The climate scaremongers: Wind farms don’t work if it’s, er . . . windy
PAUL HOMEWOOD
THE energy price cap is going up again next month and mainly because of increased constraint payments to wind farms, according to Ofgem.
Daft as it may seem, we have to pay wind farms to shut down when there is more wind than the grid can handle. It’s like dole money for energy companies.
Last year the cost amounted to £393million, all added to our electricity bills. Virtually all of this money went to wind farms in Scotland because the grid does not have enough capacity to transmit it all to England, where the demand is.
The renewable lobby claims that this is not the fault of intermittent wind power; instead it is our ‘creaking grid’ that is to blame. This is absurd and deceitful – it’s like building a new town in the middle of the Scottish Highlands and then complaining there are no roads in or out.
Wind farms should never have been given planning permission there in the first place. And any business constructing one there, and knowing the problem, should be made to stand the cost of shutting down.
To some extent this ‘Scottish problem’ is on its way to being solved by the new transmission lines being built by the National Grid, the cost of which, of course, will be added to our bills as well.
The constraint costs are a drop in the ocean compared to what is coming down the track in the next five years if Miliband’s plans to triple wind and solar power come to fruition. As early as 2030, the problem won’t be lack of grid capacity, it will be a much more intractable and expensive one.
In simple terms, there will be many times during the year when there will be more electricity being generated than we will actually need. Equally, of course, there will be many times when the reverse is the case, and we don’t have enough power.
To illustrate this, let’s look at last Sunday, September14, a breezy day but not unusual weather for September. Wind and solar power supplied 20GW during the day, two-thirds of the day’s demand. With triple the wind and solar capacity, we would be getting 60GW. In that event, half of it would have to be paid to switch off, to stop the grid from being overloaded.
The National Energy System Operator (Neso) looked into this problem last year when it published its Clean Power 2030 report, which assessed Miliband’s plans. It concluded that we would have to curtail 22TWh of surplus electricity in 2030 and in addition have to export a further excess of 41TWh – a total of 63TWh, which is a third of the projected output from offshore wind.
It is optimistic in the extreme to expect Europe to buy our surplus wind power when they will be in the same boat themselves. Even on Neso’s optimistic assumptions, constraint payments and losses incurred on exports will add £8.9billion a year to electricity bills – equivalent to 12 per cent.
If we cannot export any surplus, that cost would rise to over £10billion.
Neso Clean Power 2030 Workbook
https://www.neso.energy/document/346781/download
Why are we in this mess, where we have to throw away a third of wind output? This goes to the heart of the inherent impracticability of intermittent wind and solar power. If we built less capacity, we would be dangerously short of power for most of the time.
Consequently we have to build in massive amounts of overcapacity. Wind and solar power cannot simply be summoned up in the exact amounts we need hour by hour and day by day. You need what is called dispatchable power to do this, like a gas power station which can be switched on and off as and when needed.
So we end up with much more wind power than we can possibly use at highly subsidised prices and still have to pay the full cost of maintaining a backup grid to switch on when the wind does not blow.
And we wonder why are bills keep going up!
China Still Building Coal Power Plants
CHINA has opened more new coal power plants between January and June 2025 than any other half-year since 2016, says a new environmental research report. According to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), 21GW of coal power was added in the first half of this year, with projections for the full year exceeding 80GW.
To put the figures into perspective, China now has about 1,390GW of coal power capacity, having grown steadily from 1,080GW in 2021. Construction has started on another 46GW this year, with 75GW more in the pipeline.
The CREA report also notes a surge in new solar power capacity before the ending of government subsidies took effect in June. Solar power, however, is still no more than a bit player, generating just 8 per cent of China’s electricity last year.
I am sure that this figure will carry on rising in years to come. But there is simply no way that China can run its energy system largely on wind and solar power. That is why it is building more and more coal power stations.
The West is deluded to think otherwise.
This article (The climate scaremongers: Wind farms don’t work if it’s, er . . . windy) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Paul Homewood
Featured image: Dreamtime
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