UK Windfarms Break Record (For Subsidies Paid Out!)
By Paul Homewood
h/t Robin Guenier/Joe Public
Silly Jilly is cheerleading for renewables again!
Blustery winter weather helped Great Britain’s windfarms set a record for clean power generation, which made up more than 40% of its electricity on Friday.
Wind turbines generated 17.3GW on Friday afternoon, according to figures from the electricity system operator, narrowly beating the previous record set in early January this year.
High wind speeds across the country helped wind power’s share of the electricity mix remain above 40% through Saturday. Coal and gas plants made up less than a fifth of electricity generated.
Melanie Onn, the deputy chief executive of Renewable UK, said: “It’s great to see our onshore and offshore windfarms have smashed another record, generating more power on a cold December day than ever before, just when we need it most.”
They make it sound as if these new records are some sort of miracle. The simple reality however is that if we keep building new, heavily subsidised wind farms, the electricity they generate is bound to keep increasing.
In the last year, offshore wind capacity has risen from 9.2 to 11.1 GW:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/energy-trends-section-6-renewables
[You might also note that onshore wind capacity has barely increased at all, due to the fact that subsidies have been withdrawn for new wind farms]
The offshore increase is due to the commissioning of two projects:
Hornsea Project 1 – 1.2GW
East Anglia Phase 1 – 0.7GW
And what Silly Jilly and The Observer forgot to mention is the guaranteed price these projects are paid:
At £139.35/MWh, East Anglia is four times the current market price for electricity. Hornsea is even more obscenely expensive, coming in at £162.47.
These prices will be raised again next April, as they are index linked for 15 years, meaning energy users will have to carry on paying through the nose until 2035.
In a full year, and at current prices, East Anglia and Hornsea will together receive a subsidy of £795 million.
It’s a high price to pay for Melanie Onn’s new record.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
“You might also note that onshore wind capacity has barely increased at all, due to the fact that subsidies have been withdrawn for new wind farms”
That’s not the only factor though.
Potential developers of on-shore wind farms realise the power and adverse publicity generated by NIMBYs and pseudo-Greens.
https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/aberdeenshire/1584208/aberdeen-greens-join-battle-against-glendye-windfarm-plans/
They never mention the times when there is no wind, like 2 weeks ago. make hay while the sun shines…
‘it was offshore wind that puffed the sails of Drake, Raleigh and Nelson’
When they were not becalmed, that is.
The other point, Paul, is that even on that Friday, when the wind blew so hard, it was Gas that ensured the power came on in the morning. Gas power stations increased their output fourfold to meet the morning peak as we all woke up and got ready for the day. This is the same for almost any day one could pick. What’s Jillian’s answer to how we will manage to step up electricity output rapidly each morning and again late in the afternoon to meet peak demand? You have to have some baseload supply that is capable of a very fast ‘switch on’.
Duracell. Lots and Lots of Duracell batteries.
Kind of like the Mercedes AA series?
LOL
I was going to post that video, but Hivemind beat me to it.
It’s a classic.
Oh,wait. That’s not it. That’s just talking about it. Brace yourselves. Here it is.
[video src="https://web.archive.org/web/20170525000421/http://sundown.me.uk/technology/mercedes-aa-class.mp4" /]
(Just a pesky ad to close to get to it)
looks like they’ve removed the sound? Darn.Oh, well.
Chris – In the commonly used terminology, there is a distinction made between “baseload” and “dispatchable” sources. Baseload should be reliable and inexpensive, but not quick to change, so usually only enough to meet the low overnight demand. Dispatchable can be varied quickly to meet changing demand. A distinction should be made between “slow” dispatchable, which is for reasonably predictable changes, and “fast” dispatchable, needed for hard-to-predict changes.
Do we still have clusters of diesel generators waiting to pollute – in an emergency?
Coal has been and is still getting a look-in too. Seriously dangerous to phase out these good old reliable generators. And coal can be stockpiled to cover future emergencies. Flue gasses are now very clean compared with the past.
They admit this record was set thanks to blustery weather. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that when the weather is benign the record output disappears and non renewables take the load and the credit.
Yet the Telegraph writer can’t work it out, apparently. Or propaganda beats honest reporting.
The other thing she forgot (!) to mention – or perhaps even think about – is that if you shut everything else down, the wind percentage can only go up. Perhaps the Observer has a bank of huge batteries ready for when the wind don’t blow.
Last time I asked a developer if the lack of subsidies made any difference he assured me it didn’t and they continue to apply for more windfarms. Meanwhile the total constraints payments to UK windfarms is rapidly creeping up to £1bn., of which over £844m. is Scotland. They don’t need subsidies when they’re paid so much to do nothing.
If Scotland gets the independence many wish for, will that £844m still be shared with all of us in the UK, or will the good people of Scotland have to fund this themselves? Anyone addressed this?
We don’t believe for one moment that English bill payers are going to pay for Scottish constraints – why would they? Sadly the independence lobby, which seems to be getting stronger, doesn’t do detail and neither does our SNP government.
Surely baseload is constantly supplied juice which is nuclear and possibly hydro. Instantly available power to switch on is what we need which was totally unnecessary and unavailable when we used coal. These sometimes fairly sudden drops we get from wind and solar could be solved by fusion if it could be switched on and off quickly. In the meantime the only way is more CCGT.
David – It’s even worse than you think! CCGT takes time to come up, as it has to build up a head of steam (literally!) first. The quickly dispatchable generators are the lower-efficiency open cycle gas turbines (OCGT).
On grids that use these extensively, which are those with high penetration of intermittent renewables, this fact cancels out a lot of the supposed gains in CO2 reduction.
Ed That isn’t quite correct. Many of the CCGTs can drop back to near minimum load at night and be quickly ramped up in the morning. This was like the coal fired stations and known as two-shifting by the beloved CEGB. But at the low load their efficiency drops, so you do get those losses.
This is a excellent example of paying for two systems when one would do, can do, and the other is superfluous.
_ _ _ _ _ _
I just looked at winds using the ‘nullschool’ site.
There appears to be only light winds from Portugal to the western edge of the Black Sea. There is also a part of GB without much wind.
There is a large area to the southeast of the Island of Newfoundland, over the ocean, that will be a game-changer for wind power if it drifts your way. Your Met service models for January will be of interest.
Of course the other subsidy is being paid not to produce anything at all. Over £48m in November alone (a new monthly record, for some 679,854 MWh and over £270m for 2020 so far, for 3,639,721MWh claimed to have been constrained off. The latest data in Energy Trends shows 64TWh of wind generation in the rolling year to end September, so that’s over 5.6% of generation. And it’s only going to get worse as more is installed.
And yet a couple of weeks ago the BBC kept repeating on their graphics that wind is now £40/MWh
I already made them correct such claims once before. They just carry on lying regardless.
Silly Jilly also forget to mention the period recently when wind fell to below 1%. And fossil fuels were doing what they do – reliably generating power at low cost day in, day out. Whether the wdin blows or the sun shones or whatever.
“Windfarms in Great Britain break record for worst performance.”
Headline not coming soon to an Observer near you.
I smile every time we get reports that nuclear fusion power stations will save us. When I was at university 50 years ago, the talk was fusion power would be on line in 50 years. We are still being told it will be another 50 years. I won’t be here to see, but I’d place a wager that neither will my grandchildren’s grandchildren.
What I do not understand is WHY there is not a scaling up of the Molten Salt Thorium Reactor concept? All the R&D was done in the 70’s in the US. Kerry blocked any funding for it what it was sought during his lacklustre time in Obamas misgovernment. There are some very good docus on this subject on YouTube. The beauty is that ALL the fuel is used up in the process and if the reactor is prompted to run wild it shuts it’s self down.
PMFB, you are a sceptic, no? Be sceptical. Only 2 experimental machines were ever built, and the one meant to power aircraft was abandoned. Neither added a microwatt to a grid. Unless anyone knows otherwise of course.
I’m a big fan of nuclear, my father worked in the industry all his career, but PowerPoint reactors are always better than real ones. Could thorium MSRs work? Absolutely they could, but there’s work to do.
The big problem we have is that the media is full of Silly Jillys and there are a lot of gullible consumers and gullible politicians out there.
I notice for some reason that Gridwatch does not reflect anything like 17.3Gw.
They must have a lot of Turbines missing from their data.
They do – about 25% of the capacity, mostly onshore. Only the real time metered turbines appear in the numbers published at BM reports in the detailed 5 minute data on which Gridwatch depends – a total capacity currently of 17,983 MW. There are estimates made of the wind that is not live metered which are included in some of the reports by half hour settlement period, but these are not based on real meter readings either. Real readings are made later and included in grid settlement calculations, but that is only at least a week later. As they put it:
There is quite a lot of wind power which is “embedded” – not metered so not visible to the Grid. According to the little pop-up on the Gridwatch site, it accounts for approx another 30% on top of the metered output.
There was about a week of high pressure in November when wind produced virtually nothing and coal was called in to help – producing five times more than wind. But gas saved us as usual.
The Melanie Onn mentioned was the Grimsby MP for the Labour Party until the last election.
She has a degree in Politics, International Studies and Philosophy. Its who you know, not what you know.
A large area of Siberia including Norilsk has been/is currently 20C below ‘normal’, funny how the MSM/BBC isn’t obsessed with this cold wave as they were the heat wave in summer!
The red area in the permafrost melting oil spill scare story below is now deep blue/white!
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2246639-siberias-record-breaking-heat-is-a-loud-alarm-bell-on-climate-change/
Oh the dilemma – electricity has to be made so expensive that wind/solar appear good value, but that makes heat pumps unable to compete with gas CH on cost.
https://www.thegwpf.com/electricity-costs-too-high-to-make-heat-pumps-worthwhile-mps-warn/
That’s alright. The CCC will just assume that they will be 1000% efficient to compensate. They’re already half way there anyway.
Wind doing next to nothing today, will they put that in the newspapers?
Lying is permissible and even actively encouraged in the name of “The True Cause” Certainly there is no shame to being caught out doing it….after all, people like the AlGORythm are getting obscenely rich….in the worthy cause of saving the planet”
‘High wind speeds across the country helped wind power’s share of the electricity mix remain above 40% through Saturday. Coal and gas plants made up less than a fifth of electricity generated.’
So then who was paying the fixed cost for those coal and gas plants on which YOUR VERY LIVES DEPEND?
The 40% is government granted use to the exclusion of other sources, regardless of cost or future necessity. 40% isn’t sustainable. Not that renewables can’t generate it, but because you will lose other producers at that level of penetration. ‘Made up less than a fifth of electricity generated.’ How then do they stay in business? And at what point do the renewables start paying for that backup?