Essay by Eric Worrall
First published JoNova; Remember all those assurances that the wind always blows somewhere? Not so much on the night of the 27th.
Another wind drought pulls combined renewables output below last year
The story of Australia’s green energy transition is mostly one of new peaks in output and share of renewables, but there inevitably ups and downs.
The last few days have seen another so-called wind energy “drought” – the second in as many months. Autumn is “traditionally” the season with lowest wind outputs, but the lull this year has pushed the combined output of renewables below its level of last year.
The graph above from ITK Services principal David Leitch, a contributor to Renew Economy and co-host of Renew Economy’s popular and weekly Energy Insiders podcast, shows that the share of variable renewable energy (VRE, or solar and wind), has fallen below last year’s levels.
Another data provider, OpenNEM, puts the share of wind over the last three days at just 4.1 per cent, and five per cent for the past seven days, compared to more than 13 per cent for the past year.
…
Read more: https://reneweconomy.com.au/another-wind-drought-pulls-combined-renewables-output-below-last-year/
Let’s see, if wind power drops to below 5% normal for 3 days and counting, does this mean we’d need at least 72 hours of battery backup, and counting? Or is the green solution to build 2000% overcapacity?
Large scale wind droughts are not exactly rare. A similar event occurred in 2022;
Longer outages over vast areas can also occur, such as the 2017 season long wind drought which afflicted South Australia.
Obviously we could always keep all the coal and gas infrastructure on rolling standby, ready to jump in every other year when the wind completely fails over the entire continent, but how much would it cost to keep an entire second electricity generation system operational, just in case the renewable system fails?
Actually we don’t have to ask that question – consumers are already learning the hard way what the renewable circus costs, through skyrocketing household energy bills.
Or maybe we’ll all just have to get used to multi-day power blackouts, like South Africa is currently experiencing.
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Anybody who has ever checked out an aviation weather page knows the wind usually dies down after sunset:
https://www.usairnet.com/cgi-bin/launch/code.cgi?state=WI&sta=KMWC
Zero is not unusual
Only at ground level
Cf Boundary Layer etc.
Don’t need an aviation page to tell me that, live in a windy part of the world and if you want to work outside on a roof etc then dawn is the best time. You have about a 2 hr window before the wind picks up.
I worked in agriculture, we usually had to complete arial spraying programs before 8 or 9 AM before the wind picked up.
Which is why we normally did flight testing around dawn.
OH yes, he is.
Sure the wind always blows somewhere, except it’s often not where it’s needed most. Likewise with the sun except not for most of the night. So in the absence of high-capacity storage batteries, anywhere that depends strictly on solar and wind energy are like EV owners where there are no recharging stations. As a result, we have to continue our major dependence on fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear—a no-brainer situation painfully obvious to all but eco-alarmists and the media corporations, politicians, bureaucrats and academics in their back pockets.
Plus, there’s the simple question of how strong the wind is blowing “somewhere”.
If the wind speed is only enough to generate 10% of the installed capacity, the fact that it is blowing a bit doesn’t solve the problem
‘The wind is always blowing somewhere’ is the favorite greens retort, except you would need enough wind turbines to power the whole country to be situated in that ‘somewhere.’
Hmm, all we need to do is put them on wheels, and attach long extension cords, and just roll them around the country as needed. Also better attach floats, to float them across the ocean to a different continent where there happens to be more wind. Problem solved!
The wind modeling that shows wind working treats every farm as an independent random variable so at all times a lot are generating. Big highs falsify that assumption.
Failing to acknowledge the high level of autocorrelation of wind generation should be a fatal floor to any wind power model. It’s akin to assuming the output of solar panels is random, not correlated with the position of the Sun. To be frank, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them try to do this with solar panel output modelling too though.
Let’s see . . . wind power dropping to below 5% of normal for 3 days and counting. . . just wondering how that massive (and costly!) 150 MW, 194 MWh Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia is working out in making up that shortfall?
AEMO says theres currently a possible market intervention to manage security of supply in South Australia.
https://aemo.com.au/en/market-notices
They use waffle words about lack of ‘synchronous supply’ which really means wind and sun
Hornsdale only role right now would just be grid inertia
So the answer its No generation.
NHAsys below has the generation at 13.20.
South Australia battery demand was 200MW at that time- the mid day peak as I said
Fun fact, for the UK to supply a constant 9 GW (the average from wind over the year), from its 40 GW of combined wind/solar capacity, requires 7,000 GWh of storage capacity, which is ~3 times the total global battery production per year.
How much did Hornsdale cost? How much would another 36,000 of them cost?
For one third of the UK’s electricity demand.
Well, as of Sept 2018, the Hornsdale battery farm emplaced by Tesla was estimated to have cost $90 million in then-year Australian dollars. There was a subsequent “upgrade” in March 2020 to increase the facility storage capacity by 50MW/64.5MWh , but I don’t have the costs for that upgrade.
“However, the cost of the battery was not made public for reasons of ‘commercial-in-confidence’ and was estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars, some of that to be funded by South Australian taxpayers.
“In 2017, acquisitions relate mainly to the Hornsdale Power Reserve project (€56 million), which was built and commissioned in the period,” the document stated.”
“There’s a cost of $4-5 million a year to have the battery in place.”
— https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-27/tesla-battery-cost-revealed-two-years-after-blackout/10310680
So rough guess, $150m all in, for say 200 MWh, so $750,000/MWh, i.e. $750m/GWh, multiplied by 7,000, a mere $5.25 trillion, for less than 1/3 of the UK’s demand.
Plus, maybe $150 billion p/a maintenance.
Totally achievable, not.
“Night Time Wind Power Fails Across the Entire Continent of Australia”
Ridiculous hype. Qld was normal, WA is not mentioned. There isn’t much of Australia left.
“Let’s see, if wind power drops to below 5% normal for 3 days”
It didn’t say it was below 5% of normal. It said:
“OpenNEM, puts the share of wind over the last three days at just 4.1 per cent, and five per cent for the past seven days, compared to more than 13 per cent for the past year”
Wind was briefly less than 5% of total. 13% is normal. So wind was down to 40% of its normal generation.
“does this mean we’d need at least 72 hours of battery backup, and counting?”
The 5% figure is nonsense. But the sun is still shining.
“The 5% figure is nonsense. But the sun is still shining.” At night when the wind drops? 😉
“we’d need at least 72 hours of battery backup”
At no point on 26th May did wind produce more than 1GW of electricity for the whole NEM..
That really is a total waste of funding and subsidies.
Thankfully, COAL, and GAS and some hydro are still able to keep the grid running at night.
In SA, on the night of 26th/27th, wind max at about 30MW… out of around 1GW demand.. totally pitiful.
… thankfully they had GAS and DIESEL to provide electricity.
We don’t need battery-back-up..
We need to get rid of wind and solar off the grid, and solidify supply using, in priority order.. COAL, GAS, Hydro where possible, and Nuclear.
Dreaming . 4 hours is the most output you will get .
The grid batteries working currently are using ‘synthetic inverters’ to mimic the inertia of the large rotating synchronous generators to keep the grid stable at 50hz
The grid batteries main job is electric arbitrage , making money every day in short periods with buying cheap in middle day when solar depresses the prices and selling dear at evenings when the wind dies and sun goes down.
One Victorian grid battery got caught playing for both teams. Both being paid to act as standby rapid release generation for emergencies and doing the electric arbitrage, so had no output for a real emergency.
Got a minor fine/slap on the wrist when the emergency output didnt happen. Oh woes.
4 hours? That’s dreaming. He’ll be lucky to get 4 minutes.
And Lazard’s LCOE of storage, cited by the CSIRO is predicated on 4 hours of storage. 😉
72 hours of battery backup
How many 100s of trillions of dollars would it take to buy that many batteries?
How many decades would it take to build that many batteries? (That assumes no batteries for cars or anything else is being built during that time period.)
What percentage of batteries already installed will expire before all the batteries needed, can be built.
The point is, Eric’s calculation is wrong. They don’t need 72 hours of battery backup.
No, they need MUCH more.
And for it to be charged using COAL and GAS. !
No, they need more.
Actually, they need several weeks worth.
Nick sees the sun at night. If you try real hard you might see it too.
Does Nick wear his sunglasses at night?
Does he have a full tank of gas?
Oh Nick.
For such an otherwise intelligent bloke, your naive faith in the capability of wind & solar to deliver any developed nation’s electricity needs is pathetic.
This failure isn’t a modeling exercise old mate, it’s real-world observations.
I quoted no modelling, just generation data. In fact, I just showed what the NEM, as quoted, really said. It didn’t happen.
YES, it did happen..
The almost complete absence of wind for more than 48 hours.
Here is the 48 Hour NEM.. That green line at the top is the totally useless wind.
Black and Brown are COAL, carrying the large bulk of supply as usual.
Good thing they hadn’t sold ALL their Coal to China and had reserved a sufficient amount to allow for more reliable generation sources
Nick, how can you not understand that with real-world reliable utility-scale electricity supply, average output is irrelevant bullshit.
Unless your average output value = 100% that is.
You’re the polymath Nick, please explain what I’m not understanding with this situation.
I would be interested in NIck’s reply as well. You can’t consider the average production period, you have to consider the worst, and what you would need to get through that period. The estimates I’ve seen involve huge overbuilding and/or battery storage, coupled with forced demand reduction, which are essentially mini-blackouts. If those are wrong, what is the proper calculation?
Nick, for the foreseeable future, batteries can’t fill the gap, so it has to be conventional power sources that provide electricity when the wind is low or the sun not shining. But then you have the capital cost of 2 power systems, which has to be more expensive than just having one, even if the wind and sun are “free”.
I am willing to be convinced that sun and wind can power the world economically. But until you provide real world analysis, done by engineers who understand this stuff, you’re going to lose this battle with any thinking members of the public.
Thanks for showing just how ERRATIC and WORTHLESS wind and solar really are.
Well done Nick !!
And NO. the sun is NOT shining at nighttime.!
But like wind…‘always blowing somewhere’, the sun must be shining somewhere on the planet. Lol!!
Right! So all we need is thousands and thousands of HVDC extension lines criss-crossing the world and voila electricity whenever you need it. 🙂
Whew, thank goodness for the sun.
So Aussies will have power availability from 10am until 2pm for as much solar capacity currently installed. Just be sure to do naught but plug in your cars or else be unable to go anywhere…not that anything will be open, no power and all
Follow my link in the post Nick. I did consider WA, and when I wrote it at 1pm WST the total wind supply on the South West grid was just, wow, 30 MW. So all across the continent, 5,000 km wide, the wind turbines were working at less than 5% capacity. And the 25th of May was probably worse — all 80 wind plants on the Eastern seaboard were producing just 200MW of power at one point, out of 11,500 GW total nameplate capacity.
This has been going on for six days now and I’m referring to day time production. See my graph of the whole month of May.
Yesterday the 24 hour fuel mix on the NEM was 72% coal and 9% gas.
“at 1pm WST the total wind supply on the South West grid was just, wow, 30 MW”
WA’s average wind generation is about 150 MW. So that is 20% of normal, not 5%, at 1pm WST.
“So all across the continent, 5,000 km wide, the wind turbines were working at less than 5% capacity.”
So it goes here. You claim that at an instant they were at 5% capacity. By the time Eric is done with it, it is 5% of normal over three days.
Nick, I wrote my post about 30MW at 1pm yesterday. My psychic powers couldn’t write about todays production then… and that is 3% of normal wind nameplate capacity in WA.
I’ll accept your tacit acknowledgement that I was right. Thank you for your “grace and honesty”.
Read my comment again — it’s been six days of poor wind performance. Then read Erics post again. He didn’t get the 5% stat you complain about from me, but from RenewEconomy. And he merely asked the question “ if wind power drops to below 5% normal for 3 days and counting, does this mean we’d need at least 72 hours of battery backup”.
By the time you have finished misreading that you’ve turned his question into a claim.
Was Eric talking about 5% of normal wind production or 5% of normal daily electricity demand in Australia. You could ask him politely, given what he quoted I’d assume he means normal daily electricity demand.
And– Australia is supposedly going to be “82% renewable by 2030”. So if renewable-lovers say the share of wind was “five per cent for the past seven days, and they are talking of “normal daily demand” (which is what matters) then where is the rest of normal demand going to be supplied at night time?
“You could ask him politely, given what he quoted I’d assume he means normal daily electricity demand.”
But he quite clearly said, 5% below normal – :“if wind power drops to below 5% normal for 3 days and counting”
… below normal what? You assumed he meant below normal wind performance. But he was talking about it being below normal demand in the quote directly above.
PS: Noted you avoided the question that matters ” where is the rest of normal demand going to be supplied at night time?”
I think you won that one, Jo.
Why not download ten years of 5 minute samples of wind output from the UK, Nick and do the hard work to determine just how much battery or fossil backup is needful?
I did that for the US here
Do it for the UK, and compare your findings with the Royal Society storage report. Which I notice you have never commented on.
Why don’t you do it for the UK? The data is there, it only takes arithmetic.
The reason I’m not so interested is that the UK is really part of a much larger grid, with a greater potential for imports and exports. It would be not much more meaningful than doing an analysis for Wales.
I’m not going to do it, because the Royal Society has already done it and come up with the answer.
Yes, the UK does have access to imports and exports, but these do not affect the point. The issue for net zero in power generation is to figure out how much storage you would need, given the historical weather patterns, to get to net zero. Not counting on imports.
The question for anyone who thinks this can be done with batteries is simple. They say 100 Terawatt hours will be needed. Do you think this is feasible and affordable?
They think not, and recommend excavating and sealing caverns to store hydrogen instead. Do you think this is feasible and affordable? And where are you going to get the hydrogen?
My own answer to both is no, and I think if they are seriously attempted, and generation is taken to net zero in a spirit of hope, the result will be repeated nationwide blackouts.
From which imports will not protect them. There is too little capacity, both in generation and in transmission, and its not going to improve enough to make it a viable answer to the storage issue.
“Not counting on imports.”
Why not? They happen. That is the point of being part of a larger grid. Just like Wales does’nt have to balance production and demand minute by minute. It can import from England.
The Royal Society went back 37 years of wind data. 10 years is not enough.
I’ve actually done that, for the 5 years 2019 – 2023, it works out at 7,000 GWh of battery storage, just to meet the 9 GW average wind generation for 2022 and 2023.
I’m not even convinced that amount of storage would be sufficient.
No, agreed, it does seem light when you look at the Royal Society’s estimate for the UK.
The 5% figure is nonsense. But the sun is still shining.
So how much overcapacity and battery capacity do we need by your calculation Nick? Bear in mind when this happens in winter it’s usually very cold, so lots of people will want to crank up their home heating.
The answer to this question, for a different country, was given by the UK’s Royal Society.
The report, based on 37 years of weather data, finds that in 2050 up to 100 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of storage will be needed, which would have to be capable of meeting around a quarter of the UK’s current annual electricity demand.
This is the press release summary, there is a link to the full report at the bottom.
https://royalsociety.org/news/2023/09/electricity-storage-report/
There are two problems with wind, and both of them affect the UK, despite its being in a very promising location for wind.
One is the minimums. These are noted and graphed by Gridwatch. The following are averages for the day, and bear in mind they are coming from about 30GW faceplate, about half of it off-shore. The 2023 total and offshore was a bit lower.
2023 minimum: 0.071 GW
2024 YTD minimum: 0.16 GW
This month the hourly average low was 0.219 GW.
If you look at prolonged calms, from 23 August 2023 to 16 September, output of the roughly 30GW of wind was below 5GW, often well below. This is not unusual, it happens a few times a year.
https://gridwatch.co.uk/wind
This is why the RS concluded that it cannot be done with batteries.
But the other problem is the existence of calm seasons, whole seasons in which slow moving blocking highs lead to very calm weather. The RS was the only body so far to have researched the actual climate of the country they were talking about, going back decades, and they immediately found calm seasons. Which is why their storage estimates are so high.
The Royal Society’s report was damning about storage but also understated the problem because they took electricity demand in the UK in 2018 as their baseline and used that same years total 37 times in their calculations.
Thus they didn’t account for the fact that electrifying everything was going to require much more electricity than was used in 2018.
Yes.
Can’t read my own writing! 32 times not 37
But they then say:
Which is pretty much impossible as well.
At least it’s a start.
Good point. And when temperatures are cold, for heat pumps the BTUs from the atmosphere decrease and must be supplied either from the compressor or resistance heating, increasing the load on the grid.
WA has no wind generation.
from https://anero.id/energy/wind-energy
They do have some, but WA are not part of what is referred to as the Australian Energy Market, and not connected to the Eastern states… so not mention in AEMO data
NemWatch does include them though.
Live Supply & Demand Widget, sponsored by RenewEconomy | (nem-watch.info)
Currently, WA is running on mostly Gas and Coal.
lol! WA is not connected to the rest of Australia in almost every way. Apologies to all WA climate change sceptics, you are the exception..
nhasys — The WA grid is separated from the large “National Energy Market” by 1000 miles of largely unpopulated desert. About 90% of the population live in the National Energy Market (24 million), and about 10% are in the SW Grid (2.5m). Hence most of our national analysis and dashboards simply forget WA exists, but it has its own dashboard and about 1.1GW of wind power. We have monster solar though with 2.5GW of rooftop solar in a sunny land. Hence the ugly duck curve gets uglier all the time. And today is cloudy…
The Anero.id site is excellent (and set up by one guy, not an institution) but feeds off the east coast datasets.
“13% is normal”
Wow, for the money spent… that really is pathetic, isn’t it. !!
And no, for a lot of the last 2-3 days it has been down near 2% of supply.
How much was spend on the 87%?
Whatever it was, at least it worked / is working to expectations.
Unlike everything spent on wind and solar farms.
How much was spent on seven 1 gigawatt wind farms to (hypothetically) equal one 1 gigawatt reliable fuel plant?
Much less, and it was available almost 100% of the time.
You mean the supply that is always there and available.
The supply YOU rely on every day of every minute to supply you electricity ?
Would buy a oven without heating elements ?
Would you buy a car without wheels ?
You are a mindless twit !!
You mean the supply that is always there and available.
The supply YOU rely on every day of every minute to supply your electricity ?
Would buy a oven without heating elements ?
Would you buy a car without wheels ?
You are a mindless twit !!
No Nick, 13% is not normal.
In a civilised country available, reliable energy is 100% normal.
Wind and solar will not and never will be able to provide 100% of our energy needs.
13% share, in case you didn’t understand it.
And no, no country has 100% reliable power plants, that’s why even in grids in the past backup power plants existed.
In my 74 years, I’ve seen a number of power outages- but never due to a power plant failing- always due to damage to the wires on the poles due to storms.
First off, I’ve never seen a “back up” power plant.
Secondly, I just love the way you are trying to pretend that being available 97% of the time is no better than being available 20% of the time.
The key point it that coal/gas/nuclear plants don’t all fail simultaneously, whereas the sun tends to go down at the same time across any meaningful geographical area, and low-wind conditions are similarly correlated.
Re “Ridiculous hype. Qld was normal, WA is not mentioned. There isn’t much of Australia left.”
Right at the start of Jo’s thread –
“Australia has built 11.5 GW of theoretical total wind power capacity on the National Energy Market (NEM) spread across 80 locations on the Eastern Seaboard, and at one point today only 4.1% of it was working. Another gigawatt of generation on the Western side is only generating at 3 – 5% capacity.”
(My bold)
It was not mentioned on this WUWT thread.
Nor was the amount of electricity generated by nuclear power plants operating in Australia.
/sarc off
Thank you Nick, for correcting the impression produced by the article. Like most here, I am very Skeptical. You don’t get much appreciation from us, but facts matter and the difference between “5% of normal” and 5% of total production” turned out to be huge.
For the rest of you, the main point remains valid–Australia would be hurting badly if wind was more than a small fraction of the total. A 40% drop in total power would have been devastating.
Like all of climate science, Stokes cannot view anything in the world except through the magic mirror of averages.
Over the last few days I have posted several times on the almost complete reliance of the NEM on Coal, Gas and Hydro.
Currently (middayish Tuesday) wind in NSW is still at zero, but being a glorious blue-sky day, solar is also providing… until the Sun goes down.
In SA wind has picked up, but gas is still about 1/4 of supply.
Grid demand is low throughout the whole NEM….. lots of rooftop solar.
eg NSW is below 7GW, while it is often over 10GW at peak times. (rooftop est 2.5GW)
But coal and gas are still near 2/3 of total NEM grid supply
As Texas can testify to, wind does not blow, it sucks.
Wind ‘energy’. Pathetic Problematic P%^s Weak. Dismantle it all. That’s a big blocking high pressure system. Just sitting over the continent.
I keep telling you lefties don’t do irony-
Australian super funds double investment in fossil fuel companies, report finds (msn.com)
More into subterfuge and misrepresentation.
Happy with my WhiteHaven coal shares I bought last year 🙂
Good dividend payment too.
As always, one should watch what people and organisations actually do, not what they say.
Superfunds invest in fossil fuel companies and then insist on a position on the board, they then white ant the company by insisting that they become Greener, the company’s share price drops and the super fund loses money. who said that greens were intelligent?
Wind is not doing much at 1320 hr EST Australia.
This AEMO’s demand chart.
I see you found it 🙂
Looks like Solar is doing about 40% of demand at that moment though being nearly 2pm local it is about to drop off to zero for the next 16-18 hours PEAK DEMAND TIME
30,249 MW demand is just 15 Nuclear Plants the size of Diablo Canyon 32 allowing for refueling outages and higher.demand peaking…AND wind or no wind, day or night Nuclear doesn’t care but gives you power emissions free
32 should have been
32-1100MW Units total
“Wind is not doing much at 1320 hr EST Australia.”
At 1.5 MW, it’s about the same as gas. But hard to compete with solar.
Except at night.
“Wind is not doing much at 1320 hr EST Australia.”
“But hard to compete with solar.”
Until after 5pm when solar drops to zero and demand gets ready to hit its peak
Solar only works during the day… The grid would still function without it.
And as we have seen over the last few days.. the grid functions very well without wind.
Now.. how would the grid function without COAL and GAS. ???
Wake the **** up Nick, and stop being a moronic stooge for wind and solar.
Easy to compete with Solar at Peak Usage time, when energy is actually needed.
After 5pm Solar produces Actual Zero!
Can I just remind everyone that the (overseas) owners of these swindle-factories still get paid even when they stop turning. And who ultimately pays…? Answer = Mr and Mrs Householder.
But that is where the big battery Snowy2.0 comes in 😂 launched grandly by Malcolm Turnbull eight or so years ago with an estimated cost of AU$3 – 4 billion now up to $12 billion with additional transmission costs bring it up to AU$25 billion.
The final cost is anyone’s guess because the drilling machine is stuck in hard rock and there has been a reported tunnel collapse.
Of course Snowy2.0 may never be completed: ‘Australia’s biggest engineering debacle’ according to energy expert Ted Woodley.
A Turnbull idea.. always going to be a debacle.. … It is what he so good at.. !
Same as Rudd before him.. and now even worse.. Albo !
To paraphrase Peter Pan, every time you say “I don’t believe in Snowy 2” a green collapses in despair 🙂
A spread sheet on the characteristics of Snowy2.0 and the California High-Speed Rail project might be a fun exercise. As “green” save-the-world projects I don’t know of any others in the same league.
I likely will have checked out* before either is completed, if they ever are.
[*estimated at 7 to 10 years]
The CAGW crowd has been given plenty of opportunities to be honest and truthful but they just can’t muster up the courage to do it.
Fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators, build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators and remove all wind and solar from the grid.
4pm Tuesday, and still no wind at all in NSW.
Once the sun goes down, soon, NSW will be running mainly on COAL and GAS.. with a little bit of hydro.
Coal and Gas …
Breaking news!!! Climatologeists ha! Discover blocking high pressure systems have zero impact on energy produced from coal, gas and nuclear! Who knew..
They must have heard the news from the former Biden supporting tech giants who all want nuclear power plants for their data centers…
The precautionary principle says both. So do the boards of green energy companies,
As long as the public is paying, if course.
The Royal Society thought that you need storage of about 25% of total annual demand.
An example in terms of installed capacity would be for a system with about 100GW peak demand and the usual spread of demand you would need about 100 Terawatt hours of storage.
Not going to happen. The only way to do it is with gas.
As I commented to your earlier reply to Eric, the Royal Society report was damning about storage but they understated the problem because they used UK electricity use in 2018 and repeated that usage 37 times thus not taking account of the fact that electrifying everything would require far more electricity than was used in 2018.
That should read 32 times not 37.
Yes, that’s right, my mistake. I should have said that for a system with about 45 GW peak demand they estimated you would need 100 TWh storage.
Its obviously impossible.
And the proposal to excavate 100s of caverns and fill them with hydrogen which will be stored for decades is also obviously impossible.
Its truly amazing that both UK political parties have committed themselves to wind and solar power generation without having any proposed solution to intermittency.
A wind drought? Must be due to …. drum roll….. CLIMATE CHANGE!
At the other side of the world, in the UK, the yearly average wind power potential is barely above 30%. That means that less than one third of the time the wind is blowing strongly enough for wind power generators to work at full capacity. In other words, you pay for ten and get only three. https://www.meteoexploration.com/en/energy/#windpowerUK
The fans used to keep the AI centers cool will recycle the moving air to keep the wind farms operational.
Gee, that huge high-pressure system is till over the east of Australia. Clear calm conditions persist. Moving very slowly….