Windmills and Baseload
The physical realities of Net Zero will severely impact wind farm capacity factors, and therefore your energy bills.
A favourite wheeze of the charlatans who are robbing you blind in the name of Net Zero, is to deny “baseload”. Simultaneously, they attempt to discredit nuclear generation, and fraudulently distort the economics of nuclear, by claiming that utilisation rates (“Capacity Factors”) of nuclear will be much lower than the reality.
We will return later to the wilful disinformation about nuclear, but let us first examine the implications of baseload in a Net Zero scenario.
Like so much about the entire neo-Marxist globalist scam, the deception has been planned and implemented for far longer than most of the climate alarmist useful idiots realise, as this article from 2012 demonstrates. The whole thing is arrant nonsense, epitomised in our highlighted words from this quote:
“Baseload. It’s the word everyone knows about electricity generation now, bandied around in pubs and on QandA. Broadly speaking, baseload generation can be thought of as ‘energy supply that is available all the time’. It was mostly created as a term to differentiate fossil fuel power from renewables, whose energy source is intermittent. A less conciliatory way of thinking of baseload is “electricity supply which is too inflexible to switch on or off”.
Taking the second highlighted phrase first - “It was mostly created as a term to differentiate fossil fuel power from renewables” - this is just a straightforward lie. Baseload (or base load) is a standard industry term that has been in use for at least the last 50 years, well before any concept of large scale “renewable” generation.
Then there is the assertion that baseload is primarily a generation term. Base𝗹𝗼𝗮𝗱, as the term implies, is a demand-side issue, and a simple reality of the way in which electricity is consumed by end users. Domestic examples might be your refrigerator, freezer, intruder alarm, summer air conditioning, and standby consumption of various devices. Soon to be joined, if you believe the deranged narrative of the climate crazies, by “always on” heat pumps during the winter months and staggered trickle-charging of electric vehicles. Non-domestic examples will be 24 hour manufacturing industries, street lighting and traffic signalling, and so on.
Baseload demand refers to the minimum load in a defined period which must then (of course) be supplied from baseload generation - for which nuclear is ideal. It varies by season, day of week and time of day, as illustrated by the examples at figure 1. Typical summer weekday baseload is currently around 20 GW, with winter baseload typically around 30 GW.
At mid-day on the Summer Solstice, UK Solar is performing well, providing 9.35 GW, or 27% of demand. Even so, with negligible free-flowing hydro, wind only contributing 4%, and 7% from questionably renewable biomass, it is clear that renewables on this particular day do not come close to meeting the UK’s baseload requirements. Gas (CCGT) and nuclear to the rescue, again, along with significant net imports via various interconnectors - largely from French nuclear.
Intermittent (aka unreliable) renewables simply cannot be relied upon to provide baseload generation - so, naturally, the Net Zero scamsters work to misrepresent the term, and then airbrush it from history.
In addition to baseload, we need flexible, “dispatchable”, generation to “load follow” the peaks which occur very predictably throughout the day, the week, the seasons and the year. In the UK’s case at present, this is predominantly from gas-fired generation and dispatchable biomass (burning trees!).
In a Net Zero scenario, the “plan” (such as it is) is that fossil fuels will be removed entirely from the baseload picture and will be used only as emergency backup for renewables and for occasional extreme “peak lopping”. The obvious implication is that baseload will be supported by renewables.
By now, almost everyone is familiar with the fatal flaw in this “plan” - that, in an extended wind drought, especially in winter (when UK Solar will always be negligible), gas backup capacity will need to cover the full winter maximum demand requirement: Up to 250 GW, as we have previously documented. This expensive gas backup plant will sit idle for most of the time, significantly increasing your bills.
However, the “plan” is to minimise the periods when gas backup needs to be used (in order to limit the aggregate volume of CO₂ emissions). The problem of wind intermittency is typically one of wide variability, rather than an extreme Dunkelflaute. Generally, especially across a sufficiently wide geographical area, some fraction of the “ideal” amount of wind is available, allowing a corresponding percentage of generation. For any specific turbine or wind farm, this translates into a theoretical “Capacity Factor” (CF), or utilisation rate, which can be used to estimate the annual output - and thus commerciality - of that installation.
As we have previously documented, the overall CF of the UK’s entire wind fleet in recent years has been around 32%. This means, simplistically, that at any randomly selected point in time, a particular wind farm may be producing around 1/3 of its nominal rated output. In reality, things are complex, because the strength and reliability of the wind varies throughout the seasons. Forecasts for under-construction and future wind farms, for example Dogger Bank, predict much higher theoretical CF’s of up to 55%.
Unsurprisingly, the economics of wind generation are very dependent on assumptions about CF, and they are a key input parameter to the calculation of the “Levelised Cost of Energy” (LCOE) used in assessing the business case for any wind farm development.
We seriously question the assumption of a 55% theoretical CF for Dogger Bank, or any offshore wind farm, especially given the relative under-performance of the UK wind fleet in recent years - just 25%, for example, in 2021, as reported by DUKES in 2022.
However, let’s take the claim at face value, and assume a possible theoretical capacity factor of the UK wind fleet at, say 45% overall.
Again, simplistically, this means that, to guarantee meeting 100% of winter demand, the nominal rated capacity of the wind fleet would need to be 250 GW (maximum demand), divided by 0.45 (CF), i.e. 555 GW. But, as we said earlier, wind strength and reliability vary through the seasons. To get an “official” estimate of a representative winter seasonal CF for the entire UK wind fleet, we’d have to rely on the very same unreliable sources who constantly promote a false narrative of Net Zero viability - so, for our purpose of a high level illustration, we will err on the side of cautious generosity and reduce the installed capacity requirement significantly, to 350GW.
So, in summary, we estimate that a Net Zero scenario would need 350 GW of UK wind generation capacity, in order to meet winter maximum demand - but the average Net Zero demand for electricity would be well below this - around 137 GW, using our earlier estimate of 1,200 TWh annual energy demand (after efficiency savings).
The implication is obvious. 137/350 = 39%. What this means, in practice, is that we would need to extensively “overbuild” wind capacity - by a multiple 2.5 times, in order to meet both the baseload and peaking requirements of the UK with wind power.
The assumptions we have made above about overall and seasonal CF's are very generous to the wind zealots but, almost irrespective of the theoretical CF, 39% is the maximum realistic, market dependent, CF we can hope to achieve from a generation portfolio dominated by wind. In reality, wind droughts, equipment breakdowns and so on are almost certain to reduce this further.
Crucially, while a Net Zero generation portfolio will be dominated by wind, it will not consist exclusively of wind. There will also be Solar and nuclear contributions, as well as residential battery installations to complement rooftop solar, especially in Summer, which will reduce the demand for wind.
Above, we have calculated an overbuild factor of 2.5 but, crucially, this is measured against winter maximum demand. Looking at summer demand, the overbuild is closer to 10 times: On a sunny day in mid-summer, it is quite possible that, even in a Net Zero environment, demand for wind generation may drop well below 50 GW. On an “ideal” windy day, 300 GW of available wind generation will therefore be unusable - but we currently have no wholesale market mechanism to cope with such massive “curtailment” of wind farm output.
Who is going to pay for “loss of revenue” to the wind farms? We’ll give you one guess …
Back very briefly to nuclear CF’s. At present, these are typically ~90%, certainly in the UK. Bizarrely, the Net Zero zealots use exactly the rationale we have outlined above to argue that, in a grid dominated by nuclear (i.e. where nuclear is not used exclusively as a significant contribution to baseload requirements, but rather is required to “load follow”) nuclear CF’s would necessarily fall dramatically, and nuclear costs would consequently rise proportionally.
Of course, this would be true, but it is a typically fraudulent straw man invented by the usual suspects. Other than a few naïve social media enthusiasts, nobody is seriously suggesting that the nuclear component of the UK energy system should exceed even 10% of our overall energy needs.
The “Capacity Factor Trap” will never impact the economics of nuclear power, but it is absolutely guaranteed that it will further wreck the economics of renewables in anything like a Net Zero scenario.
If we do not put a complete stop to the fraudulent grifting scam that is Net Zero, expect to pay close to £1/kWh for electricity in the UK in 10 or 15 years time. The current Ofgem price cap is ~24p/kWh for electricity, and ~6p/kWh for gas (both due to fall slightly from July 1st).
The entire cult of Net Zero is insane. Don’t say we didn’t warn you…