cold and no wind happens sometimes

Wind 3.3% is actually contributing more to the UK grid today than coal

1.28% is. There are very few coal fired power stations left.

The biggest ones have all been converted to biomass 6% burning stuff that we import from the USA and Canada trashing primary forests:

Drax Corporation sounds like a Bond villain for good measure.

Gridwatch shows that demand is in the orange right now and will inevitably go into the red when people get home and put their cookers on. Most of the electricity generating and continental interlinks are maxxed out they are even using pumped storage at this point in the day.

More than half the UK's electricity is from gas turbines (and that goes up to 60% when everything is running flat out in winter). The *big* gotcha is that we have roughly 10 days gas storage capacity at an average burn rate (less when it is all running flat out).

Solar in winter at our latitude isn't worth having. It has been grey and foggy for most of today and solar panels are all covered in thick hoar frost.

Most of the UK's electricity generation problems are of the governments making - experts have been warning for decades that the lack of investment in infrastructure and the dash for gas left us dangerously exposed. They closed down the last big gas storage facility in 2017 and are frantically trying to get it back online. We will end up paying insane spot market prices for gas and electricity to keep the lights on.

Or not - there are plans for rolling powercuts that the government hopes not to have to use. I have recently bought a higher capacity UPS and already had a generator. We were off grid for two days last year and I fully expect it to be very much worse this time around.

Oddly, the combination of cold and windless is more important than cloudy and windless; the great smog of winter 1952 killed thousands in London, due to trapped coal fire emissions.

So earthquake by fracking, or earthquake by geobattery. Choose your poison!

What they need is energy storage. What they should use until that becomes a useful reality is most likely nuclear.

As for photovoltaics and cold weather, PV works better at cold temperatures but you still need sun.

boB

Enough energy storage to get a country (or a house) reliable power through the winter will be insanely expensive, but insanely expensive is what some people want.

“Under my plan … electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

Barack Obama

Although the national Grid did ask them to warm up ready they were stood down again in the early afternoon without ever being put onto the grid.

UK energy policy fail is not so much due to greens as a total lack of investment in any new plant for a very long time. Shutting down the gas bulk storage facility in 2017 was the dumbest thing they have done recently. Vast numbers of power supply companies have gone but here because of deregulation - they had no clue what they were doing and were annihilated when the price of gas and electricity went up last year.

Here is a very relevant warning from one expert, Professor Ian Fells back in 2008 it is almost prescient in what he predicts will happen if nothing is done (and predictably nothing was done).

You merely need more generating capacity than you'd need in mid-summer. Grid energy storage doesn't store a season's worth of power - it stores enough to carry you through brief periods of low generation.

Then China started making solar cells in ten times the volume that anybody had before, the unit price halved, and solar cells became the cheapest source of electricity.

The fossil fuel extraction industry doesn't put that fact into their climate change denial propaganda and John Larkin still isn't aware of it.

At latitudes where daylights lasts 'a few hours', vertical panels are what you'd want, aimed at the horizon, where the sun is. So, the '50 cm of snow' problem doesn't arise unless the snow sticks on verticals.

When the snow in front of the panels acts as a mirror, the panel will get some extra photons...

While installing the panels on a south facing wall will solve the snow problem, however the air mass issue

be considered. When the sun is 5 degrees above the horizon (85 degree zenith distance) the sun rays must pass through about 10 air masses, the illumination level (and hence panel output power) will drop to 1/4 compared to the high sun situation.

Clouds are also harmful when the sun is quite low. Even when the sky is partially cloudy and some blue sky can be seen, the clouds will quite effectively block the rays from a the sun close to the horizon.

However, a vertical panel is quite ineffective in the summer.

This help in March and April, when the sun is higher and the angles are more favorable.