I thought the issue with wind in the UK was that its supply is (Scotland) where the demand isn’t (the south). So we’d (a) have to build loads of pylons or expensive underground cables and (b) lose a lot in transmission.
I know that a mere back-of-the-envelope calculation isn't worth much more than the used envelope it was written on (doubly so when it is based on guesstimates of the input numbers), but that would be only £1bn for 8 GW or £4bn for 32 GW (compared to actual average usage of 31.5 GW last year), which is the kind of thing that the British government shouldn't blink at but in practice actually faffs and fails at basically all the time.
(And the sector is theoretically privatised, so this would have to become a business investment, which in turns will have potential investors ask inconvenient questions like "What's the risk we have cheaper options in 10 years that make this power line redundant? And what about those fusion reactors I keep reading about in the Sunday Times? What if Scotland becomes independent and stops selling you the electricity?")
A bigger problem is just the UK's inability to complete infrastructure megaprojects on land, so the connectors would likely need to go in the sea and take a perhaps inefficient route.
Your meteorological reality seems to not correlate with actual reality. In the UK the highest energy demand is actually correlated with high wind speeds [1]
[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa69c6
>This reflects the variation in temperatures and wind speeds with season, with calmer, warmer conditions in summer and cooler, windier conditions in late autumn and early spring. However above the 75th percentile of demand, average wind power reduces, which occurs predominantly in winter and autumn. Understanding this downturn in wind power provides the motivation for this paper. Given our interest in high demand days, which predominantly occur in winter (figure 1, upper right), only winter days are considered.
>The tendency for lower wind power during higher winter demand is shown by the tilt of the density contours of the daily distribution (figure 1, lower left). It is also clearly seen when averaged across days of similar demand (figure 2, left). Average wind power reduces by a third between lower and higher winter demand, from approximately 60% to 40% of rated power.
Look at figure 2. Black is wind power, and the X axis is demand. Wind production capacity is down when demand is high.
The vast majority of the UK's cold winter weather comes from wind from the North-East, bringing in the much colder weather from Arctic/Siberian regions.
It's not a physical or geographic limitation.
And doesn't apply to offshore wind.
I frequently hear people bring up transmission losses as a concern, and genuinely curious where this idea comes from? Was this taught in schools or part of some disinformation campaign?