By Paul Homewood
h/t Joe Public
Rather startling news from the National Grid yesterday:
https://twitter.com/ng_eso/status/1316398489363001344?s=20
This is astonishing for a number of reasons:
1) It is still only autumn, and demand is nowhere near winter peaks. Yesterday demand peaked at around 40 GW. During winter, we can expect at least 45 GW on a regular basis, with 50 GW possible during really cold spells.
2) We are not experiencing particularly “windless” weather. Our local wind turbine, which I can see from here, is still turning, and winds are forecast at between 7 and 10 mph for most of the country, Winds are still brisk from the north east over the North Sea coast.
There will be days in winter when the wind virtually stops completely across the whole of the UK.
As a result, wind power is still supplying around 5 GW at the moment, which is about 20% of capacity. There will be many days in winter, when much less is wind power is produced.
3) The HDVC interconnector to France is only running at 0.99 GW, out of a capacity of 2 GW. This shows how dangerous it is to rely on imported electricity:
4) Above all, of course, gas is still supplying more than half of demand.
The excuse given about “availability of generators” is just that, an excuse. The Grid should always have plenty of spare capacity on hand to cover for such outages.
Finally, let’s take a look at how wind power performed in January this year:
https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=generation/fueltype/current
It varied between 992 and 13703 GW during the month. Between the 20th and 24th of the month, wind power never got above 5 GW, averaging 2.6 GW over the period of 192 hours.
The average for the month was 8.5 GW. The shortfall against average over those four days was therefore 566 GWh.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
October 15, 2020 at 05:45AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 