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Renewables contributed 43% of generated electricity last Saturday |
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12 Jun 2015, 4:06 PM
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According to blogger, Chris Goodall, in his 'Carbon Commentary', renewable energy provided 13.4 GW, or 43%, of British electricity at 2pm on Saturday June 6th 2015. Goodall believes this is a new record.
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A windy day, combined with strong sun and low weekend levels of demand meant that fossil fuels delivered only 26% of total supply in the early afternoon. The remainder was delivered by nuclear, imports and power from the UK’s storage reservoirs in North Wales and Scotland.
The glut of wind and solar power almost pushed coal-fired stations out of the picture, he writes. At 3pm, coal was providing only 7% of British electricity, a total of just over 2.3 GW.
Goodall commented "I think this is also an unprecedented low and something to be actively celebrated. I don’t have the precise information but I believe only one coal-fired power station – Drax – was operating. If the country chooses to invest in wind, solar and other renewables, it can push coal-fired generation out of the generation mix completely."
Summer days that are both windy and sunny are rare. In no sense were the daylight hours of Saturday 6th June 2015 typical. But it did provide an inspiring moment that showed how renewables could eventually replace fossil fuels.
"At the moment I don't think anybody monitors the share of renewables in UK generation. In Germany, this information is provided every hour via the EEX power trading exchange and it would be sensible to do the same thing here.
A chart showing the make-up of electricity generation from 9am to 9pm is available on the Carbon Commentary web page at http://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2015/6/7/new-record-for-uk-renewables-output
Goodall warns that uncertainty is built in to the figures to some extent as the UK system doesn’t directly measure solar PV as a separate source of electricity. It ‘sees’ PV through a reduction in demand for the conventional power stations and big wind farms. So an estimate of PV output (generated at www.solarforecast.co.uk) has been added to the measured UK figure. Likewise National Grid’s estimate of output from small scale wind farms that also aren’t directly measured might well be an inaccurate figure.
It is also assumed that Drax’s biomass units are the source of output described as ‘Other’ by National Grid. The figure is about 1 GW for most of Saturday, roughly equivalent to the capacity of the units at Drax.
Renewables include grid connected wind, embedded wind, PV of all sizes including domestic, biomass principally at Drax's 2 biomass units, and non-pumped storage hydro.
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