Yesterday’s Times reported concerns about the effects of climate change on the ability of our wind turbines to produce electricity.
Citing a report commissioned from AEA by the Committee on Climate Change, it says that both heat waves & cold snaps tend to cause a drop in wind, & climate change will increase the frequency of these extremes. And as if heat & cold were not bad enough, too much wind is just as bad – the turbines stop generating above a certain windspeed!
So we will have to have other means of power generation on standby –perhaps even dirty coal.
I had some trouble tracking down the reports involved in all this – as usual no links were given.
There is something called "Adapting to climate change in the UK - measuring progress" - Adaptation Sub-Commitee Progress Report - 14 July 2011, but when I downloaded the pdf the search found no reference to wind at all – there is a lot about water & land use planning; I tried searching for ‘duration of lull periods’ which is given in quotes in The Times, but still no result.
So back to Google, where the search phrase did produce the goods – a report which was published on 20 May 2011.
Enough of grumbling - again - about how difficult it is to find government information on the web.
The main reason I thought to write something was the response from an organisation called RenewableUK quoted by The Times.
We can use electric cars for storage! Load up the battery while it is not too hot or too cold, then draw out the power from the batteries when the wind drops.
But whjat happens when you need to drive to the supermarket?
Why not just install batteries in the house to be kept topped up for drawing on if needed. Don’t we already do something like this with night storage heaters?
