Among the many brilliant and baffling woodcuts by the Dutch artist MC Escher is a depiction of what appears to be a triangle made of three sections of wood, which is in fact an impossible construct owing to the way the joints appear to fit together.

If it existed at all, it would resemble the leg of an insect, which viewed from one position only would appear to enclose a triangle, but in reality it would form a three-part zigzag in space, two of its ends far apart.

Escher’s heirs have obviously been at work on the European electricity market, whose three pillars — sustainability, affordability and security — are clearly incompatible with each other, but they have been presented nevertheless as a coherent whole.

Power that is secure (gas, coal, nuclear) is not sustainable (low carbon); power that is sustainable (nuclear) is not affordable so only governments can build it; and power that is sustainable (renewable) is not secure, or even affordable without subsidies.

As if foreseeing this outcome, the policy-makers in the European Commission devised a lever to raise the price of coal beyond its natural affordability, thereby making it a fuel to be used only in emergencies.

However, the structure of the carbon market, which is aimed at putting a ceiling on carbon emissions, has failed because emissions have shrunk so much since the ceiling was put in place that now everyone has plenty of headroom to burn coal. And coal itself is ludicrously cheap anyway, for a whole host of reasons, not least the US burning more gas for power generation.

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For various reasons, most European governments in recent years have focused on the sustainability aspect most, and least on the security and affordability aspects.

Therefore subsidies have been showered on the wind-farm industry–more in some countries than others–creating an unknowable amount of additional supply on windy or sunny days but very little on calm or cloudy ones.

Even as wind farms and solar panels are being installed and their output is unpredictably flooding markets and frustrating investments in gas-fired plants, so coal use is rising: there are no effective fetters on coal-fired generation.

Meanwhile, many gigawatts of natural gas-fired capacity are being mothballed until better times, as gas is simply too expensive for most of the year relative to coal.

Add into that mix an integrated European market. In that market, every country is simultaneously more or less secure than before because of the unexpected demands from their neighbors to which they are tied by power cables.

Then take away a few large plants which have had to be taken offline for uncertain periods for one reason or another, and suddenly the picture for this winter could look bleak.

The solution is not to remove subsidies as you might have thought, to level the playing field. Instead, it’s to introduce yet more payment schemes, this time to encourage investment in dispatchable capacity, or conversely, to encourage companies not to use electricity at peak times-a solution hit upon in the UK, for example, which is using both levers to ward off disaster.

This week the national transmission system operator, National Grid, offered up-front, no-strings-attached payments of £10,000/MW of capacity to energy-intensive companies that were willing to switch to their own fuel for generation, rather than rely on the national power supply, at peak hours during the week, should demand get sufficiently high to threaten supplies. More money will be paid depending on whether they actually bid successfully to reduce their demand.

Taken with other emergency measures that have the blessing of the national energy regulator Ofgem and its paymaster the energy ministry (Department of Energy and Climate Change), there is all the appearance here of a disaster being headed off by simulating its effects in advance.

Factories might close, but they will have been compensated in advance for it, rather than having to sue for loss of business after the fact.

Nobody knows yet what the margin of comfort for this winter is in the UK. The national energy regulator Ofgem is poised shortly to produce its calculation of available capacity and likely maximum demand, to produce the percentage of surplus generation.

Some sources of supply are very certain to deliver at peak (gas, coal, nuclear) while others (wind) are not, and Ofgem takes that into account in its calculations as well.

But the feeling is that the supply surplus will be very thin, as delays to the UK’s new energy market law, and debates about capacity mechanisms, have come too late to put new plants in place for the coming few winters.

Meanwhile, older plants have closed or been mothballed faster than new ones have opened. And affordable electricity generated overseas will only arrive in the UK if there is nobody on the continent with a different, higher idea of affordability, always an uncertain proposition.

The question being asked now in Britain is whether the lights will stay on this winter. But maybe it ought to be the familiar request: would the last person to leave kindly turn them off?

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