Brits stiff U.K. electric company despite island winds producing more power

England’s primary electricity company, the National Grid, says a windy December generated 41.2% of the island’s electricity for the month, a staggering number that surpassed natural gas, which supplied 25.8% of the country’s power during the Christmas holidays.

Great Britain has more than 11,000 wind turbines with a total capacity of 30 gigawatts, the sixth largest of any country in the world. Wind generates more than a quarter of the country’s energy source, the largest source of renewable energy in the country, according to a 2023 report published by the United Kingdom's Department for Energy and Net Zero.

England is also considered to be the best location in Europe for wind power and one of the best places on the planet because of its island coastline, strong winds, and shallow water, making offshore winds impactful.

But while wind and solar are often promoted as the most cost effective form of energy, there are significant  costs that come with them since they rely on good weather, storage and transmission lines.

The British Office of National Statistics reported Thursday that the number of households that neglected to pay their December energy bills in December jumped 39% compared to the same month a year ago, according to a report published by Reuters.

In England, the yearly share of electricity used from wind and solar power escalated from less than 1% to 29% in 2022.

Natural has accounted for 32% of the nation’s energy followed by wind energy generating 29.4% and nuclear producing 14.2%, according to an annual electricity review from the National Grid.

Costs to maintain alternative energy sources and facilities can also be more expensive that natural gas energy plants.

In a recent Jan. 12 Just the News story, the online news source cited grid expert Lee Cordner, who calculated what it would cost to replace a 100 megawatt natural gas-fired power plant with a solar and battery facility.

According to JTN, “while a natural gas plant costs $125 million and uses about $10 million in fuel per year, the wind and battery system would cost approximately $2 billion and have to be replaced every 10 to 20 years.”

To prove his point, Cordner compared a single, 100-megawatt data center running on natural gas-fired power with an average energy consumption size of 100 megawatts.

In the hypothetical, the plant would run 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, totaling just under 900,000 megawatt hours per year.

He  then analyzed the costs for the same facility entirely on solar and batteries.

A 100-megawatt gas turbine, Cordner said, costs $125 million and uses about $10 million in fuel per year. The plant runs 96% of the time.

According to Market Watch, the average solar farm costs $1 million per megawatt.

Energy education site, How to Store Electricity, run by Czech expert Kamil Talar, says that a battery facility costs between $300,000-$600,000 per megawatt hour.

A 100-megawatt solar farm can produce power for 6-7 hours (600 megawatt hours) on a day filled with sunshine, Cordner said.

Keeping the data center running day and night would take 1,800 megawatt hours of battery storage, batteries, which according to Cordner, have to be cooled.

Such cooling systems can require up 70% of their power intake.

For his hypothetical, Cordner said only 30% of the power going into the battery facility would be used to cool it.

“So you put in 100 megawatt hours, you run the cooling system, and you can only get 70 megawatt hours coming back,” Cordner explained.

Therefore, to satisfy the 1,800 megawatts of storage needed, the battery facility would need 2,400 megawatts to make up for energy lost in running the facility.

For a 400-megawatt solar farm, the data center would need to spend $400 million dollars, and for the battery facility costs, Cordner said it would cost $500,000 per megawatt hour or a total of $1.2 billion dollars.

Since solar power produces less power on cloudy and rainy days, weather would decrease the solar output by half when the sun is shining. Conversely, the center may have too much power without adequate storage facilities during the summer when there’s constant sunshine.

Cordner estimated a battery-solar system would cost $0.17-0.34 per kilowatt hour whereas at current natural gas prices, a gas fired power plant would cost about $0.05 per hour.

During a seven year span from 2015 to 2022, wind and solar production increased in the United States from 5.6% of the electricity produced to nearly 15%.

The average U.S. electricity rate for all sectors in October 2023 was estimated at 12.68 cents per kilowatt hour.