Wind and Solar Farms Set to Take Over Up to 9% of Total UK Land Area

Hundreds of gigawatts of sprawling, expensive, unreliable energy are in the pipeline

I was chatting to a correspondent recently, who dropped into the conversation that Ed Miliband’s Clean Power 2030 agenda would be bringing hundreds of gigawatts of expensive, unreliable and mostly redundant generating capacity online. I was sure he was wrong. The peak demand on the grid, on dark, cold winter nights, is usually around 60 gigawatts. “Do you mean megawatts?” I asked.

According to the DESNZ’s ‘Clean Power 2030 Action Plan‘, there are currently approximately 15 GW of offshore wind capacity, which will nearly triple. There are 14 GW of onshore wind capacity, which will double. And there are 17 GW of solar, which will also triple. That’s a lot of new capacity: nearly 80GW, bringing the UK’s solar and wind fleet up from 46 GW up to a whopping 125 GW, very little of which will work on cold winter nights, despite costing us billions of pounds each and every year. But that’s still far from “hundreds”.