Wind fantasy land: to cover 8 days of half-speed wind, UK needs 1,000 times the “biggest battery” on Earth
The inadequacy of Wind Power, GWPFBy Jo Nova
Wade Allison has done a short but devastating analysis for the GWPF. The take home message is that the energy contained in the wind is diabolically more erratic than most people realize. It’s just basic physics and almost no one in politics seems able to comprehend just how impossible these numbers are. If only they would “follow the science” eh?
Thanks to Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat.
The exponential death of affordable electricity
It’s just physics. The power of the blowing wind increases by the speed of those particles cubed which produces a twin engineering nightmare. If the wind doubles in speed, the energy goes up by a factor of 8 (or 2 × 2 × 2, and we need to spell it out), and if it slows by half, the energy drops eight-fold. It’s bad both ways. At high speeds, the mechanical engineers have to turn off the turbines to protect them, and at low speeds the electrical engineers have to ramp up power stations that may not exist, or pray to Gaia for batteries that will never exist.
Allison has a graph showing the total output of all the wind turbines in the UK and Europe for a whole year compared to the total electricity needed. As he says “This is not the headline plot that the industry shows to its investors, the media and politicians, but it comes from their own published annual WindEurope Report”.
https://joannenova.com.au/2023/03/wind-fantasy-land-to-cover-8-days-of-half-speed-wind-uk-needs-1000-times-the-biggest-battery-on-earth/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wind-fantasy-land-to-cover-8-days-of-half-speed-wind-uk-needs-1000-times-the-biggest-battery-on-earth
