Wind power

A simple question with a curious answer. From the London Daily Mail:

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows
This is the season for quizzes. So �fingers on buzzers, here�s your starter for ten. In percentage terms, how much electricity do Britain�s 3,150 wind �turbines supply to the �National Grid?

Is it: a) five per cent; b) ten per cent; or c) 20 per cent? Come on, I�m going to have to hurry you. No conferring.

Time�s up. The correct answer is: none of the above. Yesterday afternoon, the figure was just 1.6 per cent, according to the official website of the wholesale electricity market.

Over the past three weeks, with demand for power at record levels because of the freezing weather, there have been days when the contribution of our forests of wind turbines has been precisely nothing.

It gets better. As the temperature has plummeted, the turbines have had to be heated to prevent them seizing up. Consequently, they have been consuming more electricity than they generate.

Even on a good day they rarely work above a quarter of their theoretical capacity. And in high winds they have to be switched off altogether to prevent damage.

At best, the combined output of these monstrosities is equal only to that of a single, medium-sized, gas-fired power station.

To make matters worse, there is no way of storing the electricity generated on the rare occasions when they are working.

The joke of it is in the fact that there is no practical way to store the electricity. If you have a windmill farm with 10MW of capacity, you need to allow for the fact that at any given time, your output will be somewhat less than 10MW and many times it will be zero. You need to have an alternate form of electrical generating capacity running on hot standby so it can be switched in at a moments notice. This means that not only are you spending large sums of money for an unreliable source of electricity, you are still building and maintaining more new fossil fuel power plants to take over the load when the wind stops blowing. And this does what for the environment???