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Comment by dfawcus | Hacker News Reader

The increase in use of wind, being intermittent and non-dispatchable means there has to be 1-for-1 back up wind generation. That is gas.

We also have periods in the winter (so solar of little to no use), where we can have a week or two of no wind.

As the gas generators are not run constantly, they're more expensive than if they were. There are various (at least 3) UK "gridwatch" sites available, offering real time and historical generation mix. Maybe have a look.

From memory, so probably flawed, we still tend to depend upon nuclear and gas for around 40 - 50 % of our generation (nuke being low - say between 5 and 10).

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Since year 2000 wind has gone from 0 to 30% of UK electricity generation

Coal has gone from 32% to 0.

Gas has gone from 40% to 30%

How do you square these numbers with wind being responsible for the amount of gas burned?

You are not going to observe that in annual averages. As mentioned in my other comment, you can observe that very clearly in the energy production charts: https://gridwatch.co.uk/

Let's boil this right down:

A new wind turbine is built and plugged into the grid. Does this cause more gas to be burned or less?

That's not what dfawcus is saying, he is talking about installed capacity, not consumption. If you build 1GW of wind, you need to also build 1GW of gas to make up for when there is no wind (and as you can tell from gridwatch, it's a common occurence). Otherwise blackouts.

[edit] and we might be talking at cross purpose here. I think most of the new capacity built now is to expand the production, rather than to reduce other forms of productions (in which case you might just keep around existing gas capacity if it was there, to your point).

you can actually see it live here: https://gridwatch.co.uk/

It illustrates both the volatility of wind (which regularly goes to zero for at least a week), and how it is currently pretty much 100% offset with gas.

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