The CEO of Centrica, owner of British Gas, has cautioned that Britain “runs a real risk” by overly focusing on wind power instead of maintaining a diverse energy mix.
Chris O’Shea highlighted data showing that the UK’s wind farms utilized only 15% of their power-generating capacity on average last week.
Although Britain has approximately 30GW of installed wind generation capacity, it typically produced only 4.41GW of electricity during that period.
Mr. O’Shea expressed his concerns on LinkedIn, stating: What a beautiful weekend-lovely weather, which helped our renewable energy generation……or did it?
The UK has around 30GW of installed wind generation capacity which has generated 4.41GW of electricity on average in the last week.
This means less than 15% utilisation. If you look over the last year, wind has generated 9.43GW, which takes the utilisation up to 30%.
So when we’re looking at the energy system of the future, we need to think carefully about whether focussing too much on building more wind generation will help, or will it simply mean the utilisation of the UK’s wind generation fleet becomes worse?
And should we ask why subsidies are needed for wind farms in the form of a guaranteed price for the electricity produced? It’s served us well in the past, and it may well serve us well in the future, but we should at least ask the question.
Whilst wind power is great, we run a real risk if we focus too much on new wind as we look to decarbonise the energy system of the future. A net zero future requires a range of technologies and a good balance.
