By Paul Homewood
We have had a spell of high pressure this week over the UK, and consequently wind power has been well down:
Hourly Wind Power – Jan 2020
For the four days up to Friday 24th, wind output has averaged 2.5GW, averaging 6.5% of total demand of 38.7GW. Inevitably, it has been coal and gas which have done the heavy lifting, running at 2.9GW and 21.1GW respectively.
For more than a quarter of the period, wind has provided less than 2GW.
Allowing for embedded wind generation not included in the grid figures, which adds about 30% to the above figures, this means that wind power has been running at only 13% of capacity.
Compared with average utilisation of 35%, this means a shortfall in generation of 500 GWh over the four days.. To put this figure into perspective, you would need about 5000 Tesla 100MW batteries, of the type installed in Australia two years ago at an estimated cost of £125 million, to provide back up.
Five thousand of them would set you back a cool £625 billion. And that’s just to last four days. This spell of high pressure has been relatively short, and not as windless as many often are.
And also bear in mind we still only have 23.9GW of wind capacity, a figure which some would like to see quadrupled or more.
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January 26, 2020 at 08:24AM
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