Category Archives: The cost of renewable power

WAstateDNR – Department of Natural Resources via flickr

On Friday, September 14, just before 10am, Britain’s 3,500 wind
turbines broke all records by briefly supplying just over four gigawatts
(GW) of electricity to the national grid. Three hours later, in
Germany, that country’s 23,000 wind turbines and millions of solar
panels similarly achieved an unprecedented output of 31GW. But the
responses to these events in the two countries could not have been in
starker contrast.

In Britain, the wind industry proclaimed a triumph. Maria McCaffery,
the CEO of RenewableUK, crowed that “this record high shows that wind
energy is providing a reliable, secure supply of electricity to an
ever-growing number of British homes and businesses” and that “this
bountiful free resource will help drive down energy bills”. But in
Germany, the news was greeted with dismay, for reasons which merit
serious attention here in Britain.

Germany is way ahead of us on the very path our politicians want us
to follow – and the problems it has encountered as a result are big news
there. In fact, Germany is being horribly caught out by precisely the
same delusion about renewable energy that our own politicians have
fallen for. Like all enthusiasts for “free, clean, renewable
electricity”, they overlook the fatal implications of the fact that wind
speeds and sunlight constantly vary. They are taken in by the wind
industry’s trick of vastly exaggerating the usefulness of wind farms by
talking in terms of their “capacity”, hiding the fact that their actual
output will waver between 100 per cent of capacity and zero. In Britain
it averages around 25 per cent; in Germany it is lower, just 17 per
cent.

The more a country depends on such sources of energy, the more there
will arise – as Germany is discovering – two massive technical problems.
One is that it becomes incredibly difficult to maintain a consistent
supply of power to the grid, when that wildly fluctuating renewable
output has to be balanced by input from conventional power stations. The
other is that, to keep that back-up constantly available can require
fossil-fuel power plants to run much of the time very inefficiently and
expensively (incidentally chucking out so much more “carbon” than normal
that it negates any supposed CO2 savings from the wind).