Annual Abstract of Statistics” that it morphed into). One set of data that is reported there relates to electricity supply.

Not long ago, I gave a figure that showed the UK grid’s capacity factor declining as more intermittent renewables were connected. I said the capacity factor peaked in 2003 at about 0.58, and had declined by 2024 to 0.31. Well, my version of the capacity factor is not the one in current use. I took as the theoretical maximum energy that could have been provided the installed capacity times the hours in a year. The done thing seems to be to call the maximum energy provided the peak power actually provided times the hours in a year. Anyway, I’m sticking with my version, because the other does not account for a potentially infinite attachment of unused generators.

Although the first provision of public electricity began in 1881, the Statistical Abstract for the United Kingdom did not start reporting on this topic until the 1920s. Here’s a snip of early data:

In 1922-3, 3 GW was installed, and of interest may be that more than ten percent of it was DC. The lines below the capacity show the destination of the generated energy. The statistics shown change over time: later editions show “Units sent out.” At the beginning, when this is not available, I’ve used “Units Sold” to calculate the capacity factor. So, without further ado, here is a new calculation for the capacity factor of the UK “grid” from the 1920s until now, a span of a century:

Well, that doesn’t look too bad. We’ve kind of plateaued, not plunged. The appearance of the grid is slightly flattered because from 1998, I took the values for installed capacity from DUKES. DUKES reports generating capacity in de-rated quantities (as specified in the Electricity Act, 1989) for renewables. Renewables generally underperform even their de-rated capacities, but the situation looks far more dramatic if, as I have done below, their nameplate capacities are used instead (valid, I believe, since this represents their potential supply to the grid, at a (for them) perfect instant).

OK, so now the decline is rather more cliffy. The calculated capacity factor for 2025 is 0.28. How far back in time do you have to go to reach a UK grid that was equally – shall we say – peaky? Well, on these numbers, we have now dipped to a worse capacity factor than the grid provided in…

…1941.

I would say /message ends here, but there are another couple of interesting factoids I wanted to show you before I leave. The first snip shows gas still in use for public lighting, at a date that some of us (not the present author…) may remember.

The second shows the beginnings of nuclear on the grid, from 1962:

Finally, a paragraph that I found in The Journal of Gas Lighting, Water Supply, & Sanitary Improvement, February 5, 1878:

12 Comments

  1. “The first snip shows gas still in use for public lighting, at a date that some of us (not the present author…) may remember.”

    Oh, JIT!

    Some of us remember gas lighting is still used in London today. 😀

    “Many gas lamps remained in London with 1,100 lamps left across the capital maintained by our (i.e. Centrica) team. Lots of the remaining lamps are grade-II listed, preventing them from being transitioned over to electric lamps, to retain the history and heritage of the lamps and for aesthetics surrounding historic buildings.”

    https://www.centrica.com/media-centre/stories/2025/lighting-up-london-for-200-years/

    https://lookup.london/london-gas-lighting/

    Liked by 1 person

  3. Sometimes it’s difficult to know whether we’re making progress or going backwards:

    “Hydro-electricity restored to historic Northumberland home”

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-21586177

    A historic house in Northumberland, thought to be the first in the world to be lit by hydro-electricity is, once again, to be powered by water.

    Cragside house was built in 1863 by engineer and inventor Lord William Armstrong and was known at the time as the “palace of the modern magician”.

    Used as his home for 30 years, it used the lakes on the estate to generate electricity through a turbine.

    Now, 150 years later, a modern hydro-electric system is to be installed at the house.

    Andrew Sawyer, conservation officer at Cragside, said: “Lord Armstrong was an exceptional man with a genius mind and the prospect of bringing his vision for Cragside into the 21st century is a dream come true.

    “Hydroelectricity is the world’s most widely used form of renewable energy, so we are looking forward to sharing this very special part of its heritage.”….

    Liked by 1 person

  5. For those interested in technical discussions, this may be relevant:

    https://emrdeliverybody.nationalenergyso.com/IG/s/article/De-rating-Factor-Methodology

    A ‘de-rating’ factor is applied to all forms of electricity generation because we do not assume that 100% of capacity will be available 100% of the time. Generating plants can break down occasionally, and wind and solar outputs can vary daily. By applying a ‘de-rating factor,’ we can better determine the amount of electricity generation needed to meet the Government’s Reliability Standard.

    Liked by 1 person

  6. Dougie – that’s an interesting tale, but it’s unfortunate that the website is not the best. A summary of the tale of shale discovery and exploitation needs to be front and centre. What is shale? How does it form? What is paraffin? How was light made before mineral oils? Etc. I appreciate they are probably operating on a shoestring, but still.

    Mark, an objectionable point about de-rating is that it claims to calculate the average performance of wind or solar. The average does not really have any use because it hardly ever applies – the output swings wildly from 0 to about 90% – these are the values the grid has to plan for. Also, the swings are correlated across space. A lull affects many wind “farms” but outages of traditional generators are usually isolated and/or planned in advance.

    Liked by 1 person

  8. This link (May 2007) makes interesting reading also- “A study on the EU oil shale industry – viewed in the light of the Estonian experience” – Oil Shale – final page 15-17 give a brief Scottish overview but the rest is to long to summarise.

    Like

  9. dfhunter; thank you for those links to the Scottish shale industry – fascinating. That PDF included a point which really caught my eye:

    “The maximum output from the shale industry was in 1913, when 3.5 million tons (27,125,000 barrels) of crude oil was produced.” That must have been a significant portion of our consumption in those days and ties in with a comment I read somewhere that local production was a factor in the Navy’s decision to switch from coal to oil.

    Also the note that there are around 300 million tons of recoverable reserves in just that small area of Scotland supports my view that, around the world, there are huge untapped reserves which will probably be exploited once the technology and/or economics are available.

    Liked by 2 people

  11. MikeH – yes, as always technology and/or economics are the drivers. I take it fracking would be the best option to extract the shale oil now, but that’s a none starter for now.

    Anyway, this bit brought back memories of my uncle Tommy – “The Pumpherston refinery was all that remained of the original Scottish shale oil industry. Ironically when it closed in 1993 it was producing the detergent used to disperse oil spillages from the North Sea oilfields”

    He worked there all his life & sadly died shortly before it closed.

    PS – I also remember the soap works in Pumpherston related to the shale oil industry –

    Stories from the Scottish Shale Museum: wonder soap and the By-Prox ladies – Museum Crush

    Like

  12. dfhunter; aiui the shale rock that was mined in Scotland is not the same as the oil- and gas-bearing shale which can be exploited by fracking. The shale rock has to be heated to high temperatures (500 degC?) to drive out the hydrocarbons. Is there a geologist in the room?!

    Like

Leave a Reply