Winds of change.

The wind shifted round to blow from the north this week, bringing dustings of snow and sub-zero temperatures again. My dormant, hardy plants don’t care that much, but my tender staff do, and so do I. Working on the nursery is impractical, unpleasant and dangerous in freezing weather - the paths are ice-glazed and the pots are frozen solid, so there is nothing to do and nothing to be done about it, except stay at home and wait for a thaw.

I don’t mind - I lack the metabolism for working in low temperatures, and there’s plenty of time to catch up outside before spring. Indoors, the never-decreasing pile of paperwork beckons, but I am easily distracted and there is always something more interesting to do. I’ve been messing around with stained glass over winter, making bits and pieces to give away. We made a running fox for a young friend last week and this week I’ve been trying to make snowdrops. It is all about light, of course, which January lacks, so perhaps that’s the pull of it.

With no prospect of working, and no inclination to do so either, Steve and I bunked off for a couple of hours and walked our usual route down to the River Weaver. Tucked behind the cottages at Dutton Locks, a small revolution is happening - quite literally. A new hydro-electric plant has been installed alongside the weir. Frustratingly there is no live data feed but the original planning application suggests it’s a 200kW system. That’s per hour. Which works out at 1.75 million kWhrs a year, or enough to power around 400 homes. Can you see it in this picture? Nope - from the bridge the original weir looks exactly the same as before the plant was installed. But you might be able to spot four cormorants perched on top of the lights, if you zoom in.

The hydro plant is on the far left hand side of the weir in the picture above, behind the trees. It’s a magnificent, impressively simple design using an Archimedes screw. Water runs under the screw to turn it which drives a turbine in a shed, just out of shot on the right. Most of the river runs exactly as before, under the arches and over the weir. The cormorants seem happy with the arrangement and I think old Archimedes would be quietly chuffed.

If you’ve followed me for a while you’ll know I’ve been banging on about renewable energy for well over a decade. Back in 2012, wind power generated around 5% of UK electricity needs, just enough to make the sceptics crease their sides with laughter at the futility of it. In 2022 wind accounted for 30% of total UK demand across the whole year. On 10th January 2023 UK wind generation hit an all time record of over 21GW, or 63% of demand. And new records are being broken every few weeks as more turbines are hooked up to the grid.

What about when the wind doesn’t blow? Another 50GW of turbine power is in the UK planning pipeline as part of an additional 260GW slated for the North Sea over the next 20 years or so. Yes that’s right, I haven’t accidentally put a nought on the end. As an excellent article in the Economist put it this week - the North Sea is making the most of its main characteristic - awful weather. With capacity way over typical demand, investment in interconnecting cables and battery storage will help smooth out times when it’s not windy. It’s cheap now too - new contracts are around 5p kWhr wholesale (current retail capped price is about 34p). We will still need a base load, probably nuclear, but in the UK I’m certain gas will go the way of coal and be all but phased out in the next 10 years or so - see below.

I forgot to copy the legend - red is coal, orange is gas, wind is green (of course!) and solar is yellow (ditto). Ignore the 2023 figures - we’ve only had three weeks of it so it’s skewed. The source is a superb site: National Grid Live Data . Quite addictive….

In the meantime, my 11 year old solar panels are chipping away nicely at my electricity bill, helped by the batteries I had installed in November. Today my south facing panels generated 6.4kWhrs, or roughly half of what I’ll use today. The rest I bought and stored last night when it was cheap. Not bad for January, in the north of England. Nationally, for a few hours today, solarPV was generating nearly 7% of the UK’s electricity needs. In January. And we’ve barely started with solar potential in the UK.

For decades physicists have said that nuclear fusion will one day produce energy too cheap to meter. But it’s still 30 years away, apparently, as it has been since the 1970s. Meanwhile the steady, incremental installation of wind, water and solar power will keep ticking up. I am confident that together they will produce a consistent surplus of electricity for Europe in my lifetime. Now you really can laugh…. :-)

Right, off my soapbox. Here’s a gorgeous picture of the horses in the field opposite taken this morning from my front door. Yes, lucky me :-)

Notes to self:

Reading: ‘Recitatif’ by Toni Morrison. ‘The Snow Geese’ by William Fiennes and ‘Katharine of Aragon’ by Patrick Williams.

Playing (learning): Shackleton’s Cross by Howard Goodall.