Born in the UK
Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as born in the USA. But right this moment, I am pretty proud of my little corner of planet Earth.
Go on, I’ll bite, why?
Why, as you can see, right this moment, the electricity hitting my bit of the UK grid is being produced with 0g of CO2!
I am not sure about your feelings on nuclear power, but it is a carbon neutral source, I’m pretty keen.
Our local reactor is a pressurised water fission reactor, Sizewell B. Up to February 2025, it had generated 250 TWh of electricity. But it is still going strong. In the East of England, just at this moment, it makes up 28% of the power on the local grid.
Our bit of the UK has invested heavily in both on and off-shore wind power – that’s causing a little controversy at the moment, because we’re generating more than we can use in our relatively sparsely populated part of England. There’s an idea to put up a cable running over ground to power parts of London and South Essex.
The other generation source on the grid is solar.
As we can see from https://energyguide.org.uk/solar-farms-uk-map/, this part of the UK is not the only one investing in renewable sources of many different kinds, including battery sources. It’s an interesting scene. And an important one, giving the UK independence from gas and oil.
France has been ahead of this game in a number of ways, not least their use of nuclear and wind power. France has a relatively scarce population compared to the UK, and that has allowed wind turbines to be placed on agricultural land, but this is not the only opportunity the UK is wasting.
We have a number of round-abouts in our city. If each one had a wind turbine on it, how many local houses could they supply? Often the round-abouts already have power going to them, so cabling into the grid would be easy. The installations could be done at night, causing little disruption to the traffic flow.
Hey, aren’t wind turbines noisy? Who’d want that on their road?
Can I answer that question in a bit, please? The reason I want to do that is to talk about wind power in general.
Wind turbines are not new, and are a secondary solar source as our wind patterns are governed by the solar radiation hitting our skies.
Unlike solar, though, wind is, potentially, 24 hour in the UK. In Europe, we’ve harnessed wind power for milling and pumping for hundreds of years. It’s more efficient than a internal or external combustion engines, and ideally could achieve 59.3% efficiency (please see Wikipedia’s page on this: wikipedia Wind_turbine ).
Since the 1940s, there have been several common types of turbine used to generate power: VAWT (often Savonius, Giromill, or Darrieus) and HAWT towered.
VAWT stands for vertical-axis wind turbine, which means the sails or blades of the turbine rotate round the axis (think pole) of the tower. These can work at low wind speeds and can be engineered to be relatively quiet in operation. For micro-generation, i.e. where they are mounted on individual roof-tops, these can be reliable, quiet, and self-managing. They are perfect for small installations up to 20kW but do not scale well – there are few that manage more than 20kW.
HAWT means horizontal-axis wind turbine, these are like a child’s toy windmill, there is a body on which the rotors are fixed and that body does the conversion to electricity. The majority of high tension (lots of power) and off-shore wind turbines are of this sort. They can be massive and it is difficult to make these quiet. They can achieve great reliability scores but often need high wind speeds that their VAWT counterparts.
Looking at this intro and the wiki page, this seems much more complicated than just having solar cells and batteries!
Yes, it is much more involved. In urban areas, it’s advisable to check if you need planning permission if looking to put one on your roof, for example.
The returns are much harder to guage too. Wind speed can be disrupted by a variety of sources, whether the trees have leaves on them can dramatically cut the wind power received compared to the values seen during the winter.
Solar is much easier by comparison and really well studied.
Posted: November 8th, 2025 under Driving off the grid.