UK Wind Turbines Generate Less Than Half Their Capacity

The right-wing newspapers seem to love undermining renewable energy. So, when a conservation charity called the John Muir Trust came out with a report saying UK wind energy could not be relied on, those papers must have thought it was Christmas!

Under headlines like "Blow for green energy as wind farms are exposed as unreliable" and "A lot of hot air: Windfarms working at just 21% of capacity", they gleefully wrote off wind energy as a failure.

Fortunately, they got it all wrong (see here for more). The report focuses it's attention on a very narrow set of data: Mainly Scottish on-shore. Ignoring all off-shore which is known to give better performance, and most of the rest of the UK, which would have 'smoothed-out' the dips in energy production.

Something else the papers got wrong is the assumption that 20 to 30% of capacity somehow makes the turbines unviable. In fact, they are not expected to operate anywhere near 100%. The UK government is looking for 30% from off-shore, whilst Germany and Denmark want just 20%. At present, official UK government figures based on ALL the data put the on-shore production at between 26-30%, whilst off-shore is 27-35%.

So the newpapers get it wrong again. Big surprise.