Alert: Oil Up $1.30 -- Global Warming Pummelling Great Britain; Demand For Electricity Hit a Record Overnight; Beats The Old Record -- Set Earlier This Month -- Yes, Two New Records in the Same Month

Updates

September 24, 2015: The [London] Telegraph is reporting:

Britain generated more of its electricity from renewable sources than from burning coal for the first time in the second quarter of 2015, as more wind and solar farms were built.

A record high of 25.3 per cent of the UK’s power came from wind, solar, biomass and hydro-electric sources in the three months to June, up from just 16.7 per cent in the same period the year before.

By contrast the share of electricity from Britain’s ageing fleet of coal-fired power stations fell to 20.5 per cent, down from 28.2 per cent a year previously. 

Two of the many comments at the link:

I checked real time demand on the UK grid at 01:40 UK time a few evenings ago. Wind's contribution was 0.4% of total power being supplied to the grid to meet demand. It is time that the population woke up to the fact that installed capacity is not the same as real time contribution to demand.

Anyone can check the UK demand contribution by energy source in real time on the Internet. (Not quite real time but updated every 10 minutes, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year). Educate yourselves, don't be fooled by the propaganda spread by those profiting from wind power subsidies.

It is also necessary to build Gas Turbine Combined Cycle capacity to cater for conditions cited above i.e. when wind makes no meaningful contribution to demand. The electricity consumer is paying twice, once for the 'windmills' and paying again for backup capacity when wind power makes little or no contribution to demand.

The resulting dynamic demand environment experienced by GTCC plant due to the volatility of wind reduces life dramatically and increases maintenance costs significantly. More cost passed on to the consumer.

I analyzed three year worth of data, wind contribution to demand, every ten minutes. The average power from the windmills was 31% of wind installed capacity. That means on average two thirds of wind capacity is idle. If you do your homework you will find that other authors come up with practically the same value.

And:

A look at the actual statistics shows that for the three months to June, the demand was about 30GW with a wind peak of 5GW to which may be added a few GW for the other 'renewable' sources. The wind trough does of course approach zero at times, with solar always at zero for a large part of the day. The resultant renewables contribution is probably about 10% at best, and in winter the demand is up to 60GW, meaning that the winter contribution of renewables is ~5%.

Renewables cost between two and three times the cost of coal fired electricity, so the report is really saying that at even 10% contribution, renewables are an economic failure.

Original Post

 

Enjoy, while reading the post:

London Homesick Blues, Gary P Nunn, Jerry Jeff Walker

Huge thank you to "anon 1." It has been a slow news day (so far).

Some data points from the story at Platts.

• first of all, it's cold in Great Britain
• second of all, it's really cold in Great Britain
• how cold, you ask?
• 7 degrees Celsius below average in London (for newbies, one Celsius degree is just under two Fahrenheit degrees, so this is about 13 degrees below normal for London: COLD; with wind and humidity off the ocean, the WIND CHILL factor will make it feel worse
• so?
• the Brits used more natural gas on Wednesday than they have ever, ever used. Ever.

Here's the quote from the link:

Gas demand in the UK Wednesday surged 80 million cu m past seasonal norms to 389 million cu m on below-average temperatures gripped the country.

No mention of wind turbines kicking in. I assume they have frozen up. [Later: see comment below with source: "Gas-fired power generation hit its highest level for the 2012/13 winter to at 22 GW at about 1700 GMT due to a combination of strong overall power demand of 56.5 GW and wind generation levels falling below the 1 GW mark, according to National Grid data."]

Okay, so far this winter: record cold in Great Britain, Russia, China, southern California, and the Phoenix area, as in Arizona.

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More, from MailOnLine about the cold snap in London:

• it will probably get colder next week
• snow predicted for some areas, though it will be very, very light (not enough to make a snowball)

Two interesting data points:

• Temperatures on Monday night reached a low of almost minus 2C (28F) in the West Country, but all over the UK biting winds made it feel far colder. -- as I noted above
• The National Grid said demand for electricity in England and Wales peaked on Monday evening at 52,710 megawatts, well above the previous record demand of 51,548 megawatts recorded on January 3, this year.

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