More Bad News For Renewables.

It's the hottest period during September for a while, so I thought I'd have a look at how Solar and wind are doing. The baking heat and blue skies should be providing plenty of solar, right? 

And with this well established high pressure system over the UK, it's a good indicator of how wind would provide power, after all the wind farm fans say that the wind is always blowing somewhere in the UK, so we'll always have wind power.

Here's the Gridwatch.co.uk graph from yesterday:

The yellow solar sliver is a lot fatter than normal, but of course as we start to see longer nights we only get about 12 hours of usable daylight.  Which means we get 12 hours without solar power.

How about the Turquoise line representing the wind output? Oh dear. You can just about see it. 

That big, Fat , Orange line? That's Gas. Our primary power producer. In summer. 

That constant grey band at the bottom of the graph? That's nuclear producing I would suggest it's maximum output in order to keep reduce the gas consumption.

Renewables? For all the massive offshore wind farms, the huge fields of solar panels, they're still only producing a fraction of the power we need. 

The Liquorice Allsort bands on the top of the others are the interconnects between us and Europe. We're getting German coal-produced and French Nuclear and Norwegian Hydro electrons shipped to us providing overall a fatter line and a bigger power output than all the energy supplied by our wind farms. 

We even turn the UK coal-fired taps on at a couple of points in the day, when demand is highest. Coal. In summer. 

We need to stop this madness. We need to become adults and stop fantasising about renewables. They are not delivering even in the best conditions. Back in the winter wind rarely beat gas as the main source of energy. 

Let's all grow up, put our big boy trousers on and start to plan a realistic and pragmatic power production plan. Our reliance on gas from outside the UK needs to be reduced, as does our reliance on interconnects from Europe. Because you can bet your bottom dollar that they're not supplying cheap energy. They only get involved when the energy price rises enough so that syphoning energy off to supply another country makes economic sense.