Guy Faulkner
Great Britain’s electricity generation from wind has steadily increased over the past three years but Gridwatch statistics highlight the intermittency problem faced by engineers operating the electricity grid. While around 800 Gigawatts (GW) per quarter are generated in the winter period, only around 500GW are generated in the summer quarters.
Daily fluctuations can be extreme. On good days for wind, 10 Gigawatts or more can be generated and typically around 500GW are produced in this way in the winter quarters. In January-October this year, daily output was in this category on 62 days (20.4%) compared with 102 days (27.9%) in the 2022 calendar year and 57 days (15.6%) in 2021.
There are however many days in which output is below 5GW and less than 100GW are contributed in the winter quarters when there is little wind. Last year 36.7% of days were in this category, rising to 44% in January-October this year. In 2021, almost 50% of daily output was below 5GW.
It can be seen from the charts below that usually the most common category for wind generation is between 5GW and 10GW. There is little seasonal variation in this and Gridwatch statistics show that quarterly output in this category is usually 200-300GW.
The need for backup – mainly from gas-fired power stations – is illustrated by the daily figures. In January of this year, wind output was in excess of 10GW on 13 consecutive days, peaking at 16.2GW on January 11. But output then fell before rising again briefly at the end of the month. There was only one day in January-March when wind output fell below 2GW.
In July-September of this year, output was below 5GW on 43 days (46.7%). It was less than 2GW on 12 days and there were even two days when output was less than 1GW. There were only 7 days with output below 5GW in October of this year.
The April-June quarter this year was particularly poor for wind, with only 5 days (5.5%) in which output exceeded 10GW. This compared with 14 days (15.4%) in April-June last year, although only 4 days fell into this category in April-June 2021. Daily output was below 5GW this year in April-June on 58 days (almost 64%).
Nowhere has it been shown that an industrial economy can operate using wind and solar for electricity generation and these figures illustrate why this is. The contrast between wind and nuclear power generation could not be more stark and renewable power is given priority so that gas-fired power stations have to be kept ticking over to be called into action to ensure that electricity demand is met. This is very inefficient. Every new wind turbine erected presents a grid manager with a problem, not a solution.
Total connected weather dependent generation in the UK is 27GW. How can 27GW of generation possibly produce 800GW of output??
When it can’t even produce 27GW on a good day.
On the good news side of the coin, it looks like it can be depended on to produce 2GW daily at least.😂
90 days in a quarter, 9GW average per day =810 GW per quarter
If 27 GW name plate is accurate, that implies a 34% Capacity Factor/Utilization Rate. Sounds about right.
GW is a power rating. So it’s either an average power output of 9GW, or a total output of 9x24x90GWh, or 19.44TWh.
The article makes the mistake several times as a result of which it is a confusing read.
Thank you. I don’t know why so many authors so often screw this up.
It does appear to be an average and as such that 9 GW daily CAN’T be depended on every day. Some days will be more but many others will be less and some significantly less
Exactly!
And it goes further than that, especially since the article is about intermittency! If there is a daily average of 9 GW, but part of the day is 18 GW and part is close to zero, that is a huge part of the larger issue at hand: The need for on-demand back-up that is ready at a moments notice.
In many and perhaps most locations, there is a marked drop-off in wind after sunset. I doubt there are many places or many days, if any at all, where wind power is steady for an entire 24 hour interval. It varies on every time scale, often by a large percentage.
Agree. This post should be withdrawn and reworked to use proper units (GWh).
I should have read on before making my comment above.
I could not even keep reading the article, since It quickly became unclear if the author was making the units error so common in discussion of electric power.
He does not make it clear if he is talking about, for example, a daily average when he says such things as, “There are however many days in which output is below 5GW and less than 100GW are contributed in the winter quarters when there is little wind”, or even if he is making a distinction between gigawatts and gigawatt-hours.
As such, it is unreadable, for me anyhow.
The article is basically nonsense, written by a non-scientist. Peak output of a machine is in GW. Generation average is GWhrs. This article sees no difference! Note the peak may only last 1 cycle which is no good to anyone, except it may cause a damaging transient overvoltage condition!
Rick,
the omission of Gigawatt hours is why, although the text does indicate that it is over a period of time.
It may indicate that, but it does not say it.
It appears possible that power and energy are mixed up and conflated even within the same sentence in many places.
Isn’t the unit gigawatt-days?
I wish people would start using correct terms for generated electricity: watts+unit of time.
Using GW is entirely misleading because what actually matters is GWh produced at any given moment in time vs. GWh that is demanded by customers. Production of GWh at the wrong time = curtailment = literal extra cost to customers without any electricity consumption; insufficient GWh during peak times is what leads to backup generation coming on line.
The SouthWest Power Pool – which is the interstate grid operator that covers the central US from North Dakota down to North Texas, had negative prices i.e. more electricity generated than anybody wanted, 7.1% of the time in the day ahead market and 15.2% of the time in the real time market. The negative prices for the 7.1% were 95%+ in the -$0.001 to -$0.025 per kWh range but the 15.2% had roughly 20% in the -$0.025 to -$0.050 per kWh range meaning the negative prices were sometimes as high, in an absolute price level, as the actual positive electricity prices. This is pretty much entirely due to North Texas and MidWest wind installations.
The above SPP numbers are for 2022. The breakdown shows that a large amount of the excess to demand production is during the 10 pm to 4 am period. I have said many times that a big part of the wind generation problem isn’t even just intermittency, it is that wind blows a lot at midnight…
Texas numbers also show that minimum load – i.e. the lowest point of electricity demand – has fallen from 15GW<unit> to 10.3 GW<unit>. Or in other words, the wind renewables are not just producing too much at night, consumer demand at offpeak times is falling.
A double whammy.
Even in a high school physics or math class, conflating or confusing power and energy will get any student a big fat zero.
it is ridiculous for someone writing about electric power generation to not distinguish between power and energy, even if the context were not intermittency.
800GW of output is a meaningless number. The piece needs to distinguish between GWh and GW, and then logically address the intermittency issue, which is about fluctuations on a daily or hourly basis in GW. Its that which requires you to have a duplicate gas powered generating network running on open cycle gas.
GWh is pretty much irrelevant to the intermittency issue. This is the basic fallacy in Levelised Cost calculations which assume that the value of interest is total GWh generated over the life of the installation, never mind whether it is generated when there is demand.
The problem is you have to meet instantaneous demand, which in the UK varies between about 25GW and 45GW. But the peaks don’t coincide with wind generation peaks. In fact, they often coincide with wind generation lows, when there are winter blocking highs which lead to a week or ten days of calm. UK wind has peaks of around 20GW, and lows of under 1GW.
The fatal question is what do you do, its one cold, calm, dark January evening. Demand is soaring. We are now on day 5 of less than 1GW wind. There is no solar. What do you do?
I agree. The graphs are BS
Connected all-UK wind was about 28,700 MW, at end 2022
The graphs should have been on an hour-to-hour basis for various days of the year.
The traditional plants, such as nuclear, hydro, coal, gas, etc., should have their own graph to show how each category is adjusting its output to offset the ups and downs of wind AND SOLAR.
It would be abundantly clear the gas plants are doing almost all of the adjusting, 24/7/365, plus deal with solar variations during the day and its total absence at night.
The other categories of plants do almost nothing.
Any woke thinking about “getting rid of evil gas”, is a recipe for total financial/economic disaster, because it would require large scale battery systems costing hundreds of $billions every 15 years.
Each kWh fed to the high voltage system by the battery systems would cost at least 25 c/kWh, on top of the price of the electricity taken from the high voltage system to CHARGE the battery systems.
This assumes wind and solar would produce enough excess electricity to actually do that, THROUGHOUT THE YEAR
About 80% of all WORLD energy for all purposes, not just making electricity, comes from fossil fuels
That percentage has not changed for more than 45 years, FOR MANY REASONS
World’s Largest Offshore Wind System Developer Abandons Two Major US Projects as Wind Bust Continues
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/world-s-largest-offshore-wind-system-developer-abandons-two-major
EXCERPT
The wind/solar/battery bubble is in meltdown mode. This is not a surprise, because the US-EIA makes LCOE “evaluations” of wind and solar, which purposely exclude major LCOE items, regarding:
– Onshore grid expansion/reinforcement and very expensive battery system storage
– A fleet of quick-reacting power plants for counteracting/balancing the variable output of wind/solar
– Additional power plants for making up the electricity shortfall during low wind/solar conditions
– Output curtailments during high wind/solar conditions, i.e., paying owners not to produce what they could have produced
Such EIA deceptions reinforced the national delusion wind and solar are competitive with fossil fuels, which is far from reality.
Wind and solar would not exist without at least 50% subsidies, plus their output could not be fed into the grid, without the above four freebies. The costs are paid by taxpayers, ratepayers, and added to government debts.
Part of the confusion may be units.
What does it even mean to produce 10 Gigawatts?
A watt is not an amount of electricity, it is a rate.
Watts must be multiplied by time to get an actual quantity of energy.
What is the worst part of it all is, it is impossible to know if the writer is even aware of the distinction.
For example,, when he speaks about x amount of GW being produced in a day or a season or whatever period of time, he does not say if this is an average value over that entire such interval.
He does not mention energy even a single time in the entire article, from what I can see (unless I missed it somehow).
Only power.
The problem with intermittency goes well beyond variations from season to season, and even day to day: It is a problem from minute to minute and hour to hour, all day long, every day.
The confusion results from the Media and government using ignorant people, with agendas, writing about complex energy issues, to “inform” the people.
This article is an excellent example of such malfeasance
US/UK 66,000 MW OF OFFSHORE WIND BY 2030; AN EXPENSIVE FANTASY
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/biden-30-000-mw-of-offshore-wind-systems-by-2030-a-total-fantasy
BATTERY SYSTEM CAPITAL COSTS, OPERATING COSTS, ENERGY LOSSES, AND AGING
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/battery-system-capital-costs-losses-and-aging
Regulatory Rebuff Blow to Offshore Wind Projects; Had Asked for Additional $25.35 billion
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/regulatory-rebuff-blow-to-offshore-wind-projects-had-asked
I hope the engineers operating the electricity grid at least use the correct units of messure.
“gas-fired power stations have to be kept ticking over to be called into action to ensure that electricity demand is met.”
That’s what peaking power plants do, in every grid. They are more expensive than Baseload, but not inefficient.
Myusername,
no, it is not peaker plants as you call them, they do operate but rarely. This gas is the main support for the grid and balances supply and demand as well as providing inertia and reactive power. although gas turbine powered they are combined with steam generators from the waste heat and as such cannot be switched off and on readily. Such operation does make them less efficient than otherwise would be the case.
As I write @ 08:28 AM 11 Nov 2023, wind is producing 10% of demand, gas 42.74%.
https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
Not what I call “ticking over”
Yes, it’s weird – but some days there’s quite a lot of wind, some none. Bizarre, innit?
It always was that way, but now it is blamed on global warming and those evil fossil fuels, even by so-called educated people
Unfortunately the educational system has become CC institutionalized such that those attaining the highest training level…should be
CO2 IS A LIFE GAS; NO CO2 = NO FLORA AND NO FAUNA
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/co2-is-a-life-gas-no-co2-no-life
Do not forget solar
“the correct units of messure.”
I saw what you did, there…
Speaking of not knowing what you are talking about, here comes MUN.
Peaking units provide enough extra power in order to provide enough extra power to get you over peak demand. Peak demand is quite predictable and you can have the units prepped and ready to go when they are needed.
Peaking plants are not base load units, and it’s base load units that you need when wind and solar fail, which they do frequently and at completely unpredictable times.
Only a total moron would claim that base load plants can be run in the same manner as peaking units.
Gridwatch gives a snapshot of the UK grid at 10 minute intervals. So by using the data from the download from the site you can get a pretty good result for the total GWh produced by each source.
Currently the UK has about 30GW wind installed split roughly 50/50 on and off shore.
For the last few weeks shortfalls in unreliables have been made up using the interconnectors, sometimes over 20% of demand, with some then exported to Ireland. Coal has been a regular contributor too.
My personal opinion is that gas is not being used because Europe has spare capacity as it’s not yet winter and the UK Grid are saving stored gas for when domestic demand increases and spare from Europe disappears when it gets really cold..
Over 16% of demand is being met by the interconnectors this morning, pretty typical of the last few weeks.
Am not sure that the UK gas grid has anywhere to store any gas, apart from in the pipelines themselves.
>UK gets what gas it needs from Norway on an ‘as required’ basis – and oddly – turns it into electrickery that’s sent to Norway – which is of course the ‘hydro- battery’ for Danish and German windmills.
Mmmmm, is somebody there taking the piss out of the UK – is Germany effectively burning Norwegian gas, in the UK, for their own electric? Why does Norway need electric from UK when it has so much hydro?
(Presently importing from Norway = things are bad and Storm Debi is not even on the horizon)
While UK imports gobbets of French nuclear….. why don’t the Germans just import French nuclear and save all that faffing around? Why don’t the Germans burn their own gas?
UK Wind is presently (08:15GMT 10Nov) producing 4.6GW. (as attached)
Are we in a ‘winter quarter’ and do quarters have about 2,200 hours in them soooo….
UK wind, even when it is flatter that a really flat thing like now, would produce over Ten Thousand GigaWatt hours per winter quarter
So where the fug does that ‘800’ number come from?
Why do the x-axes on the graphs cover entire 12 month periods and the data lines start in middle nowhere and similarly end?
Is this some sort of joke?
and how many ‘summer quarters‘ does the average year have?
In any case, maybe the windmills were turned off to let the solar have a bite the cherry.
This is a bigger pile o’shyte that that UHI confabulation from Spender we’ve just endured.
(Was it a good party, is that why everyone’s talking self-important gibberish this morning. What did I miss?)
Indeed, gas storage was stopped by the current morons in charge. Nor do we frack – but are happy to import fracked gas from the USA. As I say, “morons”
The current radio ads telling us how wonderful smart meters are say that they “will help reduce our dependency on imported gas”. There is a much more sensible way of achieving that objective but the morons in charge refuse to do it. (And I think ‘morons’ is too polite a term for them).
The UK has Rough 9TWh, caverns 16TWh and LNG tanks 12TWh. Plus as many LNG ships as you can justify paying daily demurrage for as floating storage. In addition production from those big tanks called Norwegian fields can be increased when they are below max rates. UK production these days no longer provides flex.
A great lamentation of woes in Europe
We should remember, during the good-old-days, Russia was supplying about 200 billion cubic meter of low-cost pipeline gas to Europe each year
But the EU bureaucracy in Brussels wanted to stir things up, because the woke thing to do was the go hog-wild wind and solar, and squeeze out Russian gas,
But now Europe is buying high-cost gas from the US and Norway, and many other countries.
That surely made Europe less competitive, which is reflected in its near-zero, real- growth gross product, and decreasing standard of living.
Then, the cost of wind and solar per installed MW increased by 45 to 60 percent, which meant subsidies were insufficient, and the price of the electricity sold to utilities, c/kWh, became about 50% higher.
The blame should be directed to vanderLeyden and her posse of woke bureaucrats.
She started it and is continuing to make it worse, because she has the mindset of a moron bulldog
Europe will be fine. No need to be scared.
Europe has a near-zero, real-growth gross product, that will be stagnant for years, while the costs of illegal immigration continues to increase, while Ukraine support requires tens of $billions each year, while government and private debt is increasing, while inflation and high interest rates continue.
None of these factors will be FINE for Europe, or for the US
The Russian economy lost 2.1% in 2022, but is growing at 2.8% in 2023, per World Bank and IMF, despite US/EU/etc., sanctions
Because of Europe’s unwillingness to maximize their own natural gas resources by proven safe and cost-effective horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking their only hope for economic recovery is an end to hostilities with Russia and a return to normal trade relations. Additional wind and solar will only make matters worse. It’s not complicated.
Yes, it is complicated
Russia just agreed with China to have a second pipeline.
This one will take gas from the Northwest of Russia, via existing and new pipelines, via Mongolia, to China.
That line is about 6 ft in diameter
Expected completion is about 2027/2028
That gas was originally going to Europe.
At present, only southern Europe will continue to get gas from Russia via the new Turkey Hub, because Ukraine has announced closure of the last TRANSIT line at end 2024
Europe has permanently screwed itself by mindlessly kowtowing to the US
Centrica reopened the Rough storage facility in the North Sea, off the coast of East Yorkshire, in October 2022 at which time it was capable of storing around 30bn cubic feet of gas. Subsequent investment has increased that to 54bcf but still only up to 6 days of average UK gas use.
Total UK gas storage, at around 12 days or 7.5 peak winter days,is still way below Germany (89 days), France (103 days) and Netherlands (123 days)
It would be more informative with a graph showing total electrical energy consumed from all sources and. I understand that a net result is that prices have reduced demand itself quite starkly. A picture of the degree of energy poverty is never presented.
Regarding “Peak Renewables” having occurred in EU-UK in 2017, is hidden by presentation of worthless charts showing cumulative additions of wind and solar since 2000 without subtracting two sources of reductions in capacity: 1) over the lifetime of the “farm” capacity deteriorates quite substantially from wear, resins of insects, etc. 2) decommissioning of spent “farms”.
In 2018, 47GW were taken out of service at a time when grid energy companies began to go bankrupt and investors were backing away from this sector. Certainly today, the big boys like Siemens, Orsted, etc., are foundering and bailing out of projects because of economic a tangle of woes that can be laid at the feet of Western governments “Policy-Caused disaster (inflation, interest rate hikes, interference in energy markets. This was baked in before the war in Ukraine which gets scapegoated by the most inept governments the world has ever seen..
Same Graph, different day:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/renewable-share-energy?tab=chart&country=GBR~OWID_EU27
So how about some sources for your claims?
And here’s your electricity chart by source:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by-source?country=~GBR
Very pretty.
1) I say EU-UK and you give UK.
2) Your graphs are production from various sources. Not graphs of actual installed capacity of Wind and Solar IN Operation. The Same wind farm in a given week can produce zero power or a maximum of 30% of its rated capacity. That’s why the zigzags.
3) Do you doubt that wind farms lose capacity with time? Do you doubt that wind farms (and every other form of mechanical things) don’t end up being decommissioned? See if you can find a link that corrects actual capacity for decommissioning and decline in output with age.
4) OK, your new at this and you dont have a tech education. Please do yourself a favor and read up on the genre. Read the ‘consensus climate stuff by all means and read criticisms of it by sceptics. Just reading “talking points on how to argue with a skeptic” is pretty shallow stuff. Many who come to this site wound up becoming sceptics. See if you can find actual operating capacity instead of just a graph of cumulative capacity installations since 2005. It would be instructive!
The units should be Gigawatt-hours (GWh) per quarter i.e. units of total energy per quarter, not power (which is instantaneous). Same with “GW per day”, which should be GWh/day.
The rest of the article and the graphs are wrong too. You would think that a sciency blog could get basic stuff like this right, shirley 😉
The problem is intermittency.
Average charts don’t show the critical mismatch between instant supply and customer demands. Grid switching is required in cycles to hold frequency as electric demand and supply changes. Blackouts cascade quickly. Electric service is not built for averages because average doesn’t run a motor or provide comfort or lighting or refrigeration or manufacture anything.
Show a single 60 minute chart of local or system demand with wind supply. That would show the severe fluctuation of wind capacity (by individual turbine or wind field) compared to instant demand.
Only when the public sees that wind/solar is not a substitute for the electric service that they demand/require will there be any widespread recovery from the destruction of economies and environmental degradation “green” has wrought.
Also,to even the playing field, let’s use the term “make-up” for the energy/capacity necessary to match each hour of customer demand. Grid supply would be contracted for each provider to deliver full time capacity (nameplate plus make-up) obligations at each site. On-site fuel for the contracted delivery period would be verified.
So the British Net Zero strategy is to rely on natural gas forever – as a backup for wind and a substitute when there is little or no wind. Got it.
Yes, and its to do that while doubling or tripling demand by moving everyone to EVs and heat pumps.
It might be interesting to demand an end to all that evil natural gas and any other ff to “save the planet” and see how the authorities react. They’ll have to defend the use of natural gas as back up. Might tie them up in knots. 🙂
Never underestimate the stupidity of the people to whom that demand would be directed, they’d likely see such a demand as support for the ’cause’ without stopping to think about the consequences (they rarely do). We’ve already had people calling for the domestic gas distribution grid to be decommissioned.
It would have to be done in an extra stupid way, like: “we demand the end of natural gas as a backup- because we’d rather have brown outs and black outs- even in winter- we’d rather freeze and go hungry and lose our jobs since we wouldn’t be able to charge our EVs and get to work- all of these things we’re happy to risk all to save the planet”. Of course that might not be seen as extra stupid- it might be seen as super smart.
Yep. The UK National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) recently called for 8m buildings to be switched from gas to electricity by 2035 in order to meet the net zero 2050 target.
Over 22m of the UK’s 28m homes are on the gas grid. Current prices for energy are 7p per kWh for gas and 27p per kWh for electricity (both inc. VAT).
The NIC seemed to think that unreliables were magically going to reduce that almost 4 times more price difference.
Should we not be focusing on and measuring output from these machines in GWh (Gigawatt Hours) as this is the unit of measure billed to customers.
The high points of wind power are irrelevant. So is the average capacity factor.
It is the low points, the wind droughts and especially the nights with little or no wind that kill the system unless it is kept up with power from elsewhere.
It’s as simple as ABC.
A: Input to the grid must continuously match the demand.
B: The continuity of wind and solar input is broken if wind droughts occur overnight.
C: At present there is no feasible or affordable large-scale storage to bridge the gaps.
Consequently it is suicidal to depend heavily on wind and solar power unless there is reliable power available in reserve, or power can be sourced from some other grid.
“Its all about the wind droughts, stupid.”
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2023/06/19/its-about-the-wind-droughts-stupid/
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2023/07/11/approaching-the-tipping-point/
And why didn’t the meteorologists warn us about wind droughts?
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2023/04/30/dark-deeds-of-the-official-wind-watchers/
Wind droughts In Energiewende-speak are known as dunkelflaute. There’s a certain schadenfreude in that.
Actually, dunkelflaute refers to droughts of wind and solar power. Dunkel = dark as any consumer of German beer knows.
Few consumers, if any, have enjoyed high gravity brewed Holsten Pils.
But I have.
The high points aren’t entirely irrelevant. The grid can’t deliver the volumes to customers, and production must be curtailed. GB saw a new monthly record of 780GWh of curtailment in October.
Also, high renewables output poses additional risks for grid stability.
In the 1980s ‘oil crisis’ the UK’s Central Electricity Generating Board dismissed wind power as unreliable and not suitable for the grid. How times have changed!
If you can call British weather anything it’s changeable
That should tell them something….
A very bad article. It is correct that intermittency of wind in the UK makes a Net Zero strategy largely based on wind impossible. But you cannot show it like this. First, there seems to be a confusion between GW and GWh – perhaps this is the reason why the vertical axes of the charts are unlabelled? This is the first thing to get straight.
But the real problem with intermittency cannot be shown at this scale. What the article’s method does is basically averaging, when what matters is not the averages but the absolute values at a given time. You have to look at the hourly or daily rates of generation. They are available ready charted on gridwatch:
http://www.gridwatch.co.uk/wind
Look at the right hand charts, which show hourly or daily fluctuations.
Gridwatch charges for downloads, but you can download the csv data free here
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=generation/fueltype
One problem is that to make the wind supply at all usable when it comes with these dramatic daily or hourly fluctuations requires gas. Its the only thing that can respond fast enough. But there are two kinds of gas, Open Cycle and Combined Cycle (CCGT). CCGT is a bit like a condensing boiler, so its more fuel efficient, but when you introduce wind you have to go open cycle. The result of trying to move to mainly wind is that you burn more gas.
Now look at last year (bottom right chart). The installed parc of wind is 28GW. You find several periods in which daily output was below 2GW. Look at March – you had a full week with under 5GW. And these are daily averages. Within that there will have been days of almost nothing. The recent Royal Society report found that on a decadal time frame, there are periodic long low wind periods of a month or more.
Look at last months hourly production. Same point.
It is simply impossible to get to Net Zero with this technology. The most you can do is get to a situation with heavy gas consumption and dependency. The Royal Society was reduced to proposing the excavation of 900 caverns to store hydrogen to burn to get through the calms as part of its evaluation of the UK Net Zero program.
At the moment the National Grid, the UK network operator, is planning on a vast engineering program to be able to bring wind generation from Scotland and offshore to the middle and south of the country where power is needed. It will not help with the fundamental problems. These are a combination of short term fluctuations as revealed in the daily and hourly numbers, and long term intermittency with calm months as documented by the Royal Society.
Its not going to work. The article is right about that. But you cannot show it as the article attempts to do, by basically averaging over long periods. Its the short term fluctuations that will kill the project.
“a Net Zero strategy largely based on wind [is] impossible.”
And solar is much, much worse.
Yep, solar is GUARANTEED to be intermittent!
“Its the short term fluctuations that will kill the project.” As you solve the “short term” problem with overbuilds and storage the LENGTH of the short term problem grows from minutes to weeks.
What is never discussed is the COSTS of these solutions to the rate payers. It already is HIGH and growing.
As things stand at the moment electricity in the UK is already almost 4 times as costly as gas – 27p per kWh compared to 7p per kWh gas (both inclusive of VAT)
Two similar techniques show the problems. Start with the detailed 5 minute or hourly data. Calculate the average. Subtract the average from all the detailed data, producing surpluses and deficits for each period against a baseload of average output. The imbalances can be analysed in various ways, including producing a duration chart that shows the percentage of the time that the surplus/deficit exceeds a given value, using the spreadsheet PERCENTILE function. It is also useful to cumulate the surplus/deficit column. That’s a first step in looking at storage backup requirements.
For added sophistication, download data on demand. Multiply the detailed wind data by the ratio of average demand to average wind output so that average output equals average demand. It is useful to create a column of the generation data multiplied by a constant set initially to 1 to allow an easy exploration of the consequences of overbuild. Repeat the earlier analysis, creating surpluses and deficits against demand.
Burning hydrogen creates water vapor which is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2.
This is never mentioned. We are in the middle of what seems to be a fall in wind in Europe…
https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/04/17/are-wind-droughts-a-threat-to-the-booming-north-sea-wind-power-industry
https://news.sky.com/story/future-of-renewable-energy-in-balance-as-uk-suffers-wind-drought-with-global-stilling-to-come-12766917
And of course, CAPACITY is nothing to do with real output. Which is why official figures always like to quote capacity
In the summer and autumn of 2021 Europe experienced a long period of dry conditions and low wind speeds. April – September 2021 was the least windy such period in the UK for 60 years. SSE reported a 32% drop in power from its unreliables.
Earlier this year SSE again reported that output was 20% lower than planned during the 6 months to the end of September “due to adverse weather conditions”
But hey the ‘wind is always blowing somewhere’ except when it isn’t!
No one seems to be wondering if drawing a huge amount of energy from the wind, will affect how much wind is blowing around the planet?
Seems like a fairly obvious thing to have the facts on from the get-go.
When I tried to talk about this subject in years past, I was basically laughed at.
Now, I do not know what the answer to the question is, but someone ought to, before the entire world spends trillions of dollars sucking ever-larger amounts of power from the movements of the air.
For example, what fraction of incoming solar energy is converted to wind?
What happens when the wind slows down?
We have examples all around us, such as the difference between wind over the ocean and over the land, or between winds aloft and winds near the surface, with a large part of the differences being friction with the ground and things on the ground.
One thing is obvious: The people who are now in charge of such things as energy policies around the world, have absolutely no idea what they are doing or talking about.
They are no only un- and mis-educated, they are not very smart to being with.
On 100% of days OSW and its developers can:
So, give credit where credit is due.
Daniel,
While I like where you’re going with this, I think you have to admit that it is difficult to “freeze people to death in their homes,” even in England! Maybe in San Francisco, with it’s notorious stretches of foggy, summer days, but perhaps #1 should be; drive people to death and despair due to intense energy poverty! That has a much nicer ring to it; I’m sure that JSO and the other Green wackos will want to embrace it wholeheartedly, since their hearts are SOOOO pure!
Drat! Meant to write “freeze people to death in their homes” IN SUMMER, even in England! There are few things worse than messing up the delivery on a potentially good joke!
It hardly needs to be below freezing to die of hypothermia.
If anyone doubts that, just have them jump into some 60°F water.
Or spend a night outside in the woods when it is 40°.
Without roofs and blankets, even summertime outside at night is dicy.
Those are the reasons for SUBSIDIES FOREVER
Here across the pond in the US, the big news in the power generation world is the termination by Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) of their Carbon Free Power Project which was intended to construct a six-unit SMR-based power plant in eastern Idaho using NuScale’s small modular reactor design.
Utah just lost an important future energy source. Here’s why (Deseret News, November 8th)
NuScale is now left without a launch customer for its 77 MWe SMR. What happened?
Let’s start by saying that new-build nuclear power is industrial with a Capital ‘I’.
What we are seeing here with the cancellation of the UAMPS/NuScale project is that the risk management environment in the United States for all complex high-risk industrial projects is deteriorating, not just the risk management environment for new-build nuclear power.
Worldwide competition for access to industrial raw materials and to industrial supply chain resources is growing. This growing competition is affecting all energy infrastructure projects, not just nuclear energy projects. The ever-rising costs for gaining access to industrial resources of all kinds is a problem not likely to be solved any time soon.
Here in the US, we are not the industrial powerhouse we were thirty years ago. Over the past thirty years, much of the US industrial base has moved offshore to Asia. We no longer have the broad diversity of technical, managerial, manufacturing, and field workforce skills needed to do high-risk industrial construction of any kind, let alone nuclear construction.
In addition, with the prospect that a combination of inflation and rising interest rates will continue for the foreseeable future, high risk technology projects cannot be initiated without having very deep pockets at our beck and call, and a willingness to spend lots of money.
The UAMPS launch customer for the NuScale SMR required that 80% of its member utilities participate in the project. UAMPS could not get that level of participation because of growing fears that the project’s costs were rising quickly and could not be successfully controlled.
Nuclear power is mostly a creature of public policy decision making. We buy it for purposes of energy reliability and security, not because it is the cheapest method of generating electricity. That title goes to gas-fired generation.
That said, the NuScale SMR design philosophy is intended to get many if not most of the benefits of SMR technology at an acceptable level of financial and technical risk. IMHO, the NuScale design does just that.
However, in today’s deteriorating risk management environment, a properly balanced SMR design philosophy and a project team which has the experience and the discipline needed to keep a high-risk industrial construction project on track to completion isn’t enough.
In any case, the first commercial SMR design to go live on the North American continent is now likely to be one ordered by the Canadians with direct government assistance and funding. The Canadians have the money, the people, and the national commitment needed to get the job done. And get it done they will.
This article pushed me to update my “BM Reports + ESO daily sums” spreadsheet.
NB (to those pushing Gridwatch) : I initially used (5-minute resolution) Gridwatch data, but it required a lot of “curation” before it could be used. The (30-minute resolution) BM Reports and ESO data is sufficient for my purposes.
Data available from the following links :
BM Reports URL : https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=generation/fueltype/current
ESO URL : https://www.nationalgrideso.com/search-data?f%5B0%5D=organization%3A26
Note that for the ESO data the “Demand Data Update” link gives data from the first of the previous month, while the “Historic Demand Data” link gives annual data files back to 2009.
Additional notes
The BM Reports file “Wind” data gives metered wind production numbers for the GB grid.
The ESO file “Wind” numbers are model estimates of the “embedded” wind production for the GB grid. The (known, nameplate) capacity of this “embedded” wind fleet is ~6.5 GW.
The “Solar” numbers are all “embedded” (ESO only), with an installed capacity that is now ~15.5 GW.
My “Total Wind” is the sum of the individual BM Reports and ESO “WInd” numbers.
The “Total Wind” (nominal / nameplate) capacity for the GB grid is now approximately 28.5 GW.
My graph clearly shows the “wind drought” that occurred over Britain for the last third of August and the first third of September.
The ensemble of graphs used in the ATL article do not …
Renewables are not suited for the grid, remove them from the grid.
This article (whilst interesting and making a valid point) needs to be re-written with the correct units of GWHrs being used.
Look carefully. This article is very poor. The author does not understand that any averaging is simply foolish, unless one has large scale storage. The grid depends on cycle by cycle power being available, and if not things go black. How much total power from wind matters not a jot, if it is short for 1/50th second, someone is blackouted. Wind sometimes generates useful power, sometimes it is very low, and more trouble to grid operators than it is worth. The fact that many GW of spinning reserve (power station not generating any power but using power and operating hours) in order to keep the grid working if wind power falls is very expensive, and that cost should be bourne by the WIND companies. In fact it is paid by consumers whilst wind walk away with all the profits from good wind days. These graphs with a straight line across many days or weeks are nonsense, it is cycle by cycle power that should be graphed, and payments made only for the least cycle over the half hour cahrging period. So say your turbine produces 500MW over an hour but for one second drops to 100MW, you are only paid for 50MWhrs. That would at least be fair to the very necessary fossil fuel stations. The whole “market” is totally fixed to make wind seem good, but it is certainly not cheap compared to fossil fuels. This is the UK, the US may be slightly different, but California (the peak wind state) also has the most expensive electricity. This is not a coincidence!
Story Tip: The fact that this article is still here, wrong and uncorrected, reflects very badly on Mr Watts’ otherwise excellent site.
Numerous folks have pointed out that the units are wrong and that the article misses the point about average output being irrelevant: minimum, not average, output is the important number.
That this article remains here, uncorrected, is a wide open target to any who would claim that all who read or post to this site are wrong and just “Climate Deniers”. This would easily be fixed by a simple correction and slight rewrite – and should be.