16 January 2012

By Kari Williamson

Dr Gordon Edge, RenewableUK’s Director of Policy, comments: “Wind energy represents a new paradigm in electricity generation, allowing us to harness the power of the weather when it’s available, cutting our fossil fuel bills and lowering our carbon emissions. 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.”

The National Grid 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 variable output of wind generators involves taking a range of balancing actions, including reducing the rate at which fossil fuel generators consume fuel when wind output is higher.

Last year, the National Grid launched a new wind power forecasting system, allowing their engineers to more accurately predict output from the UK’s growing fleet of wind farms.