Renewables ~= nukes?

[John Stumbles]

This came round on my facebook feed this morning:

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15.5% of U.K. electricity made from renewables during a 3 month period! That's a fair bit and about the amount that is made from nuclear power.

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Hmmm, sez I, that's not what gridwatch shows.

To which someone responded:

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Gridwatch shows a snapshot of energy supply and distribution in near realtime (I recall it is updated every 5 minutes) so the contribution of wind and other renewables can vary considerably from day to day. It is also limited to showing the flows of energy within the Balancing Mechanism of the National Grid and the larger power stations that are directly connected to the grid.

Smaller stations such as single wind turbines, small hydro installations and household PV installation are usually not connected directly to the National Grid and are termed "Embedded". They sell the energy directly to the utility companies so the data does not appear separately as part of the Balancing Mechanism.

The report mentioned in the article posted by Chris is from the Department of Environment & Climate Change RESTATS data, which collects data directly from most of the renewable installations and so will have far more detailed information.

RESTATS still has its own web site at

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So looks as if gridwatch is not[1] gospel :-/

[1] or is, depending on your view of the authenticity of those documents ;-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

into their count of renewables are added in an ESTIMATE (based on unrealistic capacity factors) or all the little wind plant that isn't centrally metered, plus one quarter of Drax burning wood, plus all the hydro and probably the pumped storage. Plus estimates of all the solar and estimates of all the methane digesters.

I stress that these are largely estimates.

Although one quarter of drax is a nearly a gigawatt, which is seriously significant.

[Tim Watts]

On Monday 07 October 2013 18:49 The Natural Philosopher wrote in uk.d-i-y:

That would be very very naughty even by their standards!

Of course - fantasy figures for a fantasy policy...

[John Stumbles]

What: Drax, hydro and pumped storage are embedded, not on the grid?!

[The Natural Philosopher]

Everything is ON the grid, but BM reports I think only monitors the high voltage backbone - stuff connected at lower voltages isn't directly metered.

Drax is metered but only as a whole. BMreports has it all as 'coal'; but one of 4 boilers is 100% wood.

Hydro and pumped are metered more or less but some hydro is not centrally metered.

about 30% of wind is not centrally metered No solar is centrally metered.

Very little pure biomass is centrally metered.

The problem is that half the time the outputs are calculated from FIT and ROC paymnents, or are simply estimates. And estimates based on massively optimistic capacity factors. You would be surprised to learn the the average small embedded windfarm produces far more electricity per unit capacity than the ones with meters on, according to their ROC payments!

I have tried to match these up to get sensible figures and cross check against the metered stuff but guess what, The numbers don't add up.

IN short what seems to be happening is a massive infill of missing data with optimistc estimates to make renewable energy seem more important than it actually is, plus what looks like some pure fraud here and there.

[Brian Gaff]

Surely though the actual load on the system will reduce if small local sources take some of the load at a given time. Brian