by Will Jones
Solar power is threatening to overwhelm the UK electricity grid this summer as gluts of supply create a risk of blackouts and leave households and businesses facing being asked to consume excess power. The Telegraph has the story.
Energy chiefs are drawing up plans to stop the electricity grid being overwhelmed by solar power this summer.
The National Energy System Operator (Neso) said it would be forced to use “more tools, more often” to keep power networks stable when sunny weather caused surges in energy generation.
This would include paying households and factories to consume excess power for the first time, as well as potentially issuing unprecedented orders to switch off large power stations.
Neso issued the warning as Rachel Reeves travelled to Washington, where she is expected to urge a gathering of world leaders to “follow her plan” to combat the energy crisis caused by the conflict in the Middle East.
At the International Monetary Fund summit, the Chancellor will call for “collective action” while urging countries to embrace Net Zero to boost energy security.
She will also pledge to “do all in her power to keep costs down for the British public”, warning against “knee-jerk decisions that are unaffordable and deepen economic pain”. …
In its summer outlook, published on Tuesday, Neso said war in Iran would push prices higher because of Britain’s dependence on gas, but that it had no concerns about the security of electricity supplies this summer.
However, it warned that gluts of solar power and “low demand” periods were making the grid more difficult to manage as Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, rolled out swathes of new wind and solar farms to hit Net Zero.
Grid instability occurs when energy demand is low but renewables still generate large amounts of power. If not counterbalanced, this can trigger blackouts.
But many onshore solar and wind farms are not directly connected to the main transmission system and cannot be managed by Neso, which is tasked with keeping electricity networks stable.
It means it must balance the system in other ways, such as paying larger power plants to turn off or paying consumers to ramp up demand.
The amount of solar on the grid has more than doubled to 22 gigawatts in the past decade, as households and businesses have sought to cut their power bills by installing rooftop panels.
Worth reading in full.
Gee now there’s a mixed message. Solar (Zero emission energy) creates a problem with a glut of rooftop solar installations. So the solution is to embrace Net Zero??? Isn’t Net Zero defined as a glut of renewable energy sources?
Nett Zero is like kayak made from icecubes, has nothing to do with what it’s named after. But watch it get renamed in time as the absurdity becomes clearer
The kayak made from icecubes made me laugh. But isn’t it more like a camel made of icecubes? Or the proverbial chocolate teapot? The more you strive to make one half of it, the more you destroy the other half? I had fun today asking AI what happens to a solar farm when it gets disconnected. I look forward to being asked to turn on electric househeaters at noon on sunny days, ‘so that the electricity is not wasted, and consumers get better value for their hard-earned money’.
Gluts of Solar at Low Demand Periods creating a problem? Solution … install solar that only works at High Demand Periods. Oh … Wait…
Solar DOESN’T WORK at High Demand Periods does it?
🤣😂😁
story tip
https://edmhdotme.wpcomstaging.com/a-few-graphs-say-it-all-for-renewables/
This is an excellent piece. Its quite long and detailed, but persist with it. It makes the point beyond any doubt with just about all the quantitative backup you could need. The basic argument, backed up by charts and numbers with irreproachable sources, is that if you look at the actual performance of wind and solar over the years since the conversion effort started you can see that the project isn’t feasible.
It isn’t that its not cost effective. Its far worse than that, its actually impossible to make it work at all. This is gross enough to be obvious to many of us from back of envelope calculations, But the site pointed to spells it out in detail,
Take the time and work through it. What you will see beyond any rational doubt is proof that (for instance) the UK Net Zero project is taking the country to power rationing and blackouts.
We are talking the failure of an entire political class – Labour, Conservative, Liberals, SNP, Plaid, Greens, over almost 20 years, and a House of Commons that has passed the Climate Change Act, with its commitment to Net Zero, and even strengthened it, with only a handful of votes against the 2008 Act, and its 2019 strengthening passed without even taking a vote.
And a Prime Minister who, confronted with objections, remarks helplessly that all this is nothing to do with him, its down to his Secretary of State for Energy – who, he forgets to mention, he appointed, and who serves at his pleasure.
As this story comes to its inevitable climax, expect a political earthquake. Both are coming, the inevitable blackouts and rationing, and their inevitable political consequences.
Thanks michel and emhmailmaccom.
Perhaps a copy of this report should be sent to Mad Ed Miliband.
Trump was very unkind to Miliband’s energy policy yesterday. Miliband should respond to Trump’s criticism.
Trump criticized the UK for not using their own oil and natural gas resources and he said “no more windmills” in all CAPS.
Miliband needs to make the UK Great Again, but he won’t do it while focusing on windmills and solar. Unfortunately, Miliband is a fanatic who rejects anything that interferes with his worldview. Too bad for the UK.
Maybe Trump will force the issue. Make Miliband justify his unjustifiable position.
Not sure if Windmills are the issue…like Don Quixote we may be tilting at windmills while the real enemy is the people/groups promoting the ideology demanding them.
The basic argument is flawed. They say
And that is straight out false. The answer, and its obvious, is that there needs to be energy storage on the grid and that the grid needs to transmit energy to where its needed. But does the article address that need?
Here is the only mention of storage in one dot point
So the article isn’t excellent, its a fear mongering, click bait piece designed to attract the people who already hate the fact we need transition away from fossil fuels before we’re forced to do so by their scarcity.
Tim:
You miss the point of the article and graphs. It reviews the current EU/UK energy transition policy as promoted by the climate alarmists. The policies do not include enough transmission nor enough storage (of any type) to adequately & safely provide a functioning electric grid. That is not the article’s fault. Its the system the alarmists have concocted.
The article is well worth a read, and the graphs are consistent with the known intermittancy and low productivity of wind & solar. Reality can be painful, and expensive if we continue to waste trillions on unreliable energy sources.
If the article was a genuine analysis of the renewable transition, then it would have at least mentioned storage as being a required policy and then proper discussion as to why the author thought it wasn’t achievable given current costs, projected costs and timelines.
There is none of that. Even the title claims the article is everything needed to be known and its just not.
Instead the article is exactly what many people on this forum want to hear.
That photo — have the British gone insane?
PV systems in regions of moderate insolation like Switzerland and countries north of the Swiss Alps act as net energy sink.
“PV systems in regions of moderate insolation like Switzerland and countries north of the Swiss Alps, provide little more than material-intensive, labour-intensive and capital-intensive energy, resulting in high consumption of resources.”
Where are they going to put them all in 10 – 15 years?
AI: Australia faces a massive influx of end-of-life solar panels, with over 60,000 tons reaching end-of-life last year and a growing risk of hazardous heavy metals, including lead and cadmium, leaching into the environment if sent to landfill.
Currently recycling is not economic, governments will end up subsidizing installation operation and safe disposal of the useless things.
Correction: subsidizing installation operation and disposal of the
uselessworse than useless things.With apologies to Pete Seeger
.
Where have all the fields gone?
Long time passing.
Where have all the fields gone?
Long time ago.
Where have all the fields gone?
Solar Panels covered them every one.
Oh, When will you ever learn?
Oh, When will you ever learn?
I wonder how many birds have killed themselves trying to land in that silicon lake.
Being paid to use electricity or even getting it for free at certain times makes no economic sense in and anyway.
In Britain on warm sunny summer days everybody is out enjoy the 3 days of warmth not at home washing, ironing and using an oven. The best that can be hoped for is a mass lawn mowing, until the nirvana of net zero when every home has an electric heating and cooling system.
“switch off large power stations”
Dare I say it?
Switch off large solar power stations!
If only the pesky deplorables didn’t want electricity at the right voltage and frequency at all the wrong times then the brains trust would be home and hosed.
The most disturbing feature of this latest revealing concern about excess solar, is the Chancellor still finding some obscure logic to suggest it requires everyone to support this waste of public money supporting overbuilding of intermittent electricity generation.
Ed Miliband has just walked all over objectors in East Anglia Suffolk/Lincolnshire by authorising the largest build yet of solar panel installations. The company behind the project happens to be one of the Labour Party’s biggest donors, make of that what you will.
The driver of this madness is curtailment payments. The installers of these wind parks know they are harvesting state compensation payments for when the grid is oversupplied and they are told to shut off supply.
As the number of wind and solar parks grow in number so does the curtailment payments i.e. money for doing nothing. With solar it is particularly insidious. The only time it can produce maximum output is when demand is at its lowest thus curtailment payments become the commercial incentive to cover ever more farmland in pointless solar panels.
Only a completely mad literally insane administration could countenance doing this.
At the same time, Labour government are banning extraction of our own oil and gas, insisting we must import such from Norway who are extracting it from the very same North Sea we are banning our domestic firms from accessing?
If anyone can explain Reeves and Miliband’s logic please enlighten us?
If anyone can explain Reeves and Miliband’s logic please enlighten us?
This is a very serious question. The UK Net Zero project is clearly an exercise in mass delusion among the political class of a country. and the question future historians will ask is how it ever got traction, and how it persisted when it became clearer and clearer that it was not going to either work, produce cost effective power, or have any effect on the climate.
I think you have to compare it to other exercises in mass delusion among governing classes. Wars have been common cases. In Europe, invading Russia has been historically a disaster of comparable scale. In Europe there was a shortage of wars, so a mania about something else was inevitable.
Dr Johnson on Charles XII of Sweden, who killed off a huge proportion of his male population in pointless wars, including the invasion of Russia:
He left a name at which the world grew pale
To point a moral, or adorn a tale
That is the fate of the instigators and leaders of these disasters. But their abettors and enablers in the political classes probably just retire into the shadows, or worse still, pose as rescuers and remain in office picking up the pieces and saying ‘not me, I tried to stop him’. As in post war Germany.
There are books that may shed some light. Great Popular Delusions for a start. Also The Psychology of Military Incompetence. Nick Sutherland wrote an interesting book called Irrationality. Its probably a long list, though shorter than the list of episodes!
Ignorance, Arrogance, and Dogma.
Covid was mass delusion
Covid was very real, it took my brother within 2 months of exposure. The way it was handled was Mass Delusion.
It looks like Putin is the modern-day Charles XII.
Putin is also killing off a large portion of the Russian male population with his optional war on Ukraine. About 10,000 to 15,000 Russian troops are killed per month in this war, according to Trump.
I bet there are about 10,000 or 15,000 Russian families who learn a new hate for Putin every month.
You left out the 20K or so wounded, many disabled. Those Russian families certainly deserve to be included.
Asked this morning when mad Ed is going to green light Jackdaw and Rosebank, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury answered: That’s a matter for the secretary of state for energy.
I read that as never.
Do you think that Mad Ed might be persuaded to stand a little too close to a passing wind-turbine blade?
If only…
Have AI put him on a horse with a jousting lance.
While technically true that it is the SoS who must sign the licence, it is the case, as Michel has commented above, that the SoS is chosen by the PM and there is nothing to stop the PM from replacing the SoS with someone who would sign it. The buck stops with Starmer, who is, amongst many things, too feeble and cowardly to overrule Mad Ed. He is putting his desperation to cling to the office of PM before the interests of the country, just as he is doing so by keeping the atrocious, totally incompetent Reeves as Chancellor.
That solar “farm” in the image at the top- I used to think nothing could be uglier than urban sprawl. I changed my mind. There is such an ugly solar “farm” next to my neighborhood about that size.
Windmills are even uglier than solar farms. You can see them from much farther away, spoiling the landscape and the view. And there is a lot more carnage underneath a windmill.
Absolutely. I attended the Isle of Man TT (annual motorbike race) last year and was astonished at the complete uglification of the Irish Sea by the offshore windmill setup near the coast of England, easily seen from Ramsey. I was saddened that one of the more beautiful parts of the world could be desecrated in this way in the name of an irrational ideology.
Think Istanbul and Hagia Sophia, now the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque. Conquerors always desecrate and destroy the landmarks of the Conquerored. Windfarms are the conquoring landmarks of Green ideology.
But, but, but, just think of the UHI effect that causes! /s
There’s a 27 acre solar facility near me, can’t be seen from the neighbouring area.
Why is it that there is so much fuss about nuclear waste and no discussion about solar and wind generator waste?
The fuss over nuclear is on the Left side of the political spectrum.
The Left supports solar and wind so they don’t make a fuss over them.
It’s purely partisan politics. Not based on science.
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They just make this stupid crap up as they go.
It would be funny if it was not quickly approaching the precipice.
From the article: “It means it must balance the system in other ways, such as paying larger power plants to turn off or paying consumers to ramp up demand.”
This is how bizarre the UK’s energy policy is: They shut down reliable, conventional power plants just to accommodate windmills and solar.
The solution is to scrap the windmills and solar and run the conventional power plants full time.
The obsession with reducing CO2 has driven UK politicians insane. They are not rational. They ignore reality. At the peril of the UK.
Trump needs to get involved and straighten this situation out before it’s too late.
Until, or unless, DJT has USA annex UK, there is little he can do.
You left out the fact that not only did they shut down the reliable coal plants but they also made a great public show of blowing them up so they could never be restarted
And these Alarmist geniuses converted a perfectly good coal-fired power plant that was literally sitting on top of a coal mine (DRAX) into a plant that burns wood pellets imported from the United States!
One has to be extremely ignorant to think this was a good idea.
It’s on par with Germany’s Merkel shutting down perfectly good nuclear reactors.
Common-sense has taken leave of these people.
Here in midwest USA, wind has been abundant this spring. I don’t have numbers or charts, just my observation that sustained wind and gusts much higher than normal. Are we generating record wind-supplied electricity in midwest US? Nothing in the news, one can only wonder.
If it was generating record energy- you’d be sure they’d be bragging about it.
If I’m not mistaken, there a max wind speed the turbines can handle. If they shut them down in high winds to prevent damage.
Wow, even the ever Kool-aid drinking Guardian covered this.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/14/uk-households-power-renewables-soar
Not quite with the same perspective.
Perhaps the world is coming to an end.
Hard to believe they even covered the fantasy of Green Jobs with some actual perspective rather than straight up spin:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/14/windfarm-reality-green-jobs-boom-englands-east-coast-unemployment
How many of those green jobs are sustainable.
Take a lesson from history. The New Deal during the depression. Loads of employment for lots of stuff. When the construction was done, loads of unemployment.
The New Deal, as reported, was terminated due to excessive Federal debt.
What got the world out of that global depression was WWII.
‘Take a lesson from history.’
Okay. Economic ‘downturns’, ‘recessions’, ‘panics’, etc. occur when bad capital investments, initiated during periods of high monetary inflation, have to be liquidated because they don’t conform with consumer preferences and have proven to be a misallocation of scarce resources.
While such occurrences are painful, they were historically short-lived, at least until the modern era, when governments routinely began hampering the necessary re-allocation of resources back to their most productive uses. The result of this is that relatively short-term corrections became long-term ‘depressions’, with the above-mentioned ‘New Deal’, with its massive incursions into the market economy, clearly resulting in the ‘Great Depression’.
‘The New Deal, as reported, was terminated due to excessive Federal debt.’
The New Deal was an idiotic government attempt to restore prosperity by raising prices, hence burning crops, pouring milk down sewers, killing herds, implementing wage floors, labor unionization, etc. It did not go away because of debt, but because it was obviously not working, and at some point even the most committed New Dealers realized that curtailing production, particularly once WWII started, was a singularly bad idea.
‘What got the world out of that global depression was WWII.’
How do you get out of a depression by laying waste to the productive capacity of entire nations? Or in the US, taking 10 million of its most productive people out of the workforce for years and having the rest of the workforce produce stuff that’s either going to be blown up or mothballed?
The idea that unproductive government spending of any sort can create prosperity is pure Keynesian claptrap, starting with that man’s idea that printing money, putting it in bottles, burying the bottles in mine shafts and then paying people to dig the bottles up, can pull an economy out of recession.
Not wishing to debate with you on this.
Your sources differ from mine, so I suspect there is validity in yours as much as I see validity in mine.
It is not a single “ontrol knob.”
Peace.
“many onshore solar and wind farms are not directly connected to the main transmission system and cannot be managed by Neso”
I call BS on this. Technically ALL power sources have a way to be isolated from the grid, ALL of them, even if this cannot be done automatically from a central location. It only takes a phone call to the operator(s). Now NESO may not be allowed by regulation/law to do this, but that can be remedied.
Those unintended consequences strike again.
“She will also pledge to “do all in her power to keep costs down for the British public”, warning against “knee-jerk decisions that are unaffordable and deepen economic pain”. …”
So, one might conclude from this statement that she is against the Net Zero knee-jerk decisions.
Solar power is effective for a maximum of about 40% of the time on long summer days, and much less during short winter days. That fact alone will always make it a niche provider, not a base provider.
Typical crass ignorance from stem illiterate politicians. Better to physically shutter solar panels and maintain what ever little mechanical spinning reserve they have left to stabilize frequency, It will be Spain all over again.
You just can’t get dumber than government.
As non-dispatchable energy, the PV and wind suffer from the duck curve syndrome. It is effectively a binary situation, either there is too little or too much, and it is always intermittent,
Trust the current Establishment to screw up like this!!! It’s not as if this situation couldn’t have been predicted at the time of System Design (& by that, I mean to include the inter-company politics with Neso etc.). If those responsible for setting up all this could have just switched their brains on for 5 minutes, they would have foreseen this a mile away. My daughter, who works for one of the largest U.K. energy companies, tells me that they can switch wind turbines on & off at will, & that that’s working very well; how did they mess up that they can’t do the same for solar installations? It’s not as if solar panels HAVE to be loaded to survive – they don’t. This is pure bungling..
Can an electrical engineer or two please describe what happens to various forms of electricity generation when there is a sudden change from supply to a load, to supply to an open circuit?
A battery should not experience problems because it is designed to be inert until a demand is placed on it to start reacting.
But what about (say) a motor powered generator when the motor is still burning fuel and producing electrical energy? Where does that energy go when the leads are disconnected from what they were driving? Geoff S
sherro01:
What great question! And since I’m not an EE, I asked Google’s Gemini:
“What happens in a 12″ piece of copper wire [not in a circuit] when placed in a changing magnetic field?” This led to series of followup questions & answers; too long to post here. Hint: energy is conserved.
But it was a delightful rabbit hole to go down. Pick your fav AI and have at it !
PS – For even minimally controversial topics, I ask 2 or 3 AIs the same question, AND (this is the important part) ask each AI to “Do a principled critique of your prior answer. Include working links to your sources, and explain why your first answer was misleading.” You will likely be surprised and appalled at the results – as I continue to be. (I use free versions of Gemini, Grok & Copilot)
PPS – I laughed when the Taumoebe “ate” the Astrophage in the very entertaining movie Project Hail Mary. Where did all that energy go?
I dont think that’s the question Geoff was asking.
Regarding
The short answer is that if the energy supplied by the fuel cant be very quickly reduced, the prime mover will accelerate and destroy itself and/or the generator. The large rotating mass slows down the acceleration and gives it time. Steam turbines can vent their steam.
Batteries, as you have pointed out, are immune. So are solar panels.
Wind generators can feather and brake.
Sudden load and/or supply changes are what take out grids with cascading failures.
The should just make a gigantic resistor that is engaged to reheat the atmosphere whenever the load is not enough!