By Paul Homewood
h/t Joe Public
This story has been doing the rounds lately:
Seeing countless renewable energy records broken and milestones passed has been a constant source of encouraging news for our planet. Now, we have yet another impressive stat to celebrate: in the first half of 2019, Scotland generated enough energy from wind power to supply its homes twice over.
Specifically, turbines generated 9.8 million megawatt-hours of electricity between January and June, enough to supply power to 4.47 million homes – not bad for a country that has around 2.6 million homes to its name.
It’s a record high for wind energy in Scotland, and it means the turbines could have provided enough electricity for every dwelling in Scotland, plus much of northern England as well, for the first six months of the year.
The implication is that if Scotland can do it, everyone can.
But, as we shall see, it is not as simple as that!
For a start, it needs to be pointed out that, while there may have been enough to power all Scottish homes, the figures ignore non-domestic use. During 2017, the latest figures available, wind, wave and solar generated 17.4 TWh, but total Scottish consumption was 24.6 TWh.
To ignore non-domestic use is a common trick employed by the wind lobby.
There is of course nothing clever about building enough wind farms to power all Scottish homes in aggregate terms, particularly in a large country with a small population as Scotland is, if you are prepared to throw enough money at it. And in Scotland’s case, that is an awful lot.
Last year, subsidies for wind power in Scotland cost consumers £954 million. Fortunately for the Scots, this subsidy is absorbed by the National Grid and charged out to all UK customers. If Scottish householders had to pay for it themselves, it would cost every household there £367 a year.
And that does not include all of the other additional costs for integrating wind power, such as constructing transmission lines.
Yet even with all of this heavily subsidised capacity, wind power cannot supply Scotland’s needs all of the time, because sometimes the wind does not blow.
Despite having enough nuclear and CCGT capacity to supply at least half of their demand, Scotland is still having to import electricity from England and N Ireland:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/electricity-section-5-energy-trends
Without access to that supply, Scotland would have suffered blackouts.
And what happens when there is too much wind power?
Again, Scotland relies on England to take it away. If there was no access to the English grid, that surplus would have had to be thrown away.
Put simply, large amounts of intermittent wind and solar power cannot be integrated into a closed grid system. It only works for Scotland, because it can rely on the National Grid to manage shortfalls and surpluses.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
July 22, 2019 at 08:57AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 
Reblogged this on Climate- Science.
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