[NeedMoreTea]

There's just about zero chance of no wind even if you only consider the East and West coasts of Britain and Ireland. Both of which have colossal wind generation potential. Chances of the whole of Europe from Portugal to Romania, Malta to Finland being becalmed? Slim. :)

[littlestymaar]

> There's just about zero chance of no wind even if you only consider the East and West coasts of Britain and Ireland.

Almost zero chance, and yet it happens every year!

> Chances of the whole of Europe from Portugal to Romania, Malta to Finland being becalmed? Slim. :)

That's more true, byty that doesn't matter actually:

1- you can't expect one third of Europe to provide power for the whole continent when they are the only one with wind or you need to massively overdimension every country's power generation, to a point which is far from profitable.

2- the European grid don't work this way, you can't pump hundreds of gigawatts from one side of the grid to the other. Each link is only capable of transferring a few gigawatt at best from a country to another.

[NeedMoreTea]

For the odd day. It never happens for lengthy periods. Most of the time wind will be the right answer for significant generation in Britain and Ireland, with great interconnect export potential, so we'll use proportionally less solar and more wind in the mix than Italy will. :p

I simply don't understand why just about everyone on HN who argues against renewables presumes 100% solar, 100% wind, 100% whatever. Every nation will have an appropriate mix for their differing conditions -- isn't that obvious? Apparently it's really not. Interconnecting to nearby nations to move mainly westerly wind power eastwards, and mainly southerly solar northwards. Yet it's still worthwhile for Romania to be adding wind generation. It's still worthwhile for England and Scotland to add solar.

No one is expecting one nation to actually supply the whole of Europe -- grids are becoming more localised and far smarter within the European super-grid that's aiming for continent wide management. The UK is already seeing moves to demand shifting, and localised demand. We'll see far more of that fine level demand shifting, managing in-home batteries and grids managing ever more generating sources to keep to the best mix of sources at any given moment. Right now they do a fine job as you basically never realise the grid is even there, yet the mix of sources varies across every day throughout the year. How Orkney power companies manage it gives an idea where we're heading.

There's a lot of new interconnects in the pipeline across all of Europe too -- UK has 5 or 6 new ones coming soon. Scotland is progressing to new pumped storage of similar size to Dinorwig, though I'm not sure where in the approval process that currently is, or if it'll ultimately be rejected.

We'll all keep some generation of last resort -- right now, in the UK that's coal. It comes in as less economic than interconnects most of the time. There's a few (three or four IIRC) remaining coal plants, all of which are spending 99% of the time idling. Doing absolutely nothing but being ready for spin up. In five years all the coal will be closed, and it'll be the gas plants at the bottom of the heap. It's already uneconomic to build new gas.

[davidhbolton]

I analysed the Templar website grid watch records for I think 2017 and they showed a period of five days with no wind and overall, wind generation was about 30% of the rated maximum over the year. Also don't forget that turbines close down if the winds are too strong as well as too weak.

[michaelt]

Apologies for the tiny size of this graph: https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/coal-nuke-ccgt-wind-year.png that's based on live data, see https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

There may never be sustained periods of zero wind, but there are certainly some months with much less wind than others.

[NeedMoreTea]

Sure, and that's not ever in dispute. That's what the grid manage on a daily basis, and the reason we have a mix of sources, and need to always have a mix of renewables. We're also only using a tiny amount of the renewable potential. Not forgetting offshore alone is even less variable.

The only thing that matters is getting the right mix for the local conditions, and a grid capable of managing the rising amount of generating sources properly, and smartly. So far the grid's side of things is being done pretty well, and is pushing and promoting faster renewable adoption. The Westminster political part not so much.

Wind can provide the bulk of regional need, but clearly can't ever be 100%. The resulting mix also has to allow for keeping the lights on in once in a century conditions as well as normality -- an increasing challenge with changing climate.

[makomk]

This might be clearer on the larger graphs at https://gridwatch.co.uk/Wind