England just not windy enough for wind farms, admits renewables boss

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The head of the wind industry?s trade body in the UK has admitted England isn?t windy enough for any more wind farms.

?We are almost certainly not talking about the possibility of new plants in England. The project economics wouldn?t work; the wind speeds don?t allow for it,? Hugh McNeal, head of Renewable UK told the Telegraph.

McNeal joined the lobby group from the civil service, where he was ?Director of Change? (a real job title) at the Department of Energy and Climate Change during its most wind-friendly phase.

Subsidies for new onshore wind projects were canned on 1 April this year.

But if the UK isn?t windy enough for wind then surely it?s sunny enough for solar? The UK has long been a destination for Mediterranean folk seeking blue skies (steady now Ed.); Shakespeare called it ?this sun- bleached isle? (That?s enough sarcasm Ed.).

Strangely, no.

In his final interview before his untimely death, DECC?s chief scientific advisor called it an ?appalling delusion? that the UK could meet its energy needs from renewables.

Wind turbines were simply a "waste of money" in winter, for "when the wind blows you are going to have to either turn those wind turbines down or something else down that you have already paid for like the nukes or the CCS", he told Mark Lynas. Solar only worked in really sunny countries.

REF?s current "real" spot price for wind power is £101/MWh once the train has been filled with gravy.

Only at the BBC are renewables cheap. Solar only works in really sunny countries, and a spate of high profile crashes (SunEdison and Abengoa, for example) suggests that where state subsidies are involved, even then it isn't a banker.

The international renewables agency IRENA recently admitted that renewable usage is actually falling in China, India and Mexico (pdf)

The EU quietly dropped its mandate that 10 per cent of transport be powered by renewables 2020 earlier this year.

Bill Gates has called for the huge renewables subsidies wasted on wind and solar to be diverted to more potentially useful low carbon innovation.

Reply to
Jethro_uk
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*Britain*

*England*

People need to be clearer what they're talking about.

Reply to
Mike Barnes

The thing is that it is cost effective to feed micro generate solar back into the grid, it is not possible to cost effectively feed micro generated wind power back into the gird (so its cost effective use is limited to places where the grid doesn't currently reach).

The point that the power might be generated at the wrong time of day/year is a separate issue.

tim

Reply to
tim...

Well that would mean it would be easier to spot the lies.

Renewable UK are the trade shills that are allowed to lie, because they themselves are not a commercial organisation selling windmills and solar panels, just funded by those that and staffed by members of those that do.

That makes them a 'political' organisation, and as such exempt from prosecution for fraud or sanctions by the ASA.

Basically if you see Greenpeace, Foe, Renewable UK anywhere in an article, you can discount what their agents say as total fabrications all the time.

I have even given up reading the small print. Its just lies from start to finish.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Provisional 2015 renewable electricity data from DECC 6th May 2016

9073 MW onshore wind capacity 5118 MW offshore wind capacity

23.026 TWh onshore wind generation

17.416 TWh offshore wind generation

Provisonal load factor for whole of 2015

29.9% onshore 41.3% offshore

Provisonal load factor for quarter 4 2015

36.7% onshore 50.9% offshore

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Reply to
The Other Mike

Look closer at the data. These are not 'measured' these are 'estimates'

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Well wait another seven weeks then for the actuals, which on the basis of provisional and actual data released for the past decade or two will be within a fraction of a point of the provisonal estimates.

Reply to
The Other Mike

Yoiu domnt understand how much 'noram,alisation' there is in there

Using BM reports data wcho only counts actual metered wind output,. the average capacity factor has been shown to be around 23% onshore and 27% offshore.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

BM Reports is purely operational metering data and it has limitations. The figures DECC use are derived from actual settlements metering data, triplicated, very high resolution, using high accuracy voltage and current transformers and transducers across the entire electricity network.

To consider comparing them is foolish, to consider operational metering a more valid data source than settlements data is quite frankly ridiculous.

PS BM reports also does not segregate offshore and onshore wind either so there is no valid method of determining an onshore and offshore capacity factor.

Reply to
The Other Mike

Is there a problem Scotland is generally winder than England isn't it ? They seem to have more rain and less sun on average.

Perhaps solar power is more useless in scotland than England and wind power is useless in England but workable is scotland.

Reply to
whisky-dave

No. they are not.

They are derived from models. Read the small print. And they are 'normalised'.

No, it isn't.

You can tell however from the historical mix of known metered onshore and offshore.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

The operational data published live by Elexon on BM Reports plays absolutely no part in the data submissions

The settlements derived data is the only data that IS valid for such submissions.

Utter bullshit

You appear to have absolutely no idea of the difference between the two sets of data and their purpose and usage.

What a load of cack.

There is one published operational meter reading figure by fuel type that you have access to. It is summed before you even see it and comes from well over a hundred discrete data sources. It's accurate to 1% at best, subject to manual overrides, missing data and is sampled at 5 minute intervals.

274MW of wind generation right now. You take that one figure and nothing else. You have absolutely no idea of the actually loading on any single wind turbine or wind farm anywhere in the UK. To 'calculate' a capacity factor for the entire wind sector on the basis of 2/3 coverage by operational metering is borderline lunacy. To suggest a capacity factor split by location onshore/offshore is utterly ridiculous.
Reply to
The Other Mike

What you have is an average of all the metered windfarms, some onshore and some offshore. If they average at 25%, even with 1% error that gives the lie to 29% and 40%.

If you then add a seriously large offshore windfarm, and the average makes a step change upwards, the answer you need is solved in a simple pair of simultaneous equations.

This lie about capacity factors has been going on for years and its completely revealed by the actual data.

And it arises in the way the capacity factors are reconstructed from the data, and the models used to interpoloate data.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

You are sadly way beyond totally clueless.

Reply to
The Other Mike

And you have a commercial interest in this dont you?

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Absolutely none

Reply to
The Other Mike

Which I read as meaning that the actual numbers for generation are ignored and replaced by a number calculated from the installed generating capacity multiplied by the average capacity factor measured over several previous years (5 or 15 for wind and hydro, respectively). And it must become iterative, or self-perpetuating or something (not sure of the correct term), because that calculated capacity factor then becomes part of the average for previous years (5 or 15) when calculating subsequent years' capacity factors.

But is that fair or sensible, or even honest? Surely it's important to know the reality about capacity factors of renewables, and that includes when the wind don't blow etc and not to mask the effect of bad years by using an average capacity factor from earlier years and calculating a result. It seems dishonest to me to in effect fiddle the results and hide the effects of bad years.

Now there may be good political reasons for doing that, such as the need to keep afloat an embryonic renewables sector by subsidies until it can stand on its own feet, but the true capacity factors should be clearly available, so that mere mortals such as myself can make a judgement as to whether they provide value for money.

Incidentally, I have at least some understanding of TNP's qualifications and background, but I know nothing of yours. What is your experience in this field, please? FWIW, I have none!

Reply to
Chris Hogg

Thank you for pointing that out. Frankly I couldn't be arsed

You may also care to see how circular the process is.

And how badly it is distorted by new capacity coming on stream

Lets look at the real data:

mysql> select avg(wind) from day where timestamp like '2016%';

+------------------+ | avg(wind) | +------------------+ | 2499.82316112084 | +------------------+ 1 row in set, 1 warning (1.57 sec)

If we add in the amount of metered windfarms (8508 MW) as described in the power parks spreadsheet* from BM reports, the answer is this:

mysql> select avg(wind)/8508 from day where timestamp like '2016%';

+-------------------+ | avg(wind)/8508 | +-------------------+ | 0.293814432061295 | +-------------------+ 1 row in set, 1 warning (0.26 sec)

That is: this year (2016) metered windfarms (and the vast majority of those in capacity terms are offshore), reached 29% capacity factor.

This is well in accord with the figures that Stuart Young** arrived at some years back:

"Average output from wind was 27.18% of metered capacity in 2009, 21.14% in 2010, and 24.08% between November 2008 and December 2010 inclusive."

Renewable UK IIRC supplies the data that DECC gaily incorporate into policy documents.

The real point is that no one really knows till much much later how much all the windfarms produces, and no one knows if some of the data - as happened in spain - for so called 'renewable sources' wasn't ion fact produced by diesel generators.

IN this case, its almost certainly produced by the sleight of hand of Renewable UK.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

In the west of Scotland, the BBC installed a small relay transmitter power by both solar and wind. It needed to spend part of its power on a wiper to keep the seagull sh** off the solar panel. There was a storage battery as well.

Reply to
charles

The other worry to me is this. When we take power from the wind, surely that effectively will change the climate around that area, as you get very little for nothing. It could be that if you did decide to build more of them, the result would be local climate issues. Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

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