Wind Energy Too Unreliable For UK, Study Finds.
A conservative British think tank has concluded that wind energy can’t be relied on to meet the United Kingdom’s power needs and must be supplemented with fossil-fuel power plants.
A study issued Oct. 27 by the London-based Adam Smith Institute (ASI) says there are wide fluctuations in the output of wind farms because of the equally wide fluctuations in the presence of wind. Therefore, it concludes, the wind farms will need to be backed up by powerful conventional generators.
In the study, the ASI constructed mathematical models of the likely output from a planned 10-gigawatt fleet of wind farms. It found that for fully 20 weeks in an average year, the farms would produce less than 2 gigawatts of power, and for nine weeks of that year it would generate less than one-tenth of that figure.
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