Today’s word of interest is “Dunkelflaute“, formed by combining “Dunkelheit” (darkness) and “Windflaute” (little wind) to describe heavy overcast skies and light wind conditions.
As you may have noticed, UK weather has been in this condition for a number of days now – in meteorological parlance, an anticyclonic gloom.
Unfortunately for net zero proponents, this well-known phenomenon of our weather is the worst possible combination, as wind and solar generation drop off a cliff. We’ve been lucky that the temperature is so mild still, but when this happens in the depths of winter, it puts our electricity generation network under a huge strain.
With our aging fleet of nuclear reactors either decommissioned or approaching the end of life, new ones taking years and billions over budget to complete, and no realistic large scale battery technology in sight, one might just wonder if keeping hydrocarbon power stations online (and the means to fuel them in this country) seems like a sensible plan rather than the last hurrah of a dead industry to be demolished as soon as possible.
Baseload generation – pfui!
(The banner image is the current visible cloud cover radar image, © Netweather.tv)