Re: And for customers who say "sod off"?
but it is still 230MW which we don't need to be supplying...
Oh, but we do. That is, if we choose to believe the work of fiction that is the UK smart meter business case. It's got the same excrement-stained credibility of the HS2 business case (or the Hinkley Point C business case), but civil servants and politicians never, ever admit they are wrong.
And in this case, the Conservative government are as fully committed to the smart meter project as the Libdems were in the coalition, and the clowns of NuLab before. They, and the berks at DECC hope that smart meters will be able to shift energy use patterns around so that the results of twenty plus years of "climate fear" inspired meddling can be alleviated by making demand fit available generation. Unfortunately, other policy objectives "decarbonisation" of heating and transport will roughly treble total electricity demand, so any remote chance that smart meters might have had of coping with current balances of generation and demand will be nil in the longer term.
Interconnectors were mentioned in a post above - along with the French plan to reduce dependence upon nuclear. But in the forseeable future, Germany is exiting nuclear power altogether, as is Belgium and Switzerland, and in the UK, all but one of the already life extended AGR fleet are supposed to shut down between 2019 and 2024. There's no chance that Hinkley Point C, Moorside, or Bradwell will be operational by then, so the choice will be blackouts, a new short term (ie very expensive) dash for gas, or dodgy life extensions for the AGR fleet.
I'd order your gas fired gen set, and a radiation suit. FWIW, if you can bid your gas gen set into the current auxiliary services market, and scoop all the available funding schemes, it'll have paid for itself in cash terms by 2020.