After the recent puff about a record amount of wind power being produced in the UK, it’s time to return to reality. The image above shows the contribution wind is currently making to the energy generated to meet demand across the country.
After the vast sums poured into wind via subsidy, rising electricity bills and excessive feed-in tariffs, the return on a cool day with greater power needs is minuscule. We could increase installed wind capacity by a factor of 10 at huge cost and still barely register wind’s contribution to the energy supply on days like this – of which there are many just when demand increases because of the colder and darker days and nights.
Coal is currently stepping up to keep business and residential lights and heating going. But what will happen when coal is phased out? Get the candles and Calor gas ready as rota disconnections take centre stage.
Autonomous Mind 
“Carbon intensity” in grammes of CO2 per Killowat hour.
Yes, that’ll give a big number.
Wonder if these twats ever look at how much CO2 they breathe, even when they are asleep?
0.04% breathing in, 5% breathing out. Work it out!
And that’s before you consider the contribution from termites and other bugs.
Or the Chinese……
I have checked in with this site each day for the last month or two and coal has been at about 50% for most of the time with wind between 1 or 2% with only the very occasional foray up to 5%. That the vested interests and our political class think this is a solution to our power needs is nothing short of treason.
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm
Wind is not a reliable source of energy, though, as they are discovering here in Germany, it can produce a lot of it – the problem is getting it to the user and the second, bigger problem, is actually getting it anywhere when it is needed.
The Germans have realised that to meet the first problem you actually need a completely different type of ‘intelligent’ distribution grid, the existing one simply can’t do it. Then you hit the second problem, quite a lot of the power these infernal eyesores do produce is produced at low demand times – but still can’t be used because of the first problem. It will cost many, many billions of €uros to create the ‘new’ grid and there simply isn’t the money for it.
In the meantime we face a 10% hike in energy prices which goes to pay for more wind turbines, the bulk of the new ones being installed to satisfy the Greens and their demands to phase out everything else …
It’s a wonderful world, and I wonder how many contributers to all the “charities” campaigning for these things realise that every last one of them – Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF and so on are all now multi-billion pound/dollar international corporate operations. They NEED to keep us all running scared of dying polar bears, grape production in Greenland, droughts in Africa and Hurricanes in Florida to keep the tills ringing and money flowing in.
Keep it up, Mr Mind. Maybe, just maybe, that some day the idiots who form our government and set our energy policies may listen – but don’t hold your breath. But why does everyone keep talking about the lights going out? Heck, even the stupidest among us can light a candle. But what about the financial systems crashing all at once (even indidual bank system failures cause chaos and hardship). And what about the hundreds of thousands of tons of perishable foodstuffs that the supermarketys will (by law) be obliged to chuck away. There’s no end to it. And ITS GOING TO HAPPEN.