Renewables Still Fail Despite Ideal Weather

 No one can deny the past few days have been extremely windy. So you'd think that renewable energy would be taking up all the load now and we can finally ditch the fossil fuels.

Er, no.

In this graph you can see that wind (the light blue bit) made a good fist of it, but despite winds approaching speeds that would cause damage, wind only produced 56% of our energy needs.

Interesting that Nuclear (the Grey Smudge at the Bottom) tracks wind, producing more power when the wind is higher.

Then of course the wind drops (as it does) and bam, the Orange stripe of Gas takes over, showing the failure of renewables even when there is favourable weather. 

Don't get me started on the inconsequential yellow smudge of solar around lunchtime. It's getting into the depths of winter and extremely short days. At this latitude it shows how much of a nonsense solar is.

I did the maths on making a solar-powered boat on the canals. I just wanted to go as an example 5 miles a day. In order to recharge the battery in a reasonable amount of time I would have had to have a solar array the size of sails directly pointing at the sun. Because the actual amount of realistic solar generating time in winter is about 4 hours if you're lucky and it's not overcast. 

Pumped Hydro (purple) does it's usual thing around dinner time.

Finally, the real shock is the pink band of the French Interconnector. We were actually taking about 5% of our energy needs from them. In fact, we were taking energy from all our European interconnectors rather than supplying energy, which we were doing in the summer.

In fact the graph above paints a dire picture. We are nowhere near getting all of our energy needs from renewables and sadly gas fired plants will be carrying the burden for quite some time. It also shows we are nowhere near self-sufficient when it comes to energy generation. We are still relying on our European interconnectors to supply a significant amount of power.

The last puzzling fact is we never switched on a Coal-Fired power station. Coal-Fired energy stayed at 0.00% all day, instead taking 5-10& of our energy from abroad. 

Now can anyone let me know if that's practical or not? Is French energy cheaper than coal-fired energy?