A lack of connections to the national grid, which was not designed to channel power from the scattered and remote locations that suit renewables, has stalled the uptake of alternative energy in Britain

Correction: ...has been claimed as an excuse to stall the uptake of alternative energy in Britain. (And same story in many other countries.)

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

Aint' it that it is those important incumbent operators who have no alternative to keep their dominant role but building new nuclear?

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

Under current British grid access arrangements, producers have to indicate in advance (one day in advance, I think) their production for each hour or half-hour slot (again, sorry for the slight imprecisions), and they have to pay penalties if the volume of electricity they bring in during that period is either too high or too low. This is of course quite penalising for pure wind producers.

So what has happened is that wind producers in the UK have to sign PPAs (power purchase agreements) with the utilities, on a "full production" basis - ie the utility takes whatever is produced, and deals with the balancing requirements. Of course, this means that wind producers sell electricity at a heavy discount to market prices.

The dirty secret is that utilities have no problem whatsoever managing their overall load into the system, and they absorb the wind intermittency within their existing production portfolio, thus capturing for themselves most of the discount they charge to wind producers.

This underlines that wind can easily be integrated in the grid if done on a wider scale than individual projects, and that the current regulatory arrangements in the UK are very unfavorable to wind. and of course, given that state of things, higher "green certificates" are needed to promote wind, which allows to bring up accusations of the cost of wind, even though most of that subsidy goes to line up the pockets of the utilities...

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

weren't the brits the last to cotton on to central heating in europe too?

well, if they insist...

this is gordo's secret mission, a more recalcitrant politician would be hard to find these days. typically insular, myopic, dishonest and life-threatening in his constipated thinking.

would he have any of his so-called good reputation as chancellor, if the n. sea and advent of cell-phone frequency contracts had not swelled the exchequer so?

didn't think so, fossil fool... all that wasted windy goodness lying idle in scotland, and he a scot too.

scabrous ain't the word... eventually the brits will look across the channel and figure it out, in spite of what whitehall does to keep britain beholden to an archaic grid, and it's people poisoned by obsolete technology.

anglo disease, par quintessence...

cutting his nose to spite his face, i think they used to call it.

"These days, there's nothing more ridiculous than the truth." Leonard Pitts Jr

The wind industry has a very well-funded propaganda machine and powerful lobbyists. This article, using previously unpublished data, is an attempt to redress the balance, to cut through the fog of misrepresentation, and establish one simple fact which the wind industry does not like the public or the Government to understand:

Virtually all the energy contribution from onshore wind turbines will have to be backed-up.
.....
Although the BWEA and others attempt to confuse the issue and everybody, by talking about balancing requirement, capacity credits and percentages of capacity and percentages of output, the question that arises is, very simply - what percentage of installed wind capacity can be statistically relied upon to meet peak demand? It is important to be sure of this, to determine what back-up capacity is required.
.....

It is hoped that this article will do something to disperse the smokescreen put up by the BWEA and others.

One should bear in mind that individuals in the wind development companies and investors are making a considerable amount of money from over-subsidised onshore turbines.

German and UK wind power output for February 2008
Feb 08 Click to enlarge

They bear none of the incremental costs required to support an intermittent and, at times, virtually non-existent energy source.

This cost is borne by the consumers, as is the cost of the subsidy payments that make the investment returns for turbines so high.

It is little less than Government sponsored robbery of the poor for the benefit of the rich.

This article is a classic example of what tbg rails so often about,  frame-stealing and twisting.  Twisting E.ons stats is unconscionable; would that BWEA had a decent media-trained response team.

Skennah Kowa

the UK is busy trying to ensure that EU directives don't require it to give renewable energy sources priority access to the national grid: that might undermine important incumbent operators who provide jobs for the boys when they leave public service.

It is difficult to overestimate the damage that public officials can do when self-interested careerism is allowed to flourish.  As a project engineer and manager with an electronics systems company in Los Angeles I was sometimes involved in projects done for export.  I would build and test the system.  It would be loaded into a 20' or 40' shipping container and sent to Africa or the Mid East.  We would then cash the letter of credit.  

On at least two occasions I am aware of, these containers, with million + dollar systems, were simply placed in the desert or the jungle to wait.  The only benefit the purchaser received from the investment was the 10% "sales commission" which I presumed to have been paid to the responsible official in the destination country.  I thought "Geez, they will squander a million dollars just so some clown can pocket a hundred thou!"  Shocking.

But thus taught to recognize the scheme, I began to see it in play with public money on infrastructure projects in Los Angeles and to recognize the symptoms in national policies and projects.  I had to conclude that so called "1st world" countries were no better off than corrupt 2nd and 3rd world countries.  The only difference was that our theives had more sophisticated  PR.  Welcome to the 3rd world.

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.