UK Renewables Farce: Coal-Fired Generator Powered Up Because It's Too Hot For Solar Panels And Not Breezy Enough For Wind Turbines

You can’t make this up. It’s reached 30C in Britain because well, it’s summer. It’s also become quite humid because well, Britain is a small island surrounded by sea, with a moist, temperate climate. It’s not a dry desert, so when it warms up in summer, we quite often get humid air and thunderstorms. Hot and humid make for being uncomfortable, so people turn to fans and air conditioners to keep cool, which increases electricity demand. The Telegraph says:

Britain has started burning coal to generate electricity for the first time in a month and a half, after the heatwave made solar panels too hot to work efficiently.

One unit at Uniper’s Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal power plant in Nottinghamshire started producing electricity for the first time in weeks on Monday morning, while another coal-powered plant was warmed up in case it was needed by the early afternoon.

The National Grid turned to coal to generate electricity as a rush to turn on air conditioning and fans across the country during the heatwave led to a spike in demand.

High temperatures over the weekend also reduced the amount of energy generated from solar panels. Output on Sunday was almost a third lower than a week earlier, despite temperatures climbing above 30 degrees celsius across large parts of the country.

Solar panels are tested at a benchmark of 25C. For every degree rise in temperature above this level, the efficiency is reduced by 0.5 percentage points.

The temperature level refers to the solar cell temperature, rather than the air temperature. In direct sunlight, the cells can easily reach 60 or 70 degrees.

Alastair Buckley, professor of organic electronics at the University of Sheffield, said: “Both days were largely sunny in the morning, so a good part of the reduction in output will be due to the efficiency reduction from higher temperatures on Saturday compared to Friday.

“Compared with a cool cloudy day, the cells might be a maximum of 25pc less efficient.”

Supply was also lower because of depressed wind speeds, which hit turbine output, and some gas power plants being shut for maintenance.

We’re supposed to be getting 100% of our electricity from renewables by 2050, or even earlier if mad politicians get their way. It’s how Britain is going to single-handedly save the planet apparently, even though our emissions of greenhouse gases contribute less than 1% of the total of all nations, even though other major GHG ‘polluters’ are busy building thousands of coal-fired power stations and completely ignoring the ‘fine example’ set by not so mighty Blighty.

But even assuming we are mad enough to unilaterally decimate our industries and economy by generating 100% of our electricity from ‘clean’ sources in the next 25 years or less, what are we going to do when the sun shines too much and the wind blows too little during summer? What are we going to do when we’ve closed down the last coal fired power station and the sun doesn’t shine at all on bitterly cold, dark winter days and when the air is still and frosty? Solar power and wind power are not going to satisfy demand. We can’t store enough wind or solar generated electricity to power the nation for more than a few minutes at present and are unlikely to be able to do so using conventional battery storage at grid scale, which, even if it were possible, would require vast amounts of rare earth materials and would be hideously expensive. The lights are going to go out, the heating will fail, or the air conditioning will fail. Because you can’t power a modern economy using unreliable, intermittent, highly variable wind and solar power.

We could import ‘clean’ electricity from other countries. From Denmark for instance, via the newly built Viking Link interconnector. Brilliant. Except that maybe Denmark might be experiencing similar weather conditions and except for the fact that interconnectors can only supplement domestic electricity supply, not replace it.

My advice: buy candles and think about hiring a Punkah wallah.