The UK has enough gas and electricity to meet demand this winter, the government has insisted, after the owner of the country’s largest gas stores said levels had become “concerningly low” amid the current cold snap.
Centrica, which also owns British Gas, said on Friday that its inventories had fallen by half since early November, to a quarter below where gas storage levels were at the same time last year when temperatures were milder than normal.
The company blamed the decline to less than a week’s worth of gas – its full storage is the equivalent of 12 days of average use – on the early start to a colder than normal winter across the UK and high prices in the global wholesale market.
A No 10 spokesperson said: “We are confident we will have a sufficient gas supply and electricity capacity to meet demand this winter, due to our diverse and resilient energy system.”
The UK has some of the lowest levels of gas storage in Europe. Instead it relies on the remaining reserves in the North Sea together with pipeline imports from Norway for the majority of its gas. The UK also imports liquified natural gas on tankers from countries including the US and Qatar.
“We speak regularly with the national energy system operator to monitor our energy security, and ensure they have all tools at their disposal if needed to secure our supply,” the No 10 spokesperson said, adding that reports the UK was on the verge of an energy blackout earlier this week were “not true”.
Doug Parr, Greenpeace UK’s policy director, said: “We should be wary of Centrica’s attempts to boost concern about gas storage. The UK has relied on European gas stores [via gas pipelines] for many years – stores that are reasonably full.”
No 10’s assurance emerged days after the UK’s energy system operator was forced to pay about £17m in a single day to keep two gas power plants from turning off during a period of high electricity demand and low wind power output.
A high-voltage cable bringing electricity from Denmark to the UK via the Viking link also agreed to temporarily return from a planned maintenance outage during the peak in the demand for an undisclosed sum.
The Centrica chief executive, Chris O’Shea, said on Friday that as the UK moves towards a clean power system by the end of the decade energy storage will become more necessary “when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow”.
“The UK’s gas storage levels are concerningly low,” he said. “We are an outlier from the rest of Europe when it comes to the role of storage in our energy system and we are now seeing the implications of that.”
The company reopened its Rough gas storage site in the North Sea after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022; it had mothballed the site five years earlier when the government refused to offer it financial support.
“We need to think of storage as a very valuable insurance policy,” O’Shea said. “Like any insurance policy, it may not always be needed, but having more capacity helps protect against worst-case scenarios.”
The company is hoping to expand the Rough site and is lobbying the government to allow the £2bn project to access a financial support model which was designed for long-duration electricity storage schemes.
Greenpeace’s Parr said: “Centrica is seeking taxpayer cash to do up their gas storage site in East Yorkshire and will be happy to use this moment to point out its advantages. Let’s not panic.”
