I've heard all this guff about how it's clean and green, but I've just gone off and found some data. A years worth from bmreports.
On 17Nov22 something odd happened, and again on 24Jan23. On both cases the output of all fuel types dropped sharply.
Nuclear has an average output of about 5GW. There are a few odd points on 30Oct22 where it rose to 9GW - more than the installed capacity. Biomass also doubled, and the interconnecters went to zero. This is the first 5 periods in my download, and I will ignore them.
On 29/11 it dropped sharply for half an hour by 10%, and again on 15th December. All fuel types did the same. The rest of the time nuclear was between 4 and 6GW.
Wind is another animal entirely.
The peak wind output is 17GW.
On the 3rd November wind dropped below 4GW, and stayed there for half a day. It did it again on the 22nd. On the 28th it was even worse - the output dropped below 3GW at 8am, and stayed there until the 2nd December. It dropped below a GW for over 24 hours, with the lowest output being 252MW.
More than a day below 5% of output, and with the lowest value being just
1.45%.
I decided to stop at this point - just the first couple of months of my data make wind look horrible.
The demand from the UK averages about 30GW. To get that from wind alone would require something over 100 times more wind turbines than we currently have installed. And even that would require us to accept that sometimes when the weather is really odd we need to turn things off.
The Royal Society reckons we need 10 days worth of storage to rely on wind. I don't see that happening soon either.
Andy