On 1 December, The Spectator will be hosting a conference on the geopolitics of energy, featuring MP David Lidington, the UK’s minister of state for Europe, and Price Waterhouse Cooper’s chief UK economist John Hawksworth. Tickets are still available and can be purchased online.
The UK is quite windy. We need to reduce our carbon emissions. Take these two propositions together and it seems obvious that wind power could be a significant chunk of the solution. We already know that wind-power is costly and nearly always runs way below capacity. But a new paper out today suggests the problem is worse than that – its output is so variable and unreliable that we’d need nearly the same amount of fossil fuel capacity alongside wind just to guarantee supply.
The paper, Wind Power Reassessed by Capell Aris, released jointly by the Adam Smith Institute and the Scientific Alliance, looks past the average-efficiency numbers widely available to see how this average is actually arrived at.
Get Britain's best politics newsletters
Register to get The Spectator's insight and opinion straight to your inbox. You can then read two free articles each week.
Already a subscriber? Log in
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in