Last week, the U.K. Prime Minister (the big guy with the crazy hair, who was hit hard by COVID-19) announced a push to quadruple U.K. offshore wind capacity over the next decade. Perhaps he forgot August 2019, when a single lightning strike took out two power generators, causing the worst blackout in a decade, that left more than 1 million people without power.
University of Oxford professor Dieter Helm, also the government adviser on energy policy, wrote at the time: “The power cut revealed just how fragile the system is becoming as it relies on more and more intermittent renewables generation. This may not have caused the power cuts, even if a wind farm drops off, the intermittency of the capacity on the system makes it harder to secure supplies. It is just a fact that a power system with lots of intermittent renewables is harder to manage.”
He said power cuts were rare (the 2019 blackout was over a year ago, and lasted for only one hour), but the outage revealed the fragility of the system. “If power cuts can happen when just two power generators drop off, then something fundamental has gone wrong.”
On October 14, 2020, the U.K.’s electricity grid operator warned of a short electricity supply over the next few days due to generator outages and a lull in autumn winds. “We’re forecasting tight margins on the electricity system over the next few days owing to a number of factors including weather, import and export levels and availability of generators over periods of the day with higher demand,” the National Grid said in a statement. “Unusually low wind output coinciding with a number of generator outages means the cushion of spare capacity we operate the system with has been reduced.”
With their October 15, 2020 update, the National Grid said that margins are currently “adequate” and it will continue to monitor the situation through the weekend. According to the National Grid, last month one-fifth of the power supply came from wind, “in spite of unusually calm British weather during the middle of September.”
Renewable energy is a rapidly growing source of U.K. electricity -- 47 percent of U.K. electricity generation came from renewables in the first quarter of 2020, compared to 36 percent in the same quarter in 2019.
The latest National Grid warning announcement raises concerns about over-reliance on wind power, which is unreliable compared to natural gas or nuclear power. The U.K. has the biggest offshore wind market. In March 2020, the government lifted the onshore wind turbine subsidy moratorium ... ahead of committing to reduce 2050 carbon emissions to zero.
The latest National Grid false scare is about the CURRENT over-reliance on wind power. Now I'll repeat the first line of the article, which doesn't sound so smart anymore: Last week, the U.K. Prime Minister announced a push to quadruple offshore wind capacity over the next decade.