New wind energy record for Great Britain

4 February 2013

A record amount of electricity has been generated by wind energy in Great Britain, according to National Grid.

The new high was reached on Sunday morning, when wind generated more than 5 gigawatts for the first time – more than 12% of the nation’s electricity needs for industry, businesses and households – enough to power more than ten million British homes.

It’s the first time that wind energy has exceeded the 5 gigawatt threshold in Britain.

RenewableUK’s Deputy Chief Executive Maf Smith said:

“This new record proves that Britain is generating an increasingly significant amount of clean electricity from wind. The quantity of low-carbon energy that wind is feeding into the grid is continuing to surge upwards. We’re set to generate at least 15% of the UK’s electricity from wind by 2020.

http://www.renewableuk.com/en/news/press-releases.cfm/2013-02-04-new-wind-energy-record-for-great-britain

How does this compare to solar PV?

No idea how it compares, but I am a bit upset that they are quoting GW rather than GWh. You can work it out from their comments on how it was calculated:

1. National Grid states that on Sunday 3rd February a new record of 5058 megawatts (5.058 gigawatts) of electricity was generated from wind, representing 12.28% of overall generation.

2. RenewableUK has observed that over a two-hour period from 10:30am to 12:30pm on Sunday 3rd February, total metered wind output in Great Britain exceeded 5GW, reaching a peak of 5.058GW at 11:30am. Metered wind output exceeded 4GW over a ten hour period from 5:30am to 3:30pm.

So lower bound would be greater than 96 GWh and upper bound would be less than 120 GWh

There are no figures on the National Grid website for last Sunday, but there are for the same Sunday over the last 4 years.

Generation was had a mean of 39.56 GW, or 949.44 GWh.
The min was 29.05 GW and the max was 48.97 GW.

The range was between 37.92 GW and 40.28 GW or 910 GWh and 967 GWh.
As a percentage of total generation that is somewhere between 10 and 12.4%

So the claim that 12% was from wind last Sunday seems very valid to me.

Really? what kind of neighbours need lots of electricity midsummer mid day (not that many indoor swimming pools)? I understood that kind of surplus has to be stored one way or another 'on the grid'.

Well, neighbours with fridges, for starters. And people working at home, retired people, parents with pre-school children. And people who've thought ahead enough to have the washing machine run when it's sunny.

So what's the ratio, on a fine PV daytime when demand is at its lowest - say 5 local PV installations keep the whole locality of - what - 50 houses? - fully supplied and not needing to draw from the wider grid? Alternatively, how deep into spring/autumn is it till 5 local PVs fully supply just 5 neighbours, daytime?

I don't really like this site (if you go the main pages you'll see why) but it has a great gridwatch tool.

http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

If embedded PV (which doesn't show up on this as Ed pointed out) was filling all the demand them the demand would go to zero - This has happened in Germany I believe but in the UK this isn't going to be a 'problem' for some time.

From the same website what is really impressive is that wind has been averaging about 4Gw for a week or so.

I see almost 10% for a week as much greater milestone that 12% for two hours.

There is a lot more domestic PV around these days, but I'd be very surprised if any of it made it back past the first transformer. Domestic base load is between 0.2-0.9kW, it doesn't take many neighbours to suck up all your excess even if you've got a big 4kW array. You'd be doing well to cover 10 adjacent houses on a sunny day, and there are far, far less than 10% of houses with PV.

It's worth bearing in mind that a lot of wind (even quite large scale) is also "embedded" and so probably isn't showing up in the grid figures for wind output. The actual amount generated on Sunday would have been somewhat north of 5GW.

Embedded Generation

Embedded generation is generation directly connected to an electricity distribution network
rather than the transmission system. In England and Wales embedded generation is less than
100 MW in capacity while in Scotland the size of embedded generation varies from less than
30 MW in the area covered by Scottish Power Transmission Ltd (SPTL) and less than 10 MW
in the area covered by Scottish Hydro Electric Transmission Ltd (SHETL).

Embedded generation is made up mostly of CHP, wind, biomass or other renewable generation.
CHP makes up the largest part of this and output is expected to rise from the current level of around
20 TWh to 31 TWh by 2030.

Embedded wind capacity is expected to rise from the current level of 2.1 GW to 3.1 GW by 2030,
with output rising from 5.4 TWh to 7.8 TWh over the same period.

http://www.nationalgrid.com/NR/rdonlyres/86C815F5-0EAD-46B5-A580-A0A516562B3E/50819/10312_1_NG_Futureenergyscenarios_WEB1.pdf

Those figures are a little over a year out of date.

Thanks Ted -presumably that means that we about 7GWp of wind in the UK?

Posted By: jms452probably lucky it's windy when the headline on the news was we only have 2 days of gas left (in storage presumably)

And a nuclear facility has been shut down so the workers can go home

Back up after lunch

Generating more from wind 5.21 than gas 3.98 at present. Who would have predicted that 5 years ago.

Actually just seen the headlines:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/mar/22/wholesale-gas-prices-soar-after-pipeline-forced-to-close

Bit perplexed as they claim that a therm (29.307 kWh) costs a quid normally and has gone up to £1.50, that is 5p/kWh. At £1/therm that is 3.3p. Seems a bit high for wholesale regardless of a pump failure and our low stocks.

What a load of tosh. I could power 5 million homes with a push bike generator if the homes where built to passive house standards and fitted with there built in 10kw PV systems and backup batteries.