OUR government has a blind and dangerous faith in perpetual wind generating constant electricity. There is no better or quicker way of explaining the madness of this belief than by way of graphs and gigawatts.
For instance, here is one that shows where the National Grid got our electricity from (in gigawatts – GW) over December 11-12. Very little daytime solar because it was cloudy and the meteorological situation meant there was hardly any wind.
0900 December 11 to 0900 December 12
You can see that without substantial back-up from gas-fired generating
stations the country would have suffered massive blackouts. Yet nearly all those gas units are due for closure in the plan for ‘clean’ energy by 2030.
The weather pattern was not unusual. A graph from October shows what happened when the wind dropped just before the evening peak demand of 34.1 GW, lower than usual because it was a Sunday.
0900 October 13 to 0900 October 14
The National Grid has continually to juggle with the various inputs to meet the total demand. These ‘Generation’ graphs do not show the transfers always going on between the UK, Ireland and several continental countries. (See ‘Demand’ situation later.) On the graph above at peak time we were ‘borrowing’ 6.5 GW, one-fifth of the total.
A very similar situation occurred on the evening of 22nd October.
0900 22nd to 0900 23rd October
As the wind died away the gas had to be turned up for both peak evening and morning demand, and of course there is no solar in the evening as the sun has set.
One more to drive home the kind of windy facts that our government ignores, (Why doesn’t the Met Office tell them?) This time it shows both demand and generation.
1600 12th to 1600 13th December
1600 12 December to 1600 13 December
Here the upper graph shows very clearly the two peak demand times, morning and evening, and how we borrow from the Continent and pay back during the small hours.
The graphs also show (1) that no matter how many turbines you plant across the North Sea, if there’s no wind there’s no electricity, and (2) even if solar panels covered an area the size of London they would contribute nothing to the critical evening peak demand in the winter months.
Our comfort technology began thousands of years ago with a fire, initially to ward off wild beasts, then a woolly mammoth leg accidentally fell into the hot ashes and cooking was discovered. Later came candles, oil lamps, houses with fireplaces and coal cellars.
For hundreds of thousands of years there was a choice: if you were cold you lit the fire. If you were hungry you roasted something over that fire. If you couldn’t see you lit the candles or lamps. You were in control.
Now we have electricity and gas. In exchange for simple switches that bring instant power, we have lost control.
We depend on electricity, the country runs on electricity, our lives are only kept going because we have electricity. It is almost as essential to us as the very blood in our veins. We can no longer live without it. Yet we are at the mercy of government policies which as an absolute priority must keep that power available to us all the time.
But they talk of squeezing electricity from erratic and sometimes non-existent wind. They talk of help from the sun which for months of winter evenings does not exist.
You can see it all in those graphs: the sunless winter evenings, the windless winter days. It’s all there, plain to see.
Is anyone looking?
My thanks to the website IamKate for the graphs.
