Have a look at the gridwatch website.

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Have a look at the daily/weekly demand graphs. The minimum power usage is about 20 GW and peak is about 40 GW. So 20 GW baseload and 20 GW dispatchable. 5 GW of the baseload is supplied by nuclear run at max power continuously. Effectively, UK is using dispatchable gas power to cover ~15 GW of baseload.

If you look at the annual wind generation graph you can see we have periods where there isn't really any meaningful wind energy supply. Some of these windless spells last several days.

The fundamental question is where does the 15-35 GW of energy come from in the multi-day periods where there is little wind in the scenario where we do not use hydrocarbon energy?

The other day I asked how much energy the complete transition to electric vehicles would require. I did some checking. Its an absolute f**kton.

I think the ultimate solution would be to use renewable energy to generate hydrogen which can be readily stored and can be burnt in gas power plants. But we are a long way off that aren't we?

So, what timescales do we put on this? How long to build 30+? GW of wind/solar? Seriously, that wouldn't take too long. How long to build the 100s of GWh storage? In my humble opinion, that's the real challenge. Nobody seems to be talking about that.

Posted By: Timmy_Goat, Nov 12, 12:28:45