Power When You Need It? Not With Wind

By Paul Homewood

If this is the standard of research into the reliability of wind power, then heaven help us all:

Nobody is seriously saying that the wind will stop blowing completely around the UK, as they imply. This is just a red herring.

The real issue is that there are long periods, days and even weeks, when wind power is generating at extremely low levels.

It can also be extremely variable on an hour to hour basis, as the summary of the last 48 hours shows below:

https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=eds/main

Using the data from GB National Grid Status, so far this year, wind power has been producing at less than 2 GW for 22% of the time. 2 GW works out at about a capacity factor of 10%, which I am sure most normal people would regard as pretty worthless.

It has even been running at below 1 GW for 9% of the year. Average output is over 5 GW.

It is true that low winds tend to be more common in summer, when demand is low. But they can still occur in winter. Between 27th Feb and 4th March, wind power never reached 2.5 GW for 112 hours straight. During this period it was below 2 GW for 99 hours, and averaged just 1.1 GW overall.