it is likely that, soon, wind farms will be paying back subsidies to the government.
we are blessed with plenty of wind in Scotland, and to a lesser extent in England and wales, so supply is pretty continuous. You will get the odd period when the wind doesn’t blow so back up is required, which form this back up takes is probably still to be agreed on. As Julie says hydrogen is likely to be the favourite but if we are going to heat houses using electricity and run millions of EV’s we will need many, many more wind farms than we have now.
I certainly wouldn’t discount the potential input from solar panels England and wales get more sun than Scotland but even up here it could play a major part in the green energy mix.
I’ve had solar panels for a number of years, a 4kw system, and it produces, year after year, 3,000kwh of energy. My system panels are 11% efficient, new panels, coming to the market this year, from a company in Oxford, have an efficiency of about 28% . if my system was powered by these panels I would produce about 7,000-8,000 kWh per year.
To give you an idea of what that means in the real world, I use about 5,000kwh a year to power my house, so these new panels would produce enough electricity to power my house with 2,000-3,000kwh left over so if this was replicated through the millions of suitable house roofs throughout the country, could go a major way to bringing excess green energy during about six months of the year to say make hydrogen for the winter months.
Ceres Power, another Oxford company I think, produce a fuel cell that converts natural gas into electricity with no dangerous by products. One of these cell produces 1kwh of energy, so 24kwh per day. We still have natural gas in this country and we have supplies from other European partners so maybe one of these in every house combined with solar , wind and V2G we could make this work.