No 10 insists UK has sufficient energy supply despite ‘concerningly low’ gas storage levels

The UK has enough gas and electricity to meet demand this winter, the government has insisted, after the company that owns the country’s 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.

The company blamed the decline to less than a week’s worth of gas – it usually stores a fortnight’s worth – 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.

“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 assurance has 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.

The costs paid to the gas plants may have been higher, but a high voltage cable bringing electricity from Denmark to the UK via the Viking link 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 No 10 spokesperson said: “Our mission to deliver clean power by 2030 will replace our dependency on unstable fossil fuel markets with clean, homegrown power controlled in Britain, which is the best way to protect bill payers and boost our energy independence.”

They added that reports that the UK has been on the verge of an energy blackout were “not true”.