Gridwatch "excellent" - see Guardian

[polygonum]

OK - so it was in a comment... :-)

"One shutdown you didn't mention was Dungeness B about a year ago which was shut down by the St Jude's day storm. I remember seeing the electricity supply from pumped storage suddenly peak on the excellent gridwatch site.

As you say, renewable energy is actually more reliable than conventional power plants in this respect - but we do still need to make progress on grid-scale storage and a more diverse renewable energy base (tidal and wave need to be added to wind and solar) to completely replace fossil fuels.

We are making progress. Wind produced more electricity than nuclear for almost all of last weekend."

[Vir Campestris]

The guy doesn't get it. Losing Didcot B is an argument that intermittency doesn't matter? Or that conventional stations are jsut as bad?

He's right, wind can be forecast days ahead. I forecast that tomorrow the installed wind plant will all be shut down, due to a common cause. I equally forecast that the installed nuclear plant will not all be shut down due to a common cause - because there isn't one.

Andy

[polygonum]

Agreed. It was the irony of that which decided me to post here!

[newshound]

Never trust a bloke called Damian.

[Dave Liquorice]

Context required:

It was rather windy - wind at its peak - 5 1/2 ish GW.

About half the nuke capacity was offline, 4 1/2 ish GW is the lowest I've seen nuke generation for a long time.

Even today with wind flat out coal and CCGT are meeting 62% of demand.

[newshound]

I'm out of touch now, but this time of year they are sometimes fettling it for the really cold weather. Some of the outages are unplanner of course.

[Chris Hogg]

And in fact wind didn't shut down due to the gale and actually generated more electricity than nuclear (latter only running at half-c*ck ATM), which underlines just how unpredictable wind-generated electricity is!

[Tim Watts]

PING TNP:

Here's an idea for Gridwatch - I have no idea if it is even feasible...

Is there any automatic feed of declared capacity by generator in realtime? And if so, could the dials show it?

[Davey]

Here in North Suffolk, the so-called 'gale' was a joke, just a mild blow. No wonder the local Eye Airfield eyesores kept spinning and producing, there was nothing to disturb them.

[Chris Hogg]

Breezy down here in Cornwall, but no more than that, and less so than a week or ten days ago.

I am firmly of the view that since the 1987 hurricane and the Fish debacle, the Met Office has been deliberately exaggerating gales so that it will never again be guilty of under-estimating their strength. That in itself makes for difficulties in predicting the output from wind farms.

[Chris French]

In message , Chris Hogg writes

I'm not sure it's not also partly the media not really being very clear- I read the met office warning, and it mentioned northern england and scotland etc. I don't think they were expecting, nor forecast anything beyond windy down south (Cambidgeshire for us)

[Vir Campestris]

The charts I saw seemed to estimate the gusts about 10% down on the actual figures. Though I'm comparing the forecast from Windguru for Grafham Water

might work for you, subject to cookies

Against the Cambridge Uni Comp Sci lab

which is nearly 20 miles away.

I'm still surprised we didn't see them shut down!

Andy