Dead-calm weather is NOT news!

With the wind always blowing somewhere, it’s claimed that if turbines are spread far and wide, there’ll be a constant supply of wind ‘energy’. Except whole countries and indeed vast tracts of whole continents face dead-calm weather on a routine and regular basis.

South-eastern Australia is home to 5,000MW of wind power capacity, spread across four states (NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia), which often struggle to produce more than 5% of that figure for hours, and sometimes days on end.

The same phenomena applies right across Western Europe, as detailed by Roger Andrews below.

Quantifying wind surpluses and deficits in Western Europe
Energy Matters
Roger Andrews
7 November 2018

This posts updates my January 2015 Wind blowing nowhere post using 2016 rather than 2013 data. The 2016 data show the same features as the 2013 data, with high and low wind conditions extending…