Want to hazard a guess at the % of renewable on the grid in Q2 2016.....
24.9%.
Ah yes, the magical definition of renewable that uses hydro and 'biomass' to inflate the values for something commonly associated with wind and solar.
By this measure
Drax is a renewable power station.
If you refer to wind and solar - what is commonly refered to as renewable power in this context. Then for Q2 2016 we are at 10.88TWh out of 78.28TWh generated.
That puts us at about 14%.
Not 25%.
And since biomass is not really sustainable in the long run and hydro can't expand as there is no more capacity - making further progress wil lbe very difficult.
I will freely admin this is an average figure but even the worst fears of intermittency are being blown away
You ain't seen nothing yet.
Rebadging coal stations as renewable stations to cover the short fall from wind is not a sustainable long term strategy.
Just look at Germany, where the grid is in a state of near collapse and the subsidies for renewables are a bigger component of bills than the wholesale price of electricity.
The rule of thumb is that a grid can easily absorb unreliable power up to about its capacity factor before it starts to cause issues.
Tidal is unusual in that it is extremely reliable even if it is intermittant and thus special steps can be taken to integrate it. For example you can have an Economy 7 tarrif that is planned years in advance to shift around the day in time with it and still use it for storage heaters practically as it will always arrive every 12.5 hours (on a ebb only barrage) or every 6.25 hours (o a dual generation barrage).
You can also easily turn the neap component into a baseload generation with only a few hours of pumped storage.
With pumping the neap-peak tidal differences are relatively small, and also fully predictable.
Also because of the extreme lifespan of a barrage if we were used index linked government debt to fund it it comes out at ludicrously cheap. The capital repayment charge is essentially nothing.
EDIT:
To put that 10.88TWh for Wind and Solar in Q2 2016 into context.
In Q1 2016 [no Q2 figure easily available] Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in Ontario achieved a capacity factor of 88% with a nameplate capacity of 6,232MWe, which translates as a production of 24 TWh.
So all the wind turbines and solar panels in the UK produced
less than half what one site in Canada produced using nuclear fission.
Wind turbines are a joke.
