Adding wind power generating capacity is one occasion when ‘more’, truly means ‘less’. No matter how much of other people’s money gets spent spearing wind turbines all over the countryside, the result is the same: whether it’s 10,000 or 100,000 MW of available wind power capacity, when calm weather sets in, the combined output adds up to nothing.

Like pushing on string, eventually there is absolutely no return on the effort expended.

The simplest way to demonstrate why no economy has ever powered itself using wind power (and why no economy ever will) is to run the numbers. Paul Homewood does just that, with the aid of a new website that collects the pathetic performance of wind farms across Europe and the UK.

New Website For Wind Farm Data
Not a lot of people know that
Paul Homewood
17 May 2020

Someone tipped me off about this website, which has a lot of useful data about renewable energy, both in the UK and Europe:

https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors

It is worthwhile playing around with it, but one useful feature is a table of output, capacity factors etc for each offshore installation in the UK. Currently the rolling 12-month average capacity loading is 40.6%.

What I found particularly useful is this chart:

It shows the time distribution of capacity loads, both for individual wind farms and overall.

So for instance, the load factor was 36.3% or more for 50% of the time, ie the median. (This arguably is a more important measure than the average load).

The curve for all windfarms is for the last five years.

If we look at extremes, we find that load is below 20% for 31% of the time, in other words below half of the average.

At the other end, output is above 80% for 12% of the time.

In other words, loading is either extremely high or extremely low for 43% of the year. This gives the lie to claims that wind power is reliable most of the time, and that output is smoothed because of the widespread geographic distribution – in other words, that the wind always blows somewhere!

In particular, it is commonly claimed that winds at sea are much less volatile than over land.
Not a lot of people know that