This is because large parts of the north sea are shallow/have banks that very large offshore wind farms can be built on.
No terrain to get in the way, no people to object about it being close to their house.
Scotland is also windy and not that populated and so has quite a few onshore farms.
Eg see.
https://orsted.com/en/media/newsroom/news/2022/08/2022083155....
I'm not sure whether this MP was in the pocket of gas, coal or nuclear interests or whatever but he successfully rounded up residents to NIMBY what would have been the biggest wind farm to date even though it would have barely have been visible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navitus_Bay_wind_farm
I was bitter before. Doubly so now electricity prices are through the roof.
I note that the successful argument was based on the imagined impact to the tourism industry, rather than the visual effect per se.
Electricity prices would still be through the roof. The prices are all set on the international markets.
Only to the extent that electricity can be imported and exported via international connectors, which are of course limited in their capacity.
Prices are not set internationally, but domestically. Energy is not a tangible, stored commodity like coal which is internationally priced.
If what you said was true then America's electricity would be priced the same as Europe's, whereas it is way cheaper.
Therefore building out additional electricity production in the UK could well lower prices, depending on matching of demand and supply, agreed prices in contracts, length of contracts, etc, and of course whether additional connectors are deployed.
Even if you didn’t believe in man-made global warming, surely the idea of cleaner Scottish air would be a bonus.
Clearly due to the nature of grids and shared generation nobody can guarantee that all electrons used came from wind power (nor does anyone care!?!) but Scotland is an exporter of energy and at times its entire needs could be met from its renewable generation.
Not sure which part of Scotland producing lots of renewable energy you find difficult to cope with, but renewable production is here to stay, cheaper than other sources and a growing part of the mix.
About end of the Stone Age ~15,000BC you could still walk from UK to Europe - there is I believe evidence of civilisation and villages down there still.
Solar in the UK is highly seasonal. A ~4kW installation that generated 500kWh in June might only produce 50kWh in December [1] - whereas a ~4kW install in Spain might generate 700kWh in June and 200kWh in December [2]
So if you want power output in December, Solar in the UK isn't the best choice :)
[1] https://pvoutput.org/aggregate.jsp?id=43099&sid=39381&v=0&t=... [2] https://pvoutput.org/aggregate.jsp?id=91812&sid=81184&v=0&t=...
In the Mediterranean area, while there is more prevalence of solar, it's not a clear winner either. For instance in Italy there is quite an aggressive law on usage of agricultural space for big solar farms. Solar will win in the decentralized, domestic space, an area that I'm highly interested in. At scale, Wind seems to offer a better ROI, especially on country on the coast line (or other favourable morphological characteristic)
I'm heavily looking to switch to work on the space (from more traditional consumer products), but it's a more full stack space: software is written as a byproduct of the hardware. unfortunately I haven't found any Electrical engineering interesting in doing something in the space. Shameless plug if there is someone out there interested.
At the same time they are thinking about allowing wind on land again (probably because it will no longer be the cheaper option).
Given their links to fossil fuel interests it comes across as delaying tactics.
That's actually changed as of this week https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63880999
> how to write software for renewable energy farms ... wind or solar.
Basically this means working for Siemens. I don't think they have a huge number of software engineers, it's mostly MechE.
(this is one reason why the amount of storage required for an all solar/wind grid is usually vastly overestimated).
If you look at graphs of the wind and solar production in winter vs summer, the correlation is obvious. On a day-to-day basis, much less so, but on average low wind does tend to come along with higher sun.
This only happens in the designed operating window ( too light you get nothing, too strong you need to shut down ).
So one question is what window have your tuned your farm for?
Air density matters as well - the denser the more power - ie the colder the more power.....
So whether it's anti-correlated might a local feature depending on the local factors driving the weather?
Perhaps stronger correlation would be that air movement ( wind ) is the thing that drives the weather changing. ie no wind, means slow change ( though the opposite isn't necessarily true - if you are in the centre of a cyclic weather system which isn't moving you could have wind and not much change ).
ie if you have a solar panel on your roof and mostly use it to reduce the power you take from the grid, all you will see in the national numbers is lower demand, not increased production.
I think the estimate is that maybe as much as 5GW of UK wind nameplate capacity is unmetered, so it's a minority of wind power, but it's a big minority.
There's no central register of unmetered power generation, the assumption used is that if on a windy day mysteriously we're buying 25GW from the grid across the country, while on a similar but calm day it was 30GW that suggests 5GW of electricity is not being purchased when it's windy, implying 5GW of unmetered electricity supply from wind.
And there are presumably other embedded systems making up some of that 5GW estimate. Farms just seem obvious because 1) I've seen farms with wind turbines 2) They're industrial scale electricity users, often occupying terrain very suitable for a wind turbine
We can forecast the embedded generation in real-time, but it’s only post event once the meter data has been accounted for that we know what actually happened.
( The suns out! Put on the washing machine/dish washer etc ).
Bottom line - not all the local solar production is measured at the grid level - much of it results in demand reduction which can't be directly attributed.
I think this will only increase - either due to local batteries, or more electricity driven heating systems ( heat pumps for example ).
And this isn't just homes - if you have a farm and have a big water reservoir which you fill by pumping water - and you had some solar panels - you'd just run the pumps when it was sunny - there is no particular need to run them at particular times ( same if you had a wind driven pump ).
(Not saying it does go the other way in capacity though, I don't know.)
Ok wow.
I assumed solar would be the thing that takes over, and In Spain that's probably true. But here it seems wind is going to be a win.
Anyway I still need to work out how to spend my declining years - how to write software for renewable energy farms ... wind or solar.