Wind Power Drops By A Third In Q3
January 1, 2022
By Paul Homewood
h/t Joe Public
The latest energy trends data have been published by BEIS:
It is quite shocking to see that wind generation has fallen by 38% for onshore and 24% for offshore year on year. This is despite new capacity being added.
We are familiar with short term drops in output, maybe for a few days or even weeks. But to lose effectively a third of generation for a whole quarter shows just how dangerous over reliance on wind power is.
The difference was made up largely from imports, which doubled:
How long we can count on that is anybody’s guess.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
“Where capacity and generation trends conflict, it tends to indicate the dominance of weather effects”
OMG that statement is PRICELESS! It should be placed on the gravestones of all those greens and their useful idiots in governments responsible for our insane energy policy. It simply means that the weather is totally unreliable. Who’d have thunk?
When are they finally going to work out that wind and solar are – and always were – wholly inappropriate for maintaining power across a modern nation-wide grid? What more evidence do they need than this?
Yes, and how many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, and how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, and how many deaths will it take ’til he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
Bob Dylan
Or not.
We have always known it: we just didn’t expect it to be revealed so soon.
And, I expect, neither did the Environmental Activists.
Andy Lawton tweets useful series of data on all of Britain’s electricity sources – hourly, daily, monthly & annually.
His 1st Aug 2021 summary for wind’s July 2021 performance:
“GB Grid: Last Month’s #Wind generation.
Wind generation: 1.96TWh (9.18%) out of GB total: 21.32TWh”
That shows that our entire fleet of 25GW capacity generated at just 10.5% Capacity Factor for the entire month.
NatGridESO assumes an Equivalent Firm Capacity for wind of 16%.
That ridiculously large figure (which should be 2-4%) is borderline fraud, given the money made by National Grid from the carpeting of the country with wind farms.
Get your facts right – National Grid do not build windmills. They are required to connect them to the grid which will require the expense of carrying the power generated long distances. There was a reason power stations were built where people lived an worked. Another thing lost in the regression of western civilisation.
Have you got a similar graphic for sun?
Reports say London had 26 minutes of sun in 16 December days. It has been VERY gloomy. Quite what we are supposed to use for energy when there is no wind or no sun completely baffles me.
Green zealots never seem willing to get into a conversation to tell us where they believe energy for a 66million person 24/7 society will come from.
“GB Grid: Yesterday’s (i.e. 16th Dec) #Solar generation.
Solar generation: 4.56GWh (0.53%)
GB total: 856.28GWh”
You can get a lot of solar estimated data from this site.
https://www.solar.sheffield.ac.uk/pvlive/
Play around with the box marked “show” and you can get national daily and monthly figures. Some days in winter solar produces the equivalent of less than 3 minutes of peak demand. i.e. the square root of sweet FA
I use this site regularly
https://grid.iamkate.com/
last week or so, the total contribution of renewables for that week as 8.8%
Only 91.2% short of the NetZero target.
Given how important energy security is to our country, is there a case for a legal challenge against a renewables-led UK energy policy?
It’s failing. It’s exposing the country to clear and obvious risks that a responsible government (and entire Opposition) shouldn’t be even entertaining.
What’s the threshold for suing government over a national policy on specific grounds of serious risk to national security?
OK I accept it probably wouldn’t win but it would generate big media coverage and help lift this issue to the prominence it deserves.
Current policy is clearly reckless and cannot go legally unchallenged.
I see that in France there are already contingency plans to cut supply to industry, and even to impose rotating blackouts on consumers in a cold windless period. Presumably our ability to import will be impaired.
https://www.rte-france.com/actualites/niveau-de-vigilance-sur-lapprovisionnement-en-electricite-rehausse-pour-le-mois-de
Forwarded to my net-zero zealot MP.
…who will get one of his Green-affiliated staffers to write a patronising response for the MP. It’s what mine did. So I FOI’d him to ask how many staff were members of Green party (their CVs should indicate) but it was refused on grounds of cost to go through all CS CVs!
When I woke at about 7:30 this morning I had a look at Grid Watch. Wi d was at just shy of 53%. On the quietest day of the year, on a warm windy morning no real surprise.
But I’m expecting headlines like the one I saw the other day claiming we should get a heat pump because renewable were generating 42% of electricity
Outages? Outages? How can windmills have outages? Are they unreliable?
One issue often overlooked, is that there is a seasonal slew to electricity demand – more in winter, less in summer. Consequently dispatchable plant tend to schedule maintenance for late spring, summer and early autumn and go offline at such times. With wind going walkabout at short notice at any time of the year can cause major problems – there simply may not be adequate available reliable plant to make up the extended shortfall. As I have pointed out several times before all three major power blackouts of the UK in the 21st century occurred in either May or August.
Either the late great Booker or Richard North commented that summer was a prime time for a grid failure which would catch people out as most would expect a winter failure. I guess now we are liable to a failure every day.
Just to add insult to injury, I see that the combination of warm windy weather and low holiday demand led to extensive exports at negative prices via the interconnectors overnight. 2GW each to France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and 700MW to Norway. Doubtless also a good chunk of constraint payments.
I’ll download fuller data later, but for now you can see the essentials here (although they will roll off in a couple of days)
https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=eds/main
That great Saudi Arabia of wind plan….
Thick finger on my tablet…. only 1GW each, but just as well that our interconnector capacity is restricted to France. IFA2 went out of service for unexplained reasons on the 30th December.
The key picture preserved for posterity
Minus £75/MWh and worse on 3.7GW of exports for several hours.
The CCC technical report assumed that the latest crop of tall turbines will deliver 50% of capacity. The experience in Denmark is of lowered efficiency as the turbines age after 16 years. The Rampion windfarm off Sussex was running below design last year at 25%. And the things will have a maximum life of 20 years in a salt laden environment.
But this dunce of a PM is keen to have 15,000 of the things stuck 60 miles out in the sea. It’s another of his bridge follies.
Paul,
OT but here is some recent nonsense from the US
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/01012022/biden-buttigieg-infrastructure-climate-evs/
Oh dear …. silly Jilly in the Graun, just two years ago:
“ Renewable energy: climate crisis ‘may have triggered faster wind speeds’
Windfarms could be able to generate more energy due to phenomenon, says report”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/18/climate-crisis-striking-a-blow-for-windfarms-new-research-suggests
How many of these predictive ‘reports’ have come even close to being accurate? I’m guessing very few going on (almost) none.
Straight-up activism dressed as ‘science’. To say the country has been gaslighted would be one of the great understatements.
A million monkeys all with type writers couldn’t come up with a line let alone the complete works of Shakespeare. Similarly, installing climate nutters into government and expecting sober and properly thought out and engineered national energy policy, you’d have to be insane, oh wait here comes bunter!
Actually the odds for the monkeys are rather better. It was one of the challenges set by Dawkins in I think The Blind Watchmaker: write a simple BASIC programme and see how long it takes before a sequence of random letters matches a line of Shakespeare. Even on my ZX81 it only took a few minutes.
Does this mean we should resist wind power generation? How about other renewable energy sources? I’m trying to understand opposition to “all of the above” energy production options. It seems political ideology drives too much of the drum beating rather than a focus on economic efficiency and productivity. Perhaps the goal is to secure a following rather than solve a problem. As Dr. Franklin put it: “Those who fail to govern their passions are destined to be governed by them.”
On Saturday, January 1, 2022, NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT wrote:
> Paul Homewood posted: “By Paul Homewood h/t Joe Public The latest energy > trends data have been published by BEIS: It is quite shocking to see > that wind generation has fallen by 38% for onshore and 24% for offshore > year on year. This is despi” >