Revealed: The Graph That The Wind Industry DON'T Want You To See

Source: https://www.carbonbrief.org/met-office-a-review-of-the-uks-climate-in-2023/

This is a devastating coup de grace for Miliband’s Net Zero dream and his Mission Impossible to 95% decarbonise the grid by 2030 by vastly expanding offshore and onshore wind generation capacity. Forget your Dunkelflautes (they are bad enough news, as we are now seeing); UK average annual wind speeds have declined sharply and continuously since 1969 and by the looks of the Met Office graph, they are going to continue to decline for at least the next decade or two. With electricity demand set to increase, not decrease, from now until 2050, the prospect of supplying 95% of annual demand via renewables generation in the next 5 years and 100% of all primary UK energy consumption via zero carbon generation by 2050 is exceedingly remote. Meteorological reality says no; physics and thermodynamics say no; engineering realities and practicalities say no; harsh economic reality says no.

The above Met Office graph may be part of a wider phenomenon known as global stilling, where surface wind speeds across the globe have declined in concert with recent warming, or it may be reflective of cyclical internal multidecadal variability as I explained here in January of this year. The Met Office graph above is then just a snapshot of that northern hemisphere/North Atlantic multidecadal internal variability:

Here is another snapshot:

This is especially important because it covers the winter period only, when we need wind speeds to be consistently high in order to supply the increased demand for heating. A negative winter NAO means more atmospheric blocking, hence colder weather and generally lower wind speeds, manifesting as more frequent and prolonged Dunkelflautes. These graphs demonstrate the fairly close relationship between the cyclical variation of the NAO and AMO and resultant winter blocking.

The clue that average annual wind speed, standardized winter NAO, winter atmospheric blocking and internal multidecadal variability are all linked is the fact that 2010 stands out as a particular low point in all the graphs. In that case, ‘global stilling’ may just be a manifestation of natural climate variability. But whatever the cause of declining annual average wind speeds and declining winter winter speeds in the UK, the fact is, the prevailing trend looks set to continue over the next few decades at least, meaning that an energy policy which builds even more reliance upon variable wind power in order to meet increasing demand is quite frankly insane and reckless in the extreme.