Date published: 2008/09/05
The BBC says:
By 2020, more than a third of Britain's electricity will be generated by wind power, according to government plans. But what happens on calm days?
...
Denmark is proud of the fact that a fifth of its electricity comes from wind. But Hugh Sharman, an energy consultant, says this figure should be treated with caution. Sifting through the charts in his crow's nest office overlooking the Jutland peninsula in Denmark, a different picture emerges."Every time the wind is high, the exports are high. Every time the wind is low, of course there are few exports". Mr Sharman says more than half of Denmark's wind power is exported - so it only actually uses nine percent of the wind energy it generates. If the Danes couldn't do this, their system wouldn't work.
The UK, however, doesn't have this option. There is a link to France and one being planned to Holland but these won't able to shift the amount of power needed to balance our system. Peter Jorgensen believes it can, but it won't be cheap.
"You could build a system that would balance on it own," says Mr Jorgensen, "but it would be very costly"
Other options for Britain would be to store its wind power in giant batteries, but this is difficult and very expensive.
Instead the UK will need to look at back-up power stations for the many days when it is not windy enough . In the short term that will come from fossil fuel generation, says Nick Rowe, an energy campaigner with Friends of the Earth.
It does not mean we will need the fossil fuel generation all the time but it means they need to be turned on when necessary."
This back-up will probably have to be gas-fired power stations as these are the easiest to turn off and on.
But this will mean a "dash for gas" - a resource that Russia, hardly Britain's most cooperative ally, has in spades.
Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at Oxford University, says Britain could find itself badly exposed. It would be "about the worst possible thing that one could conceive of given what's going on in Russia and given our dependence on Russian gas supplies".
It could also prove costly. The energy company, E.On recently estimated back-up power could cost up to £10bn per year across all the energy suppliers. That would add £400 to the average annual household energy bill.
Unfortunately the BBC does not publish enough articles like this. The basic conclusion is that wind power in effect is a lot more expensive than the zealots claim. Needless to say, for this reason alone, it should only be one part of the carbon emission reduction solution.
Of course the so-called environmentalists want energy to be expensive, so for them this costly redundancy could be deemed to be a feature, not a bug. For them it is a disaster if energy is cheap, because cheap energy means people can do things (and the so-called environmentalists don't want people to do most things that people want to do, so denigrate these activities with labels like "consumerism").
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