Wind is Main Source of UK Electricity for First Time (bbc.com) 97
Wind turbines have generated more electricity than gas for the first time in the UK. From a report: In the first three months of this year a third of the country's electricity came from wind farms, research from Imperial College London have shown. National Grid has also confirmed that April saw a record period of solar energy generation. By 2035 the UK aims for all of its electricity to have net zero emissions. "There are still many hurdles to reaching a completely fossil fuel-free grid, but wind out-supplying gas for the first time is a genuine milestone event," said Iain Staffell, energy researcher at Imperial College and lead author of the report. The majority of the UK's wind power has come from offshore wind farms. Installing new onshore wind turbines has effectively been banned since 2015 in England.
Re:What happens (Score:4, Funny)
Welp, seeing as how wind not blowing and the sun not shining is a recent development, maybe you should join the research teams trying desperately to make sure those never happen again.
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I assume you didn't hear the whoosh because of nearby wind turbines.
Re:What happens (Score:5, Funny)
The sun doesn't shine every night
Aye, but on the nights it does it's a wonder to behold!
Re:What happens (Score:5, Informative)
Look at the wind speed overnight in the North Sea. It never stops.
Temperature changes all day and all night. It's just faster at some times than others. So we just need more capacity and some short term storage.
Re: What happens (Score:2)
Except for the days and even weeks when a large area of high pressure sits over the whole of the UK and beyond and the wind dies down. Some good charts and CSV data here: https://gridwatch.templar.co.u... [templar.co.uk]. How much over capacity do you propose we build?
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Looking out my window, there isn't much wind today. But looking on windy.com, I see that there is a massive amount of wind in other parts of the UK. Especially in the North Sea and Atlantic. That's before we even get to interconnects with Europe.
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We're not currently in that settled weather pattern where a large high pressure region sits over the UK. You just have to look at the isobars on today's weather map to see that it's windy in most of England and less so in NW Scotland. I'm sure we'll next get some prolonged still periods of that in June and July, as we do every year.
Re: What happens (Score:3)
Except literally last year and the year before there were gas crunches in Europe explicitly because of serious underperformance of offshore wind assets in Northern Europe. The wind does, in fact, slow dramatically sometimes even in areas that are "windy" on average. And what we've been discovering is that between climate change altering wind patterns, and gaps/inaccuracies in our historical wind data, offshore wind farms in particular have been a craps shoot in terms of production.
That's not to say we shoul
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How can I make this any clearer? The wind is there, but we don't have enough windmills to harness it all. The use of fossil fuels is because we aren't collecting all that wind energy yet.
The issue is not that individual wind turbines have a ~50% capacity factor, it's that we don't have enough of them to provide for our energy needs >90% of the time.
The grid planners understand that (at least they do in Europe) and are adapting the grid to handle it. Europe has decent interconnects and is building more, t
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Right: so we can't do this by ourselves by building out capacity. The variability is so great that wind depends on storage and interconnects. There's an order of magnitude difference in power generation between windy and less windy periods at the moment. Dependency on the EU for anything is something that isn't politically palatable for the UK right now, even if Labour win a landslide by the end of next year. Furthermore, the EU can't get its arse in gear due to national protectionism, e.g. France not s
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I think he is refering to research into a hypothetical device that could take electricity when it is abundant, store it, and then give it back later. Believe it or not, people before you have actually have thought of the fact that the sun does not shine at night and the wind sometimes doesn't blow. If you had electricity storage devices, you could assemble an array of them, kind of like an artillery battery, that could absorb energy when it is cheap and abundant and release it later when it is expensive a
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Storage is being built in Scotland using the existing terrain and some new dams.
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The UK hasn't experienced a day with no wind or sunshine in recorded history.
Not that it really matters. If we can get to 95% renewable energy with some storage, we won't be burning much fossil fuel at all and can offset the emissions.
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The UK hasn't experienced a day with no wind or sunshine in recorded history.
Not that it really matters. If we can get to 95% renewable energy with some storage, we won't be burning much fossil fuel at all and can offset the emissions.
I hope the flamebait moderation was accidental. :/
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Please Amimojo, you should really rely on sources and provide them, instead of spouting whatever comes to your mind.
A simple google search shows:
- Nine consecutive days in 2018 without wind power [energyvoice.com] (at the time the article was written, the low wind situation was expected to still last for another 2 weeks... didn't bother to check how long it last in the end)
- Such events occur regularly [mdpi.com]
That doesn't mean we shouldn't deploy offshore wind farms... just dont spread false facts. It just makes you a bad salesman,
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You seem to be confusing wind power with the turbined installed in five years ago, with the wind blowing in general.
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The energy generated was low because we didn't have enough turbines at the time.
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Clueless answer. Go read some scientific papers on the topic.
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Maybe you should bear in mind that the renewables infrastructure is still not complete - transition takes time and trying to trash it as "not working" when its nowhere near complete is not a great argument.
Here is a hint. I didn't trash it as not working, in fact, in my initial comment I said exactly the contrary: "That doesn't mean we shouldn't deploy more offshore wind farms..."
The thing is that it does no good to renewables when people like Amimojo just spread false facts; like saying there are no challenges to the intermitency of wind/solar. It is better to acknowledge those challenges, so that we can work on them and work around them (with backups, storage, etc...). Every energy source has advantages and
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wind power was still happening
2023 was the year ... (Score:2)
Welp, seeing as how wind not blowing and the sun not shining is a recent development, maybe you should join the research teams trying desperately to make sure those never happen again.
2023 was the year of the big price and availability breaks for low-trouble long-life high-capacity battery storage suitable for home use. Storage at the several-days-worth level is no longer an issue - even at the privately-owned per-house level.
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the same what happened in france last summer when the nuclear plants all had to be switched off because the rivers were too warm for cooling. france got electricity from germany where they were burning coal and gas.
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Where I come from, the wind always blows. However, we need to increase our other "carbon free" sources. One they should use more is tidal energy. If the tides stop, we will be too busy trying to prevent the imminent destruction of the planet to listen to more silly questions.
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Ok, troll, i will bite the bait
ALL power need to be of various type to be redundant. Yes, no wind at night is a problem, but then hydro, tides, geothermal, gas, nuclear, burn biomass (trash) can fill the gap.
the same can happen with gas, no gas (some pipeline problem) or price too high, use other energy sources...
No water or too hot for nuclear, or they need to stop to refuel or maintenance, use wind and solar.
Too much wind and solar during day? use energy storage to reuse that energy later on (like pumping
Re:What happens (Score:5, Insightful)
"when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine?"
Then the tide generators are there, the Moon never sleeps.
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Gas still determines the electric price (Score:2, Insightful)
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You need to be more specific about who "they" is that is charging you.
It isn't "they" (the ones who own solar or wind farms charging you the same price -- that's your electric company who can buy electricity from renewable sources.
Where I live, if you power your own house with your own solar, you get charged *0* and may be charged less than zero if you generate a surplus that is fed back into the grid. You get paid the Kw-h rate to feed electricity into the grid. Which means you can substantially reduce
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It is the solar and wind farms charging it, because of the way the electricity market works.
Every half hour, generators submit bids for price and amount of electricity they can supply. These bids are sorted in ascending order of price, and they go down the list until they have enough electricity to meet demand. Whatever the price of the most expensive winning bid its, that is the price everyone receives.
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Maybe in some countries that's how it works, but I know in CA, it's not. Suppliers can charge anything, even to the point of bankrupting your electric provider as what happened to PG&E back in the Bush Jr. years. It's also the case that electricity you generate yourself is free (except for your
costs), though PG&E is required to pay you the going rate//Kwh. Here, electric rates are set by the California Public Utilities Commission and are not based on producer costs. This is to give customers a c
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And where is that strange market?
It is certainly not how the European spot market works.
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The UK, which is the subject of this article.
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So the UK is not using the European Energy market anymore? :D
Sounds like fail
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No, and I don't think it ever did, it always had its own separate grid, or at least Scotland, England, Wales, and Isle of Man are on one grid; Northern Ireland is on another along with Ireland, and Jersey is part of the French grid. There are lots of interconnections with neighbouring grids.
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Yes, and because of the interconnects it would made sense that they are/were integrated into the https://www.eex.com/en/ [eex.com] market.
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If you are in Spain for example, you can't buy electricity from a wind farm in Scotland. You could buy it from one of the interconnects with the British grid, and they could buy it from the Scottish wind farm. There is limited capacity on the interconnects, and they are quite often running at full capacity.
Re: Gas still determines the electric price (Score:2)
Heard EU countries are involved in windmill instalations in the US because it is so different from pumping oil. And I will let myself out.
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Clearly it's a communist plot. Or at least a socialist one. Freedom!
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Funny, how Americans rush to downplay the importance of something when other countries are better at it than them.
Looking at electricity prices in Europe one has to question the meaning of "better" in this instance.
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Re:Unrelated (Score:5, Informative)
I'm aware your linked site shows blackouts scheduled. They always have been since forever, but read the fine print: "Power blackouts are set according to 18 levels of severity - 0 being no power cuts, 1 being the least disruptive and 18 being very severe.". They're set at 1, i.e. 'least dispruptive' - basically this is grid maintenance not rationing of poewr.
Have a look at a different site, say this one [ukpowernetworks.co.uk], and see the reasons for the changes. They're not for lack of generated power.
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The last major outage was a couple years ago in Texas but keep referencing that as though it means something.
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The last major outage in the UK was in about 1975/1976.
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During a big storm ...
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No, I am talking about the winter of discontent. There have been localised outages due to extreme weather events, mostly storms but sometimes also floods.
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The last major outage was a couple years ago in Texas but keep referencing that as though it means something.
Oh it does. The last major outage was in 2021. The one before that in 2020. Before that in 2019. It means a lot compared to most western countries which don't have a 2 appear anywhere in the year they last had a major blackout.
Re:Unrelated (Score:5, Informative)
Did you even read the headline of that, rather old, article? It is from October, last year.
UK drops plan to prepare for winter blackouts with energy rationing campaign
It says they dropped the blackouts plan. Further in, it says...
However, the business department on Wednesday said there are now “no plans for the government to tell the public to reduce usage for the sake of our energy supplies”.
Looking at the other site you linked we see that there are no blackouts planned so, in answer to your question, no it is not related.
In an aspect of capitalism that actually worked, the rising price of energy caused people to use less!
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Artificial constriction of power availability has nothing to do with capitalism, but OK. :)
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I understand where you're coming from, but markets and capitalism are not the same. Markets are about how we set prices; they say prices should be set by buyers and sellers reaching a mutually agreeable price. Capitalism is about who owns the means of production; it means the means of production are owned by private individuals or companies. It's perfectly possible to use markets to set prices when the means of production are owned by the state or worker collectives, and it's possible to have private own
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Literally had BBC report (Score:2)
Today, that detailed how all new wind and solar are waiting 5-10 years for the infrastructure to get built to allow them to hook to the grid......
Re:Literally had BBC report (Score:5, Interesting)
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5 years for every windmill to be online, but they will usually get the first ones connected to the grid as soon as possible and then expand.
A better metric is the number if turbines that can be deployed per year. At the moment it's growing exponentially.
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5 years for every windmill to be online, but they will usually get the first ones connected to the grid as soon as possible and then expand.
A better metric is the number if turbines that can be deployed per year. At the moment it's growing exponentially.
A large wind farm takes a lot of planning and design (they are placed carefully based on underlying geography and to avoid shadowing each other based on typical wind patterns requiring modeling with CFD and weather data). From inception to the first wind turbin unlikely to be less than five years
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A large wind farm takes around five or so years to build, so with good planning, that's not necessarily an insurmountable issue
No the issue isn't the wind farm, it's the grid itself. The UK and many parts of Europe are transmission constrained on the grid. The ability to build wind quickly doesn't matter if you can't power anything with it.
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A funeral.
law (Score:1)
Sodium Batteries (Score:1)
Or aluminum/graphine, or ... (Score:3)
Now someone has to step up to the plate and make sodium batteries at scale...
Or aluminum/graphine (my favorite this week if it works out). Or any of a number of others.
Battery technology is in the stage that solar photovoltaic went through some years ago: The improvements are coming thick and fast; several are 'way better (on several measures) than the current stuff; the holdoff is the need to pick one, get it into production, and make a profit before it's eclipsed by something still better; but things ar
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By the way,. for home solar/RE systems: Last year (in the US at least) had a major price and availability break on both battery storage and UL *Listed* inverter/controller systems. For even a halfway-decent solar site the payback time for a whole-house offgrid/grid-backed-up/also-a-UPS electrical supply, even without subsidies, is now about 4 years (except CA where electric rates are so high it's only about 2.)
Batteries are Lithium Iron Phosphate: No cobalt. Virtually impossible to get them to catch fire
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What you need to remember here is that the design constraints for grid-storage batteries is very different to a car or laptop battery.
You don't really care so much about energy density, because space on the edge of the city is relatively cheap. You don't really care about weight because nobody has to carry them around.
You do care about cost per kWh of capacity, and you do care a lot more about reliability and number of charge cycles.
So for that reason, I'm not really sure why people are using batteries desi
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[The design constraints for grid-storage batteries are very different from those for a car or laptop battery, s0] I'm not really sure why people are using batteries designed for use in cars as grid-storage.
Because EV batteries are at "end of life" and retired if their capacity drops below 60% of their rating while in warranty, and typically leave auto service with 70-80% capacity intact. At that point you can:
a) grind them up and salvage the pricey atoms, or
b) put them into other service u
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There's a whole bunch of technologies which companies are trying to bring new battery technology to market in the near future -- sodium, sure, and also solid state batteries. For grid storage there are also many options that would not work in vehicle applications -- pumped hydro, compressed air, thermal storage, iron-air batteries and molten metal batteries.
One of the key advantages of both iron-air and molten metal batteries is longevity. Batteries based on these technologies could last on the order ten
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Much more years.
A charge cycle is from empty to full load to empty.
So if you fully charge from half empty to full, and discharge back to half empty: it is one cycle.
Good news for electricity generation (Score:4, Informative)
This is a good news for electricity generation. Together with nuclear and hydro, that's ~57% (42% for solar/wind and 15-16% for nuclear/hydro) of electricity generation coming from low-CO2 emitting sources.
In terms of energy use though (which encompasses not just electricity, but all kind of energies), coal/oil/gas are still dominating at ~75%. The next challenge will be to electrify a lot of current fossil fuels usages, and the current estimate is that we will need between x2 and x3 the amount of energy we currently need if we want to do that.
Just to compare a few countries, at the time of writing:
- UK is emitting ~134g CO2eq / kWh [nowtricity.com] : this is pretty good!
- Germany is emitting ~500g CO2eq / kWh [nowtricity.com] : this is because despite their communication on "huge renewables deployment", they are also closing down nuclear plants, building and burning more gas, and ~35% of their electricity generation comes from coal.
- France is emitting ~35g CO2eq / kWh [nowtricity.com]
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Germany does not burn more gas for electricity than in the past before starting to shut down nuclear (2010: 89 TWh, 2021: 90 TWh) .
It also uses less much coal than before (2010: 263 TWh, 2021: 165 TWh). CO2 emissions were reduced accordingly.
It is true that they could have reduced coal much more if they hadn't shut down nuclear. But now with nuclear gone, future growth of renewables will reduce coal use much faster.
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Germany natgas consumption has been steadily increasing those last years [ceicdata.com], with an all-time high in 2021 (no data yet for 2022 that I could find).
It also uses less much coal than before (2010: 263 TWh, 2021: 165 TWh). CO2 emissions were reduced accordingly.
This is a bit sad that after all that "work" and billions spent, they only have to show one of the worst level of CO2 emissions in the EU. Other countries, like the UK, don't communicate as much, but are much more effective at actually reducing their CO2 emissions. We need actions, not words.
But now with nuclear gone, future growth of renewables will reduce coal use much faster.
Let's hope so. They are only 50 years late compared to their French neighb
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Germany natgas consumption has been steadily increasing those last years [ceicdata.com], with an all-time high in 2021 (no data yet for 2022 that I could find).
You're being disingenuous. Being an all time high in 2021 is unremarkable given how it isn't very much higher than in 2010. In fact in 9 of the 12 years you have shown on your graph Germany's consumption was lower than it was in 2021. Actually why not extend the graph and you'll see Germany's peak gas consumption occurred in 2006 not in 2021.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
they only have to show one of the worst level of CO2 emissions in the EU
Germany happens to be the most populous country in the EU as well, and also the country with the highest GDP and largest manufacturing b
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You're being disingenuous. Being an all time high in 2021 is unremarkable given how it isn't very much higher than in 2010. In fact in 9 of the 12 years you have shown on your graph Germany's consumption was lower than it was in 2021. Actually why not extend the graph and you'll see Germany's peak gas consumption occurred in 2006 not in 2021.
You are the one being disingenuous: we should aim to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, gas included, not aim to be consume just a bit more than we were consuming in 2010... The fact that I provided links and sources for my assertion actually shows that I am being honest, and allow others to see for themselves. Unlike the comment I was answering too, which was just giving numbers without quoting sources.
Germany happens to be the most populous country in the EU as well, and also the country with the highest GDP and largest manufacturing base, something that much of the EU directly benefits from. It's like me calling you an environmentally destructive arse because you have a car and I don't, oh and can you give me a lift to the train station please I don't have a car you see. Per capita Germany is lower than the Netherlands... who are the second largest food exporters in the world, just behind the USA, a country 12x as large. In fact per capita Germany is on par with Poland for emissions, and Germany has 3x the GDP per capita to show for it.
The fact that you are bringing GDP into the discussion shows you have no clue what the end goal shou
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Germany natgas consumption has been steadily increasing those last years [ceicdata.com], with an all-time high in 2021 (no data yet for 2022 that I could find).
It also uses less much coal than before (2010: 263 TWh, 2021: 165 TWh). CO2 emissions were reduced accordingly.
This is a bit sad that after all that "work" and billions spent, they only have to show one of the worst level of CO2 emissions in the EU. Other countries, like the UK, don't communicate as much, but are much more effective at actually reducing their CO2 emissions. We need actions, not words.
The billions spent at a time were renewables were still expensive helped create a mass market for renewables which now make them very cheap and also help the UK and many other reduce emissions.
But now with nuclear gone, future growth of renewables will reduce coal use much faster.
Let's hope so. They are only 50 years late compared to their French neighbors. And 15 years late compared to the UK.
Maybe, but it is not that France built nuclear power to combat climate change, nor would this scale easily to the world. Renewables do scale.
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Or in other words: If France, Germany and others had invested in renewables early on instead of nuclear, we would be much further along reducing emissions because the dramatic drop in prices would have occurred much earlier. While the investments in nuclear help reduce emissions where being used but do not matter too much in the overall scheme of things because nuclear never really become economical and therefor cannot be scaled up easily to fix the global problem.
This is why there is so much hope that SMR
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It doesn't look good. As I understand it, nuclear is unlikely ever to be able to compete on costs no matter how cheap and safe you make the reactor, because the high pressure steam side of the plant is more expensive than an equivalent generating capacity in solar or wind. The reactor could literally be free and it still wouldn't be able to compete on cost. That's
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Maybe, but it is not that France built nuclear power to combat climate change
Greenhouse gas effects are known since 50+ years, so it was actually a known side-effect, even if it was not the main goal.
That said, this is even sadder: a country which didn't try hard to reduce its CO2 emissions has emitted a lot less than Germany since 50 years, which tried very hard to deploy renewables (semantics are important here: they are trying first to deploy tons of renewables, not to reduce CO2 emissions). And even now, France (and UK) are in better place than Germany...
Renewables do scale.
No they don't. Not like
Not the first time (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't, by far, the first time it has happened. Wind generates more than gas on a regular basis in the UK, and has done for years.
This will be the first time the total wind generation in a quarter exceeds gas, which is a substantially bigger achievement than claimed by the headline.
Baked Beans (Score:2)
'cos of all them baked beans!
innit?
Energy is a basic requirement (Score:2)
Wind and Solar are both good sources of power however intermittency comes at a higher and higher price as their percentage of the grid increases. Energy is a bit like water, it's easy to take it for granted when you have running water on tap. It's when it's not easily available that its value increases significantly.
Our electricity markets need to adapt to provide the right incentives for both baseload sources and intermittent suppliers. A market which caters to the temporal factors involved needs to be far
Kinda funny (Score:1)
One of those fascinating, after the fact, discover (Score:1)
So at about 1/3 of the total power generated in a given month, Wind power was the 'main source' of electricity? So what?
I mean, it's nice that 1/3rd of their power comes from wind, really, that's nice, but if I understand it correctly, wind generates power all the time, whether you need it or not, but I'm not sure it's reliable enough to be the sole source or even majority source (over 50%) of electricity, even with battery storage/backup.
Why are constantly seeing press reports for things like "for a four h