UK wind power hits record level
National Grid said 1,860 megawatts was being generated briefly Aug. 30 at 1930 GMT, mostly from Scotland, which accounted for 4.7 percent of total generation. A single nuclear power station in Britain generates around 500 megawatts.
"And over the 24 hours on Monday... wind generated 5 percent of all electricity," National Grid said.
"National Grid also believes that if embedded wind generation is taken into account, about 10 percent of Britain's power was generated by windÂ…."
National Grid data showed gas-fired power stations accounts for around half of all electricity generation currently, with coal around a 32 percent, nuclear around 15 percent and wind dropping from the evening highs to 2.2 percent.
Electricity from wind generation is also forecast to fall further, to less than half of Aug. 30 peaks at 800 megawatts on the following evening and less than a quarter at under 300 megawatts on the evening of September 1.
Britain's wind power generation is still below other European countries such as Spain, which supplied half its domestic demand during a windy New Year period in January.
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NEW YORK - The power grid in the U.S. is aging and already struggling to meet current demand. It faces a future with more people — people who drive more electric cars and heat homes with more electric furnaces.
Alice Hill says that's not even the biggest problem the country's electricity infrastructure faces.
"Everything that we've built, including the electric grid, assumed a stable climate," she says. "It looked to the extremes of the past — how high the seas got, how high the winds got, the heat."
Hill is an energy and environment expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. She served…
