When it’s a windy day, guess what? We get a lot of wind power!
Yesterday we got 60% of our power from wind:
It does not take a genius to work out that when Ed Miliband succeeds in tripling wind power capacity, there will be far too much wind power for the grid to handle.
I have analysed the half hourly generation data for the full winter just gone. It’s a fairly basic summary, but my model assumes a tripling of wind output, 4400 MW of fixed nuclear generation and existing demand profile.
It calculates that there will be 19 TWh of surplus wind power during those periods when wind and nuclear exceed demand. Obviously there will be other periods when wind and nuclear cannot supply all demand.
Whatever battery storage we have by 2030 will be far too tiny to make any difference, so most of that 19 TWh will have to be constrained. At a going rate of £100/MWh, that could cost £1.9 billion. And this is just for winter.
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