Guest essay by Eric Worrall

h/t JoNova – The cold is biting Britain so hard domestic gas use is causing a supply shortage, forcing the British government to ask industrial users to reduce energy expenditure to preserve supply to households.

UK running out of gas, warns National Grid

Perfect storm of freezing weather and supply problems prompts call for more fuel immediately

Adam Vaughan

Fri 2 Mar 2018 02.36 AEDT First published on Thu 1 Mar 2018 19.56 AEDT

National Grid has warned that the UK would not have enough gas to meet public demand on Thursday, as temperatures plummeted and imports were affected by outages.

But the government said households would not notice disruptions to their supply or any increase in energy bills because suppliers, including British Gas, bought energy further ahead. The energy minister Claire Perry said people should cook and use their heating as they would normally.

But experts said there was a strong chance that industrial users could experience interruptions to their gas supply.

Within-day wholesale gas prices soared 74% to 200p per therm after the formal deficit warning, which acts as a call to suppliers to bring forward more gas. It is the first time such an alert has been issued since 2010.

By lunchtime on Thursday the price had spiked even higher, hitting a high of 275p per therm at one point.

National Grid’s forecast for the day initially showed a shortfall across the day of 49.5m cubic metres (mcm) below the country’s projected need of 395.7mcm, which would normally be around 300mcm at this time of year. The gas deficit warning aims to fill the gap, which has since narrowed to 16.5mcm.

“We are in communication with industry partners and are closely monitoring the situation,” the company said.