Last year Britain wasted enough wind power for a million homes, but new turbines built over the next decade would see that figure grow fivefold by 2030, according to think tank Carbon Tracker.
The cost to pay wind farms to switch off at these times and buy gas to fill in the shortfall would rise to £3.5 billion a year, according to Carbon Tracker’s analysis. That would add an average of £200 to annual household energy bills.
Bottlenecks in the planning process
The problem has been blamed on bottlenecks in the planning process which can take up to seven years for major new electricity cable projects.
Laissez faire RULZ
It’s nothing whatever to do with planning. It’s the fundamental unworkability of windmills.
Having to pretend that something totally unpredictable can deliver reliable, 24/7/365 power.
Utter fantasy, but the sheer, mindless pig headedness which of these fanatics in driving the grid to destruction.
Think tank! Fucking wankfest more like.
The cost to pay wind farms to switch off at these times and buy gas to fill in the shortfall
What gas? Where is it going to come from in future? (Not Britain)
How about shooting the people who decided we must ‘rely’ on useless, vastly expensive bird-choppers for our electricity needs?
8% of demand being currently supplied by wind….
We could always stick a pipeline in the roof of Parliament, Steve….
Doesn’t make sense.
Wind is variable. When it blows hard, more power generated than is needed, so we have a crazy scheme to pay for not using it. Just abolish that scheme. Do apple orchards get paid for unsold apples? That’s one subsidy/tax abolished.
When it’s calm, you need a gas power station to fill in the gaps. Unfortunately, that means you have to pay for it all the time, even when not using it. Tough, that’s the feature of wind.
Planning and grid connections have got nothing to do with this. It’s ‘cos the wind is variable!
Yes there are delays in adding in new wind connections, because the grid has to both build and pay for all the new lines, but also because they foolishly try and keep the grid stable and not do a South Africa.
It’s these delays that are saving us. Any more variable sources and the grid will be unsaveable.
See Texas, California.
If you want to avoid all the green subsidies, abolish the state support of the green religion. Make that religion free enterprise, the ecoloons can pay for their own beliefs.
‘Do apple orchards get paid for unsold apples?’
I can only agree. Paying these people for power they can’t sell to customers is stupid. The windmills in fact should be paying for the gas powered generators that are needed because they can’t do their jobs.
TtC, Dale
ponceVince stated categorically on the JHB show yesterday morning that wind* is “not subsidised”.Lying piece of shit.
* JHB may have said wind and solar but I didn’t record the segment…..
Create a system which pays windfarm owners to produce more leccie than the grid can take and then pay them to turn off when they produce more leccie than the grid can take …
Incentives matter.
@ MC
It was at 9 o’clock – currently it’s just under 6%
BUT it supplies even less (in absolute amount) in January when we most need power.
Gas is not used to plug the shortfall when wind has been told to switch off, it is used at times (75% of the time in fact) when wind turbines cannot supply through lack of favourable wind conditions.
It also is a question of balance. Unlimited wind power cannot just be fed into a grid sector because the wind is blowing there, as this will unbalance the grid: it isn’t a battery. Balance is achieved by using dispatchable power stations in different locations so some can reduce grid input in some places, others increase grid input in other places so power input is evenly distributed around the grid.
That cannot be done with wind and solar.
The problem with Net Zero is the nitwits promoting it do not understand that Physics controls all.
Make the wind/solar operators responsible for providing power when their technology is off line, apart from being the only way to see the true cost it will focus their minds on getting the technologies right instead of relying on the grid to do it.
As for the timescales, I suspect a lot of that is planning routes and getting wayleaves signed, no doubt Jim will confirm approving wayleaves it’s the top of his priorities. On top of that there’ll be the usual objections about some newts or people having their views spoilt by new pylons.
JuliaM – either that, or try to power what remains of our country harnessing the rotational energy of Winston Churchill’s grave.
@ John B
I suspect that the original advocates of “Net Zero” are not nitwits, albeit many of their followers are.
On the subject of planners, from the beeb:
“ Families have said they face splitting their children between different schools or moving home after a council miscalculated the number of places needed for pupils.
Dargavel Primary in Bishopton, Renfrewshire, opened last year with a capacity of 548.
Renfrewshire Council then admitted as many as 1,500 primary school places might be needed after a planning error.
The council has apologised but parents say they have been left “devastated”.
People living in the newbuild village of Dargavel say they warned Renfrewshire Council for years that the delayed primary school was going to be too small.”
Imagine them planning our food supply.
Today’s Torygraph:
The National Grid is in talks to keep Drax’s coal power stations running this winter as bosses warn they cannot rule out blackouts for a second winter running….
The winter of 22-23 was the most miraculous slice of good luck we’ve had in decades. Despite the unreasonably mild weather, we came within a pubic hair of widespread blackouts and the potential for serious civil unrest.
The British government naturally learned nothing from this, and did nothing to prevent it happening again this winter.
Buy socks and coal, lads.
Program the smart meter of every ecofascist to deliver electricity only when wind/solar is generating more than 60% of total demand.
“When it blows hard, more power generated than is needed”: aye, and when it blows very hard no power is generated lest the turbines shoogle themselves to death.
I really like that one decnine.
@john77 – v good point. The people who come up with these policies know exactly what they’re doing. If asked: “What about the dead pensioners each winter and the end of 20th century freedom and comforts”, they’d say: “A small price to pay in order to appease Gaia. And the oppression gets me hard.” And of course many of them are making plenty of cash out of it all.
The politicos who force these lunacies on us, however, do not know what the fuck they are talking about. If you sat Boris down, for example, and grilled him on his “green beliefs” he’d come unstuck very quickly indeed.
Indeed. Make those in “renewable tariffs” have a smart meter that cuts them off if there isn’t enough renewable elec being generated for their collective use. That’ll focus the minds. Even better if it includes businesses like mine. “Your work has to cease as your servers are going down in 10..9..8”
Buy socks and coal, lads.
?????
Weapons. You’ll need them.
You can take the socks off of the bodies. Breathing or not.
BiS – you can put coal in a sock and use it as a makeshift cudgel / Christmas punishment for bad children
People wanting government to run everything shocked to discover government fucks up everything it runs.
Never heard that one before.
The energy supply contracts would seem to have been negotiated by morons, or alternatively bright people who have shares in the wind power companies.
Firstly they should not be paid for producing more power than that required to meet demand and secondly they should be charged for failing to deliver their allocated share of demand when the wind doesn’t blow.
@decnine
when wind/solar is generating more than 60% of total demand
We probably should be lenient and make that 55%. Better to let them have a taste of electricity once in a blue moon rather than denying it to them always.
@MC – “many of them are making plenty of cash out of it all.”
Those are not the ones you should worry about. The dangerous ones are those who are following their principles, as they will persist in the face of all evidence that their policies are not working. Not only do they not care about the cost to you, they don’t care about the cost to themselves.
“Those are not the ones you should worry about. The dangerous ones are those who are following their principles, as they will persist in the face of all evidence that their policies are not working. Not only do they not care about the cost to you, they don’t care about the cost to themselves.”
Agreed and that famous CS Lewis quote is quite apt.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” -“The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” in God in the Dock
@ Mark
Windmills *do* work and have done so for centuries. Most mediaeval bread came from flour milled by windmills. The Dutch maintain their polders by pumping out water when the wind blows.
The failure is not intrinsic to windmills but to ecoloons who insist that we should use an intermittent source of power to meet continuous demand.
How about we let the eco – loons demonstrate their commitment to the cause.
We have windmills. When the wind blows and produces enough power great.
When there’s no wind, the ecoloons have to sit on bicycles and pedal to make up the shortfall.
When there’s too much power from wind, they have to sit on the bicycles and pedal again, but we run them 180° out of phase (assuming single phase output from the big bird choppers).
That will stabilise the grid and show us how committed they are to the cause.