Wind Power ?

or NOT.

The failure of wind generation this week has been conveniently (for the subsidy bandits) sidelined by referendum mania.

I have regularly compared the UK's wind fleet with the 1/10th the capacity hydro generators  The UK's electrickery windmills seem to have been mostly stationary the last three days of this week - except the ones stealing power and being driven round by fossil and nuclear - to keep from permanently bending the blades (droop/set) or wrecking the gearboxes with see-sawing...

Wind is now down to 180MW. Only an idiot would specify them as an energy source for the grid. @JamesDelingpole pic.twitter.com/qojitWWZ9R

— Richard W. Jones ❤⛽ (@richardwjones) February 25, 2016

As of January 2016 there's 6,666 wind turbines with a supposed total installed capacity of ca. 13.5 gigawatts rated output (vs. actual) vs. roughly 1.6 gigawatts for hydro. I don't watch the outputs obsessively but Thursday night - the piffling amount of hydro is approaching three times the output of the entire wind fleet - this is simply appalling.

Windmills are simply not fit for purpose 

The very idea that fossil and nuclear output is financially punished to support this farcical situation is ridiculous and to add insult to injury -

we have to pay them extra when it's "too windy"! 

At the very least the wind generators should be required to pay for the extra "emergency" capacity required  when they fall short - at rates commensurate with what they would have taken had the wind not failed - plus a charge for the unreliability factor....  which pretty much what happens with other generators anyway.

The distorted and grossly unfair subsidies should be scrapped forthwith.

I could of course be accused of cherry picking - but - a large part of the usefulness of electricity and the reason we chose to buy it is that it's there on the switch. To charge double for something that's unreliable and doesn't measure up in almost every other way - well, that's <insert your own expletive>

EDIT 29th Feb:

You might think windmills are perfect harvesters of Mother Nature's bounty - but that's not the whole story by a long chalk.


How Much Power Does It Take to Run a Wind Turbine?

Energy Consumption in Wind Facilities

and last - but certainly not least The Ecotricity Windmill at Green Park Reading - the Daily Mail version here - the perpetual motion machine that remorselessly grinds around on perfectly still days...