www.businessgreen.com
9 Jan 2012
Industry welcomes news that wind farms supplied 5.3% of UK electricity from December 1 to January 5.
Can you can remember where you were on 28 December? Perhaps you were visiting relatives, or maybe you were back at work secretly wishing you were hiding under your new slanket and watching another re-run of Only Fools and Horses. Wherever you were, chances are that you were not working quite as hard as the country's wind turbine fleet, which was spinning enough to set a new record for green electricity supplies. According to trade association RenewableUK, wind farms met an average of 5.3% of the UK's electricity demand between 1 December and 5 January, hitting a record share of 12.2% on 28 December.
The trade association estimated the high yield cut more than 750,000 tonnes of carbon emissions from the UK's electricity generators over the festive period, the equivalent of taking more than 300,000 cars off the roads. In fact, RenewableUK reckons the figures could be almost 50% higher than those stated as they are derived from Elexon's Balancing Mechanism Reports, which ignores many onsite generators and only monitors turbines connected to the National Grid.
Dr Gordon Edge, RenewableUK director of policy, hailed the National Grid's ability to cope with the increased levels of wind power, as it is responsible for balancing the output of the UK's electricity generators with demand from consumers and businesses on a minute-by-minute basis. Integrating the intermittency of wind turbines involves taking a range of balancing actions, including reducing the rate at which fossil fuel power stations consume fuel when wind output is higher. "As we're generating increasingly large amounts of electricity from wind, feeding those large volumes of power into the system represents an engineering challenge to the National Grid-a challenge we are pleased to see they met over Christmas", said Edge
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