Great Britain's electricity supply during lockdown.

2 May 2020

Another week of reduced demand during lockdown. What happened to the wind?

Following on from last week’s news item, the graph below shows how renewables contributed to the reduced demand over a further week when grid demand was reduced.

It can be clearly seen that although wind made a significant contribution on Monday and Tuesday, by Thursday this had dropped to virtually nothing where it remained for the rest of the week.

• Wind averaged 20.1% over the week, but averages are meaningless if the source of energy is not available when required.


• Nuclear again made a steady contribution (25.3% on average) and Biomass (9.4%) was ramped up to counteract the fall in wind from Thursday onwards.


• Interconnectors (10.7%), were also running about maximum over much of the same period.


• Once again gas (CCGT) was the fuel used to meet the varying peak demands and was again the major overall contributor (32.5%).

So, once again wind has failed to help meet demand over a prolonged period.

So much for the proposed National Grid strategy of trebling the wind capacity. This would not change the demand for gas at periods such as this shown and would also make the country more reliant on imported electricity at a considerable cost during periods of high demand.