Electricity generated by a wind turbine

[SteveW]

There are lengthy periods of high pressure and no wind over the whole of Europe, never mind just the UK, when ALL the wind turbines are useless.

[Pancho]

Yes, we were given 20% gas cover to play with.

[Andy Burns]

The latest year for which I can see both capacity and generation numbers for wind is 2020

capacity 24 GW potential generation (24 h * 365 * 24 GW) = 210 TWh actual generation 75 TWh

actual / potential = 35%

[alan_m]

The existing gridwatch figures disprove the "it must be blowing somewhere" statements made by the green lobby? 11,000 UK wind turbines and bugger all generated for weeks on end.

Often when there is no wind in the UK there is no wind over most of Europe

[Vir Campestris]

The wind problem isn't the average, it's the worst case.

Over at

I can see several days when the total output of all the wind farms in the UK is under 1Gw. The minimum recorded is 0.035GW over a whole day,

0.2% of the maximum.

AKA **** all.

So we have to have backup of something else for the days when the wind doesn't blow, and Putin has cut the gas off.

Andy

[Andy Burns]

Doing an "average by eye" over the 12 month graph it looks like about 8 GW, which isn't a million miles from the 35% of 24 GW capacity I mentioned earlier?

[alan_m]

Look at the past 6 week. It's no good having large peaks in generation to give an 35% average if there are times in between when there is nothing unless you can store the excess for weeks, or months.

It's very much like those who claim to be effectively off grid with solar because over a period of a year their solar is producing the average energy that domestic household uses. Unfortunately it produces nothing on a cold winter's evening.

[GB]

And, we can't just magic up some nuclear. Which is why I expect some cuts.

[Andrew]

You need a lot of hands on deck doing (very) dangerous work climbing up rigging, furling and unfurling really heavy sails, compared to the number of people needed to shovel coal into a boiler (or two, or three, or ...)

[zall]

But nukes leave that approach for dead cost and maintenance wise.

[Tim Streater]

And at the times when there is no wind for several days (happens a couple of time every winter), this "backup" would have to be substantial enough to meet our entire electricity demand, for a several-day period.

So you've now built two power stations to get the output of one. Why bother?

[zall]

Putin doesn't supply gas to the UK.

[zall]

Thats not accurate. The recently shut down nukes can be restarted.

That's what some predicted last time. Didn't happen.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Saling ships lost out due to unreliability, low average speeds and amount of crew needed to man them. Just like f****ng windmills

[The Natural Philosopher]

They are there already

Average wind output is 27% of nameplate capacity

>

[The Natural Philosopher]

Renewable UK claims that. The reality as measured on gridwatch, when all the outages are taken into consideration, is 27% for off shore and 21% for inshore.

Nearly all the puff about renewables is actually the output of models. These are even used in preference to measured output to make reports for the government. It is wholesale fraud.

No, it cant. Again looking at Gridwatch when the wind isn't blowing in the North Sea it usually isn't blowing anywhere in NW Europe. Do you have any idea how much a grid to transfer Gigawatts of windpower from Scotland to Spain, would cost? By the time you have built your mostly redundant supergrids, hydrogen storage battery stabilisation and enough wind turbines the cost is about 5 times a nuclear power station.

No the problem is the ruinous cost of £9 a uniit that an 'all renewable' grid would cost.

Plus there being no North Sea left to plant any more windmills

Jesus H. It isn't impossible for you to own your own nuclear power station.

If you have a couple of billion spare. Do you have that?

No? Then its impossible, isn't it?

[The Natural Philosopher]

select avg(wind) from day where timestamp > '2021-09-01';

+------------------+ | avg(wind) | +------------------+ | 6476.31797964286 | +------------------+ 1 row in set (0.30 sec)

6.5GW

26% , which is what I said.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Where did you get 75TWh from?

select avg(wind)*(24*365) from day where timestamp like '2021%';

+--------------------+ | avg(wind)*(24*365) | +--------------------+ | 48951009.02209283 | +--------------------+ 1 row in set, 1 warning (0.24 sec)

49TWh appx.

More renewable lies

[Andy Burns]

Does any type of wind generation not make it into Elexon data?

ONS data doesn't seem to be available that's newer than 2020, but they said

"in 2020, the UK generated 75,610 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity from both offshore and onshore wind."

which was 35% of the 365x24 worth of 24 GW installed wind capacity that I could find for 2020, maybe the capacity figure I found is wrong, but I'd generally trust ONS data ...

[Andy Burns]

ONS, URL is a bit misleading ...