What The Solar Industry Forgot To Tell You!

By Paul Homewood

http://eandt.theiet.org/news/2015/jul/solar-independence-day.cfm

The solar industry has apparently been bragging about how much power it has been producing recently. Unfortunately, they seem to have forgotten to tell us the full story.

In overall terms, solar only generated 1.2% of UK’s electricity last year.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/electricity-section-5-energy-trends

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/energy-trends-section-6-renewables

But worse still, in Q1, when demand is at its highest, solar only provided 0.51%.

And if that was not bad enough, when solar power does ramp up on sunny days, it simply provides problems for the grid, as this presentation from the National Grid earlier in the year showed:

At its peak around 2.00pm, solar was contributing about 14% of the UK’s total demand on 11th April, which would be around half the peak in winter months. This brought many problems with it, which required these actions from the National Grid:

So two additional conventional power stations were brought online for voltage management and 2,500 MW of wind ‘bought off’ (i.e. constrained) to make room for solar.

According to the Renewable Energy Foundation, “constraint payment records show that payments to wind topped £500,000 on that day. Not all of that will have been caused by solar, but NG’s figures suggest that a large part of it was so.”

Nobody with more than one brain cell would design an electricity network in this way.