I was chatting to a correspondent recently, who dropped into the conversation that Ed Miliband’s Clean Power 2030 agenda would be bringing hundreds of gigawatts of expensive, unreliable and mostly redundant generating capacity online. I was sure he was wrong. The peak demand on the grid, on dark, cold winter nights, is usually around 60 gigawatts. “Do you mean megawatts?” I asked.
According to the DESNZ’s 'Clean Power 2030 Action Plan', there are currently approximately 15 GW of offshore wind capacity, which will nearly triple. There are 14 GW of onshore wind capacity, which will double. And there are 17 GW of solar, which will also triple. That’s a lot of new capacity: nearly 80GW, bringing the UK’s solar and wind fleet up from 46 GW up to a whopping 125 GW, very little of which will work on cold winter nights, despite costing us billions of pounds each and every year. But that’s still far from “hundreds”.
My friend pointed me to Ofgem’s website, where it is claimed that a new approach to managing the queue of renewable generators waiting for connections to the grid before construction “would slim down the 722 GW of projects in the queue”.
722 gigawatts!
In the queue!
Doc Brown would be having an aneurysm.
I assumed that it was a typo. But the National Energy System Operator, under Miliband’s control, says similarly that “the current connections queue stands at over 738 GW, far exceeding the 200-225 GW of clean generation capacity
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Is there really no one in this country who can stop such lunacy. What on earth is going on?
We’ve had solar PV on our roof for five months now, and I already seem to know much more about it than Milliband does – though that’s not much of a boast.
Our system can produce 3500 watts when the sun shines, which isn’t bad. But what is it producing at the moment (3.20 pm on a day of thick cloud) ? It’s producing 100 watts.
So in a nutshell, murky afternoon output is about 3% of peak output. And at night it is of course 0%
So how Milliband can pretend solar PV is a serious method of supplying the country’s electricity needs I really cannot fathom.
What is the explanation then: Ignorance? Stupidity? Corruption?
In my corner of Surrey we now have two subsidy farms using panels under proposal. One makes a link missing from the article and that is one is proposed with batteries as well. I have no details on the other proposal as that has only just appeared. So it could be that a lot of the solar is linked to batteries.
Milibrain has apparently admitted in the last 24 hours that windmills are not efficient – no 💩 Sherlock. That’s why they were abandoned long before the start of the industrial revolution. Presumably, the BoJo plan to be the Saudi Arabia of wind power actually requires surplus electricity to be generated so it can be exported. Fine intentions, but with this useless, intermittent power source being so expensive in this country, why would any countries buy power from us at the price? We can already see how much more we are importing than exporting and I don’t see that equation changing anytime soon. We are governed by morons
If the people promoting the super-duper battery can’t understand the difference between 379GW and 379GWh then they shouldn’t be let anywhere near any policy makers.
Ben points out that 379GWh of stored energy is enough for about 6 hours of peak 60 GW demand. However, if it can only* supply power at a rate of (say) 6GW it will last for around 60 hours. Great: 60 hours of not meeting 90% of grid requirements.
The rate at which it can supply power (GW) combined with the amount of energy it can store (GWh) both affect how useful the battery can be. A 379GWh battery feeding a domestic mains socket would last over 120 million hours. Take it in turns to plug your kettle in to that socket, won’t you?
*6GW is a lot. 25 million Amps at mains voltage, nearly 2 million domestic power sockets running flat out. 6 million electric bar heaters.
And even if it could output it, can the grid actually transport that power to where it’s needed?
Isn’t that where the local generation and storage, local grid idea comes into play? With differential pricing so that those in densely populated areas (with more demand and less space for all the wind farms, solar farms and batteries) will pay more for their power. That would be a handy way of “levelling down” in the south.
Well, people wondered how they would make us own nothing and be slaves, this seems to be the mechanism, they will compulsory purchase all the land to do this insanity, large solar installations are already doing this without opposition on vast swathes of farmland, despite the fact the “law” was set up to be used on non agricultural land except in extremis.
Someone is making very large amounts of money on the back of others. Wrapped up in ‘innovation’, green jobs & “renewables”. Watch & weep.
Perhaps even more alarming is the fact that we are NOT replacing power stations that are coming to the end of their natural working lives. Either some old power stations will somehow have to keep going much longer than planned, or we will have to buy fleets of diesel generators…or the light will go out.
Or use interconnectors with France et al. Which won’t be possible if the UK’s grid has collapsed, because (as far as I know) the UK grid must be running normally to manage the conversion back to AC from the DC cables.
Kommissar Miliband’s five-year plan to take us back to the Dark Age.
I do not understand why people in the Uk are so helpless?
Apart from which there is not enough lithium and other rare materials in the world to manufacture this quantity of batteries, solar panels and wind turbines.
And this green infrastructure will be contracted with committed spend to China for the various components and huge costs of cancellation. Simple wealth transfer