FROM WHERE I live near Aberystwyth you can see a windfarm on a ridge four miles away. Edge a little to the left, and another comes into view. When I looked the other day, all 26 turbines had ground to a halt.
It was warm, sunny and still. But the turbines are higher than where I am and exposed to wind from all directions. So either it wasn’t windy enough even where they are, or they’d all broken down.
Another possibility is that the companies running these heavily subsidised generators may have been paid to turn them off. Energy firms can receive thousands of pounds a day per windfarm to switch off if the National Grid can’t use the power they are producing. And wind-generated electricity of course can’t be stored.
Whatever the reasons, the windfarms on my horizon are often like this, the rotors frozen at odd angles for hours, sometimes days.
A week or so later, and it was fairly breezy. Nothing dramatic. According to the Met Office, a wind-speed of 12mph, gusting to 28mph. But it was the same story. Off on the now misty ridge, the only things that moved were shifting pools of light as the sun intermittently broke through. The turbine blades had stopped, some at an angle convenient for flocks of crows looking for somewhere to perch.
As in summer, so in winter. During the freezing days and nights of last November and December, there was often very little wind across the UK. Demand for electricity was astronomical, yet the country’s 3,149 turbines were, on one very cold day in mid-December, generating just five per cent of the amount they were theoretically capable of producing. That was about 280 megawatts (MW). At a time when demand was running at about 60,000 MW.
As I write – last Thursday evening – I’m checking the website of Elexon, the company responsible for balancing electricity supply and demand on the National Grid. It tabulates the day-by-day, hour-by-hour contributions to UK electricity demand from the various forms of generation – coal, gas, nuclear, wind, imports from France and Holland.
It’s been another lacklustre day for windfarms. With the number of turbines throughout the UK now risen to more than 3,400, and with electricity demand running at slightly under 39,000 MW, wind-power between 8pm and 8.30pm was providing just 703 MW - that from machines notionally capable of producing more than 5,700 MW. The turbines were meeting a minuscule 1.9 per cent of UK demand and working at a meagre 12 per cent of their overall capacity. Keeping the lights on were gas, coal and nuclear - in that order.
So here’s one reason why many people are incensed about the proposal by SSE Renewables to crumple the hillsides above Talybont, Cwm Einion and Nantymoch with roads, concrete and huge industrial machines.
While blighting wild uplands this vast, straggling complex – seven miles north to south, six miles east to west - would become part of a generating system which on this August evening was producing a fraction over 12 per cent of its theoretical output, and which on freezing winter’s nights may contribute only five per cent.
A system which provides a smidgen of unreliable energy in return for subsidies hidden in consumers’ electricity bills which raise more than £1 billion a year to underwrite windfarms and other renewable energy, wind receiving 40 per cent of that.
Another major gripe is that, the construction phase over, Nantymoch would provide few jobs. There’s a pressing need to increasingly switch support from unpopular big-scale, environmentally-destructive wind to non-intrusive domestic and community-scale solar which, being about daylight rather than just sunshine, works well in our climate. This way lies the potential to create a substantial number of jobs in rural Wales, exploiting the established expertise in this field offered by, for example, Dulas, Machynlleth’s award-winning renewable energy company.
