With great fanfare and much brouhaha, Britain announced that coal had not been burnt in the UK for two weeks and Britain was hitting a new clean energy record by surviving without coal generated electricity for two weeks.
The new record marks the longest period that coal has not helped power Britain since the industrial revolution.
National Grid said yesterday: ‘We can now confirm that Great Britain’s electricity system will pass the fortnight mark for no coal generation this afternoon! The last coal generator came off the system at 3.12pm on 17th May – meaning we will achieve #coalfreefortnight at 3:12pm today!!’
This means Great Britain has not needed coal – considered a highly polluting way to produce energy fuel for 336 hours.
The last record was 193 hours, set at the beginning of May.
Daily Mail
Wow, simply wow! A whole two weeks in the middle of summer. But hang on just a wee moment here …
Between May 17-31, Britain saw its first two-week period without domestic coal-fired power stations generating electricity since the 1880s.
However, modelling carried out by energy market data analyst EnAppSys shows that power generated from coal has been imported from abroad over the same period – with the most coming from the Netherlands.
EnAppSys says that high carbon taxes in Britain were the key reason why the UK’s electricity system has run without coal for the last two weeks – and it adds that further no-coal records could be broken should these taxes remain at current levels.
These higher carbon taxes do not, however, apply in neighbouring regions and over the initial two-week period of zero coal, Britain imported 50.9 GWh of power from coal-fired plants operating abroad.
Of this power, only a relatively low share of the modelled coal-originating imports came from France and Ireland (0.1 GWh and 0.9 GWh respectively), with France seeing a high share of power from nuclear plants and with Ireland seeing high levels of wind generation over the noted period.
Instead, the largest share of the modelled total was from the Netherlands, where coal-fired power stations continue to operate at a high level of activity as a result of only paying around half the carbon taxes paid within the UK. […]
The figures produced by EnAppSys are based on the different sources of power generated around Europe (incomplete for the Netherlands, leading to a potential under-estimate of real coal production). This shows that the Netherlands produced 535.8 GWh of power from coal over the period.
With the country also seeing exports to Britain over this period at 7.8 per cent of demand, this translates into an assumed export of coal-fired generation totalling 40.4 GWh.
This analysis was also extended into Germany, where 5017.3 GWh of power was produced from coal or lignite plants over the period, but with only 2.1 per cent of demand in Germany being exported to Netherlands, there was only a 0.16 per cent modelled passthrough assumed for German coal into Britain. This translated into a 9.5 GWh import of coal from Germany over the period.
These import totals at 50.9 GWh imply an effective 151 MW baseload production of coal from outside of Britain over this period.
PEI
Like everything else in the climate change new world order, what the media reports is based on lies, obfuscation and dodgy maths.