Our heating and hot water is provided mainly by gas and I was surprised by the huge differential between the first quarter of the year and the second. Lesson one from which is that heating must burn a lot more gas than hot water. And lesson two from which is that British Gas has to be able to crank up domestic supply by a factor of around four. I have no idea what proportion of total supply domestic supply is, but it must amount to a big change, with some of that big change being on a daily basis, following the ebbs and flows of beasts from the east. Or the west, as the case may be.
And I don't suppose that daily change on this scale can be absorbed by turning a tap somewhere in Siberia (or wherever it is that our gas comes from these days), so somewhere along the line there have to be storage facilities. Gas holders have been more or less banished, so where on earth do they put the stuff?
This against a background of my being sure that I have read about the gas people closing down several large underground storage facilities in disused mines.
Maybe I will catch a special report in the Economist about the whole business. Not the sort of thing that the Guardian takes much interest in.
PS: I wonder how long it takes gas coming out of the ground at, say, gmaps 49.1789041,87.4105572, hundreds if not thousands of miles away, to reach Epsom? Two days? It is no wonder that one can, that one needs to build elaborate models of the flows in such systems.
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