It was close, and the previous week will be remembered by Londoners not only as a time of record heat, but also as a blackout. The British capital was saved from a power outage by electricity from Belgium. Help is quite expensive.
On Wednesday 20 July - the day after the hottest day in British history (the first time temperatures were recorded above 40) - part of London was saved from a power outage. Came to the rescue … Nemo.
On July 20, according to the Brusselstimes website, energy demand was exacerbated by a bottleneck in the British power grid. East London was on the verge of losing power. The city was saved from a power outage by importing energy from Belgium via the aforementioned Nemo, i.e. an undersea cable connecting Belgium to the UK.
Salt pay for help
The Belgians helped, but not for free. For support, the British had to pay a record price of £9,724.54 (approximately €11,424.9) per MWh. It’s about 5000 percent. more than on a normal day, and at the same time, this amount is almost five times higher than on the previous record. The Belgian site notes that Britons paid an average of £178 per MWh last year. The price paid now shows the desperation that gripped the British last Wednesday. - If Belgium had not come to our aid, we would have been forced to turn off the electricity in our homes. - said the representative of the British energy network.
The NEMO Interconnector was launched in early 2019. It connects the Belgian Zeebrugge with the British Richborough. Its capacity is 1 GW.
Source: Wprost
