Just Enough To Boil The Kettle
By Paul Homewood
Today, here in the UK, the temperatures have just about crawled above zero, after a night of hard frost. And how much electricity have our obscenely subsidised windmills contributed to the grid over the last 24 hours?
0.6% !
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm
This is about a tenth of their normal output, and about 3% of their rated capacity.
The recent Energy Bill 2012 commits the UK to sourcing 30% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. In 2011, the contribution from renewables was :-
TWH | % Of Total | |
Hydro | 5.69 | 1.6 |
Wind | 15.75 | 4.4 |
Other Renewables (Mainly Biomass) | 12.97 | 3.7 |
Total Renewable | 34.41 | 9.7 |
TOTAL ELECTRICITY OUTPUT | 353.73 |
Solar power contributed a measly 0.1% to total electricity generation, and can be utterly discounted from making any real contribution in the next few years, and there are no plans to significantly expand biomass, which in any event has environmental and food production problems of its own.
Which leaves us with wind. To get to the 30% target, we will need to generate about 5 times as much wind power as we do now. But its actually much worse than that, because demand for electricity is forecast by the government to double by 2050, as petrol for cars and gas for heating homes, etc, is replaced by “low carbon “ electricity.
But just taking the “5 times” example, on days like today, when demand is running about 20% above normal, something like 20% of the country’s electricity capacity will have gone missing.
And that’s just by 2020. Within a few more years, the cretins who rule us have committed to shutting down most of the country’s coal, gas and oil power stations.
We are already paying a huge price to satisfy our politicians’ vanity. But our children and grandchildren will have to pay an even bigger one.
Whoever is last to leave the country won’t have to bother switching the light off. It will have gone off already.
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And the contract with the wind farmers requires the grid to take all they can produce so other suppliers are turned on and off to complement the wind speed And on occasion when the wind blows strong at low demand the grid can’t use it all they still have to pay.
I used to access a site http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/~dcurtis/NETA.html which, courtesy of Daniel Curtis, provided a graphic display of all UK electricity sources from the beginning of the year at a high temporal resolution, often half hourly. Abruptly,on October 24th this fascinating site stopped updating, and has remained non-functional ever since. It also referred to another source, which provided half-hourly numerical data on which the graphic must have been based, I downloaded the entire file, which started at the beginning of Jan 2010, and have analysed it in some detail. This too is no longer updated. It is called ALL_neta_30.zip, and is found at http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk, and is in the form of an Excel file. I presume that D Curtis was the person who set up and ran this site. I would /dearly/ like to be able to access all the data since the closedown, and on a continuing basis. Does anyone here know how to get at the NETA data. I badly need some advice/help. I think that D Curtis may have left the geography department, since I can find no address for him, though his name is certainly there still.
I have begun correspondence with my MP regarding the conribution of wind to the electricity supply and he has sent my email with analyses and graphics to the Dept of Energy. I hope they read it!
Robin
Robin
I use this NETA website, but I have not found any archived data. It simply updates every half hour. There are some data files but I can’t make head or tail of them!
If you get anything, please let me know.
Thanks
Paul
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm
Robin, this site shows dials of the contribution from different sources, and you can download a huge data file that has all the numbers at 5 min intervals back to May 2011.
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
The Invisible Hand enforces payment of real prices. When necessary, it employs brass knuckles. Prepare to be beaten within an inch of your life, or further.
Robin/Paul – I have put together a site to continue Daniel Curtis’s site, http://www.ukpowergeneration.info. I’m in the process of final data validation, please take a look and let me know of any comments. I also found Daniel’s site extremely useful.
It looks good, I’ll play around with it .
Just one typo – “Perentage”!!
Thanks
Paul