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

Vir Campestris wrote:

> 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.

Looking on DraxElectricInsights, I don't see anything out of the
ordinary on those days (very likely the source is also bmreports).

<https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?period=3-months&start=2022-10-01&&_k=6pe54v>

> 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.

Don't see that either

<https://electricinsights.co.uk/#/dashboard?period=7-days&start=2022-10-27&&_k=f2yr71>

> Biomass also doubled, and the interconnecters went to zero. This is the
> first 5 periods in my download, and I will ignore them

There have been times when gridwatch showed bmreports "stuck" for a
while, obviously it's worth ignoring such glitches,whether drax weeds
the glitches out, or averages them away, dunno.

On 14 Nov 2023 at 12:08:56 GMT, "Vir Campestris"
<vir.campestris@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> 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.

Well I and others have been saying this for some time. There are periods every
winter when you have a high stuck over northern Europe and wind ouput drops to
next to nothing. In Winter, solar is already next to nothing, so our favourite
renewables can find that they produce fuck-all for periods of days

We usually get a couple of these periods every winter and they show up nicely
on GridWatch.

--
If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

Ernest Rutherford

On 14/11/2023 12:08 pm, Vir Campestris wrote:

> 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.

And don't forget that electricity is only 20% of our ENERGY consumption.
So these numbers have to be multiplied by 5.

Another Dave
--
Change nospam to techie