From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
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.
Weather dependent sources is a fair term.
and given the fact that the climatistas think weather will get more extreme- you’d think they wouldn’t want weather dependent sources
The operative word here is ‘think’ of which they are incapable. A mental defect of liberals.
Clearly the lack of wind is climate change 🙂
Precis for Greentards
“Renewables are pants”
And the production of renewables will cause more environmental damage than continuing to rely on fossil fuels once one discounts any climate crisis.
Which is why it is essential to educate the populace about weather and climate history.
Only The School Of Hard Knocks would educate anybody…
It seems so.
for any complex system it is always easier to make excuses than than to understand the true mechanisms
I always have bad luck
They are out to get me
Big Oil conspiracy
Nuclear is clogging up the grid
… and so many more
Funny thing is, some of us can conceive of, research, develop, design, build and deploy complex systems. It’s hard. It takes time and money. But it can be done. Of course, it helps if you engage engineers with expertise in the product domain.
You just can’t fix stupid.
Stupidity was sent by God to irritate people with common sense !
Let’s hope that those knocks aren’t too hard on the rest of us.
The wind blows between your ears .let alone the 1000 X more powerful Tides and rivers while triple meltdowns mutate viruses 20,000 more years. Facts matter.
The only triple meltdown that I see around here, is the one you appear to be having.
Calm down, come down off of whatever you are taking, then try to make some sense.
Houston she is gonna blow.
Facts do matter; please present some instead of incoherent babbling.
Well knickers to that – I call then Unreliables.
The received wisdom used to be that we could put a total of 16% wind and solar on the grid and still remain stable. Something like that.
Have ‘they’ figured out how to get more than 16% wind and solar on the grid and still remain stable?
I think that is the purpose of high speed grid control features like ultra high speed comms networks and items like synchrophasors
All needed to control the grid in real time to try and compensate for thousands of intermittent sources coming on and offline.
They keep adding batteries to provide stabililty. Today they spent £ 447,168.64 on 630MW of battery delivery capability (in this application the MWh don’t matter so much, because the batteries are constantly switching between charging and discharging to keep the grid balanced). Then they use curtailment as an added way to add some stability – almost 57GWh, or an average of 3GW so far today with 5 hours to go. Of course, the curtailed generation gets constraint payments. So far, balancing has cost over £15m today – and they’ve had half a dozen high and low frequency events outside the normal operating range, so it’s proving difficult to keep the system balanced. Not into major risk of partial outages, but you don’t see this when it isn’t windy unless there are trips on interconnectors.
How many charge-discharge cycles can the batteries support?
And who are “they”?
“They” are National Grid, the system operator responsible for dispatch.
That wisdom would completely go over the heads of the morons in power
“That wisdom would completely go over the heads of the morons in power.”
Yes! They’re morons, so why not start a meme that says, “The more windmills put up — the more they block the wind from turning other windmills.” The morons have no sense or feel for orders of magnitude.
Add lots more batteries and fast-charge them. The resulting fires will provide lots of warming to make up for the cold we are seeing.
Look guys, it’s very simple.
We have now reached the stage where a company makes it’s money building wind farms. Freindly banks lend working capital and wind farms spring up like mushrooms.
Then they are sold to associated merchant banks. These amalgamate various renewable assets into a green investment fund, and then they sell it on to a pension fund seeking green brownie points.
These are the first people who think in terms of return on investment, rather than capital gains.
The whole cycle is based on wind forecasts.
Pension fund says “It’s losing money. You sold me crap.”
Merchant bank “The wind dropped. Who knew?”
Just business.
Just like the mortgage crisis. Government forced risky behavior.
Wind energy is finite. When you harvest it, there is less of it.
What else did you expect would happen?
Is that why they don’t put one windmill behind another?
But they do. Staggered across the landscape like a thick wall of defence.
That explains why I had to give up sailing on the inland lakes due to a lack of wind!
I don’t think this is unprecedented at all. The only thing that is unprecedented is the lack of attention to the real world history by BEIS and the CCC and National Grid and OFGEM and all their consultants collectively. Here’s estimated capcity factors from re-factored weather data estimated by Staffell & Pfenniger:
Can you just do an extraction for average capacity factor for off and onshore. Looks to me like about 40 ish for offshore and about 30ish for onshore, but monitoring https://gridwatch.co.uk/
I think in practice we get much less Deliberate lies and spin by culpably dishonest politicians
I think you would get somewhat less simply because the chart makes no allowance for maintenance outages: it is assuming that the wind farms are available to use whatever wind there is. While regular maintenance would usually be planned for summer months when generation is usually less and the weather kinder, inevitably some breakdowns occur in wintertime. Additional outages for cable repairs are becoming an important factor too. Orsted actually mentioned that as impacting their profitability, partly because of the cost, but also the loss of production.
Please post a graph with sufficient resolution so that we can read the notations. Happy New Year to all!
Click on it! Hey, presto! enlarged version appears.
While what you complain of is a very frequent problem, it isn’t with this graph. If you click on it, it opens to near full screen. It is high enough resolution that you can then zoom in as needed (Ctrl_+). My approach is to right click and chose ‘open link in new tab’, thus not losing the blog screen.
While either of these approaches are almost always available, far too many graphs and tables are such low resolution that nothing can be read, no matter how much one magnifies them.
Take it from an old power systems analysis engineer: 30% to 40% availability (unplanned!) should scare the shit out of any responsible person.
re: “re-factored weather data estimated by Staffell & Pfenniger:”
What, exactly, does that mean? Especially the terms in italics.
It means they looked at the weather history and estimated wind speeds hourly from the available data by location, which they then turned into wind output estimates using typical turbine power output curves. They then validated it for locations with real turbines and real output data, using that to help tune up their estimates. You can read their paper here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544216311811
It’s the best estimates I have come across, importantly for a continuous history at hourly resolution that covers a long time span – 1980-2016 – (as well as per country data across Europe) which is what you really need if you want to understand the impact of weather variation and whether things like storage are at all feasible for covering lulls over the months and years. (Answer: no, it would be too expensive)
They’ll just shop around for new consultants to tell them what they want to hear if any should be a little reticent.
Records from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) show the amount of wind power delivered to the grid from every wind farm in SE Australia. Every month there are periods when the input is less than 10% of the installed capacity of the wind fleet and the input can fall below 2%.
The system has to cope with the worst possible case and average figures don’t indicate that, in the way that the average height of a flood protection levee does not indicate how effective it is, if there are gaps in the wall.
A worst case in Australia was June 2020 with three long periods with the wind fleet under 10% of capacity – 33 hours between the 5th and 6th, 18 hours on the 11th and 16 hours on the 17th.
The picture tells the story https://www.riteon.org.au/netzero-casualties/#201
The lowest points during those periods were 3.4%, 1.1% and 2.3% for the whole system.
Individual states experienced long periods at zero or even negative numbers when the turbines drained power from the grid instead of contributing to it.
That’s why they need to add more windmills.
So they can make up in volume.
Like the Pony Express that employed way stations for the riders to change horses as the ones they rode ran dry.
More windmills is like more horses at each way station without making the stations any closer. When there isn’t much wind, it doesn’t matter if you have extra.
Just adding more intermittent power to the grid is not the answer.
1919 Betz Limits faked to support oil discovery in Texas and Oklahoma and eliminate Einstines relatively of wind and Tides plus new inventions like my automatic feathering flat bade radical windmills. both horizontal unlimited or vetical ate stonewalled.us patent (lonien).with inflate values
what?
Big Oil lied that it isn’t possible to get unlimited energy from the wind. In actual fact, one presumes, a proper turbine will take all the wind energy, stopping wind flow completely, but then the wind immediately revs up to full power again and goes at the next turbine down the line.
Really? Can you prove that?
Oh ye of the most literal mind!
Where does the energy to “rev up” the wind again come from?
Can you demonstrate how a wind turbine is capable of taking 100% of the energy from the wind?
Didn’t you see the /sarc tag?
Poe’s Law, Andy: your sarcasm is, unfortunately, indistinguishable from what some would actually believe.
must have had too much of Grandpa’s cough medicine?
Brilliant, Einstine! Prolly yore patent is held up coz there’s no English wurds in yer appikashun.
If something isn’t working, do more of it until it does. Just ask Griff.
He’ll be here in a bit to tell you that at about 07:00 this morning wind was supplying nearly 53% of electrical demand.
Which is true, however the morning ofJanuary 1st* is probably the point of minimum demand for the entire year. Add to that it is is exceptionally mild and windy.
*The country has been shut down for o er a week, 90% of the population is still in bed, unlike Christmas when 30 million ovens are cooking dinner abd as many children are playing on new Xbox, PS4 or tablets.
Griff’s new year resolution is to not post something stupid.
Too late
Going to be quiet then
Griff has run out of wind?
fortunately by the time all cars are electric and all houses are heated by heat pumps and electricity there will be more wind blowing
the ideal engineering solution!
As with all energy sources utilised by mankind wind energy is directly generated by the sun. It will be interesting to see if this decline in usable wind energy continues while the sun is in its quiescent state
Nuclear is generated by out sun?
Well, technically, all the uranium, and every other element, came from the nebula that formed our solar system, which came from the leftovers of an exploding star.
Polar bears had enough of Biden’s USA, they are off to Putin’s Russia.
Polar Bears forced to migrate from America to Russia On Boxing Day, temperatures soared to a record 19.4C on the island of Kodiak – the highest December reading ever recorded in Alaska
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/frightening-new-covid-data-shows-boris-johnsons-omicron-gamble/
Across the Bering Strait in town of Uelen is -26C.
Not to worry, Kodiak town is 13F today. Back to normal.
After a quick research I found that:
Telegraph headline is a ‘fake news’ construct.
“Polar Bears forced to migrate from America to Russia because of climate change
On Boxing Day, temperatures soared to a record 19.4C on the island of Kodiak – the highest December reading ever recorded in Alaska”
Correct link to the article is:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/01/01/polar-bears-forced-migrate-america-russia-climate-change/
Verkhoyansk, the town that made the headlines by reaching a supposed 38C in summer as an Arctic Circle record, got down to -53C just ahead of Christmas. Still a bit above its record low of -67.8C (achieved twice), so I suspect those years had a higher temperature range than 2021.
Funny how, with covid, policies get based on worse-than-worst-case scenarios, whereas, with electricity supply, policies are based on better-than-best-case scenarios!
whatever works for the most profit
AND IT IS GOING TO GET A WHOLE HELL OF A LOT WORSE
In the UK we have 24 GW of installed windpower and I have seldom seen it producing at 50% of that, ( as it is today) yet the mendacious slugs who would have us believe that we are teh Saudi Arabia of Wind tell us that we operate offshore at 59% annual capacity factor. You are dyed in the wool liars Mr Jonnson and Mr Kwarteng (He is the smarmy git who runs BEIS) and I hope that one day you will be held to account for the wholesale calculated destruction of our society.
Noone faces up to what to do in the halcyon days of 2050 when the demand is 5 times what it is today and there is no fossil fuel or other backup.
I will be dead by then thank God but I fear that so also will my children, and theirs
High treason!
Sabotaging the economy: Traitor Joe….
The not so Great Reset, build back better with a new green deal.
The capacity factor (CF) depends on location & blade optimisation (target range for local wind & output). If several wind farms target 30% CF then how well can they average 30% when combined?
An area with 8m/s average wind will have higher CF than an area of 6m/s. The problem is you can disconnect & park them (to reduce output from farm, less income) but there is no way to turn them up when needed above full available power.
The current profitability still requires subsidies/credits someone has to pay for.
Here’s the other side of the coin. With the warm windy weather over the turn of the year, and low demand also because of the holiday, wind has been in surplus – so much so that overnight prices have gone negative. That means that UK consumers get to subsidise wind farms for the privilege of exporting at negative prices to France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway. The subsidies work differently according to the different regimes: those on CFDs get the full value of their CFD, but no compensation for the negative element of the price. So for example, Hornsea wind farm gets a guaranteed £164.96/MWh funded by consumers, but just under £100/MWh net after selling for minus £75/MWh for export. Hywind, the floating offshore turbines, gets paid 3.5ROCs per MWh. These are currently worth over £55/MWh each, so the subsidy is worth over £192.50/MWh billed to consumers, with again no compensation for negative sales price. The difference is that when prices were over £300/MWh in the market, Hornsea was still getting £164.96/MWh, while Hywind was nudging £500+/MWh. Quite unjustified subsidy.
Just as well that the IFA2 interconnector failed on 30th December for as yet unexplained reasons.
The climate changers at The Guardian would understand you have to break a few eggs to make a fancy souffle’-
6m UK homes may be unable to pay energy bills after price hike, charity warns (msn.com)
At least the news is not all bad. The good news is that investing in generating capacity for waste actually yielded an increase in power generated.
For wind, solar, and hydro… the chart indicates that increasing capacity actually reduces the total amount of power generated by each of those technologies.
So the takeaway from the chart is that the best return on investment for the other renewable technologies will be for whichever can be most easily converted to waste.
My money is on wind turbines with their inherent capacity for self-immolation.
Expensive stupidity is depending on wind and solar, I hope it doesn’t end up cost live of those who have no choice.
Deaths due to not having adequate heating or air conditioning are blamed on the climate disruption of CO2, causing them to say more wind and solar are needed.
The BC government blamed 600 deaths on the June heat wave, including people who died 5-6 weeks later, because heat damage is forever I guess.
But basically all of those who died were old poor people in energy poverty who could not afford AC
Gee, you keep building these things that extract energy from the atmosphere, and you are surprised that wind speeds are down. Did any of you take even a basic course in physics? Did you learn anything?
I have been asking about that and poking around myself. Weather systems are ultimately driven by the sun, assuming energy in is constant and weather systems are constant, every turbine is removing energy from the weather systems which has to have a knock on effect to the weather?
If I drive my vehicle in summer, if it gets hot and we turn on the AC that forces the engine to work a little harder and burn more gas. But the wind can’t blow harder to compensate for the energy removed by a forest of turbines.
Winter with an ICE vehicle is not the same as the heat to warm the car cabin is a byproduct of combustion, I don’t need to attach a heater to the engine, I don’t have to add energy to the system to warm up, a huge ICE advantage here on the canadian prairies
LET’S not forget the movie Michael Moore was part of, the one that pulled off the false mask so-called renewables wear, trying to convince the population they are “green”:
“Michael Moore Presents: Planet of the Humans | Full Documentary | Directed by Jeff Gibbs”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE
Michael Moore presents Planet of the Humans, a documentary that dares to say what no one else will — that we are losing the battle to stop climate change on planet earth because we are following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road — selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America. This film is the wake-up call to the reality we are afraid to face: that in the midst of a human-caused extinction event, the environmental movement’s answer is to push for techno-fixes and band-aids. It’s too little, too late.
I wonder when the wind turbine businesses “tipping point” will be reached and company directors notify the shareholders who were not advised to sell their shares earlier that the wind turbine installation and business venture is being wound up, replacement of assets not commercially viable?
https://stopthesethings.com/2017/03/13/born-lucky-stars-align-perfectly-for-pms-son-with-mammoth-bet-on-wind-power-outfit-infigen/
Here is a graphical representation of the last two years of wind power production in the UK. For the first nine months of this year, wind production was way down. The small increase in May in 2021 was due to a couple of big storms and was ballyhooed on the BBC as there was a record for wind power for a few hours or something.
The last three months of 2021 had good wind. Still, overall wind was down about 10% for the year from last year.
Of course, these monthly averages hide huge swings. For example, in a “good” month like Oct 2021, there were six days in a row with very little wind. They were using everything but the kitchen sink then, even firing up open cycle gas plants as well as coal plants.
Other data, not shown, shows that natural gas usage was up 10% for the year.
There is no question about it. Wind and solar are only attractive to the numerically illiterate.
And, the idea that this approach will reduce atmospheric CO2 is beyond ridiculous. Germany is closing nuclear plants and burning more brown coal as I write this.
So, opponents of grid scale wind and solar might as well forget about facts, logic, and reason in arguing against this approach. This is a mental disorder. I don’t have any solutions.
I think we will have to accept Ben Franklin’s opinion:
“Experience keeps a dear school, but a fool will learn at no other.”
I was worried about day-long or week-long wind drought – this is the first I’ve seen anything about the half year 50% reduction in the UK – need to build 2x as much wind as stable power, and then 3x as much to make up for capacity factor – so 5x the GW as generated from reliable heat sources, and then add on ??GWh of storage to make up for quiet periods. Wow.
Has anyone government entity had the guts to publish what a ‘renewable’ grid would look like and cost, that could actually supply the needed amount of electricity?
In the 1980s when the scare was running out of oil the UK Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) wouldn’t look twice at wind citing its variability, aka unreliability.
Times have changed for the worse.
Well don’t forget that when coal runs out coal fired power station generators stop, and when water runs out too.
sarc.
Yup, climate change. The expert Griff will explain it as soon as the troll message is authorized.
Better speed up the subsidy machine to compensate.
Obviously, it’s “climate change.”