IT is commendable that The Herald today includes a major piece on Climate Week within the Commercial Focus section.
It’s a shame though that the separate report on the North
Kyle wind farm carries the perennial unquestioning, inaccurate, misleading renewables industry soundbite asserting the untruth that “its 49 wind turbines will generate enough green energy to power the equivalent of 168,000 homes each year” (“First turbines of wind farm that will power 170,00 homes installed”, The Herald, September 23). They won’t.
As always the renewables industry present the potential maximum output capability as the yearly performance which, presumably wittingly, misleads the general public.
Average figures for central Scotland wind farm output are approximately 30-35% of installed capacity. On many days it will be zero.
These repetitive untruths which can only be interpreted as deliberate have overtones of Orwell’s masterpiece 1984 and would put a manipulating dictatorship to shame.
Here is this past week’s reality. The renewables publicity cohort including those salaried by the energy companies were unsurprisingly having a quiet time at the office over the past week. Trumpets are being rested. Perhaps being polished for the next windy day. Why?
In the calm early autumn weather there is a message that their working arrangement with the energy companies likely requires them to ignore.
UK wind output was again in collapse for six of the last seven days, delivering only around 4.7 to 11.0% of our electricity needs from less than 2GW to 3.9GW at lunchtime Monday from a Uk-installed operational capacity, in May this year, of circa 30 GW.
Scotland has mostly been importing power from England over the last week, reaching at one random check more than 1100MW, which is almost the output of the two nuclear reactors at soon-to-close Torness.
Gas and nuclear generation are today having to produce almost 20GW, some 56.5% of our needs, ie more than five times today’s wind output and have been as high as 10 times that of wind in recent days. The UK is importing a further 13% of our power needs from our European friends: more than the output of our largely becalmed wind, and imports have been periodically as high as three times wind output in the last week For almost every day up to last Thursday we have been running the last remaining coalfired station to help plug the shortfall, possibly to ensure we have adequate inertia in the Grid to protect against dangerous frequency variations. It is scheduled to close on September 30.
Senior politicians need to be aware of today’s all-too-frequent scenario and look down both barrels of energy reality.
Worryingly for us consumers, I doubt that they are or will.
DB Watson, Cumbernauld.
IAIN Mcintyre suggests in his letter (September 21) that I might believe in electricity being beamed down from the heavens, while, if he had read my letter of September 17 carefully, it is quite clear that I do not (geomagnetic storms excepted, since they represent a threat rather than a usable source of energy). My response to his original letter of September 16 was prompted by the possible confusing message in his letter that a statement about cloud storage and electrical energy might have with some readers. Mr Mcintyre describes himself as an engineer and I have no desire to trade qualifications with him. I would describe myself as well informed on the basis that I am also a professional engineer who spent his whole career in the electricity supply industry and worked closely with power generation, grid control and transmission. While I am not arrogant enough to claim that I know everything about the supply of electrical power, I believe I am reasonably well informed on most of the issues.
What I, and my professional colleagues, are concerned about is the failure of government to recognise the need for an entirely independent national energy authority charged with strategic planning which is solely directed to delivering a secure energy system at optimal cost. Levelised costs tell us something but provide a very incomplete story. It is whole system costs that should concern us and be the focus of entirely independent expertise and critical thinking about our energy future, rather than the short-term objectives of shareholders and politicians. How the new Government’s GB Energy fits these requirements is as yet unknown.
Norman McNab
Killearn
(This is the letter to which Norman refers).
LET me assure Norman McNab (“The renewable energy myth”, letters, September 17) that there is no magic system which allows electricity to be beamed down from the heavens and that the ignorance is in fact on his part. Unfortunately in my original letter (“Electricity: go for location pricing”, September 16) I made the mistake of assuming that everyone knew that “Cloud Storage” relates to the remote storage of electronic data which allows large amounts of data to be stored in a central location for use by the owner wherever required. As an engineer I learned early in my career that it is dangerous to assume anything so I apologise for confusing Mr McNab. The storage of massive amounts of electronic data uses a lot of electricity and also generates a lot of unwanted heat at relatively low temperature which can be utilised using a Heat Pump system to extract low-grade heat energy from a low temperature heat source as defined by the combined gas laws which show that Pressure x Volume / Temperature is equal to a Constant. A Heat Pump can generate over 3 KW of heat energy from 1 KW of electrical energy. Please note that this is not free energy, but merely changing one form of energy to another form as energy can neither be created nor destroyed. (Trust me, I’m an engineer). To counter another of Mr McNab’s misconceptions regarding the cost of electricity generated from wind power I suggest he reads the information released by some very clever chaps in the UK Government’s Department for Energy Security & Net Zero which can be found at Electricity generation costs 2023 – GOV.UK which shows clearly that the cheapest way to generate electricity is from wind turbines. The “Levelised costs” provided are a measure of the average net cost of electricity generation for a generator over its lifetime and should not be confused with the “Strike Price” which is the price that OFGEM has agreed for a generation site and it can be increased to provide incentive to develop the specific generation process, hence the very high Strike Price for floating offshore wind generation. There are some well-informed professionals who look at what is required to meet our needs for energy and I suggest that comment is left to those who know what they are talking about instead of from those who have become an expert by reading information provided online by authors who have an agenda other than spreading genuine information. As Scotland produces a large amount of this cheap energy from wind turbines it would be nice if our prices reflected this and the lower prices used to attract worthwhile jobs and to avoid fuel poverty and hypothermia. Iain McIntyre, Sauchie.
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