Dave Jones@CleanPowerDave
Wind and solar complement each other - there's more solar in summer and more wind in winter in the EU.
We've updated for 2024 data, and you can see solar is growing faster than wind - and for the first time, there's now a clear seasonal split growing, with more total generation in summer than winter.
So this is a good reminder - we need wind!
Especially so, if we want to move away from gas heating, and electrify heat.
I'm not pretending there are no challenges in wind+solar stability - although the swings at a monthly level look small, they are not any other granularity...
- Hour-by-hour swings are huge, especially from solar which obviously only delivers electricity in the day - battery can go a long way to ameliorate this.
- Week-by-week swings can also be huge, especially from wind, when EU wind generation can shift by 7TWh week-to-week. Batteries won't be able to help much with that, and other flexibility is critical.
Still, it's pretty cool that - as wind and solar delivered 29% of the EU's electricity across 2024 as a whole - every month they delivered over 25%.
And wind+solar have delivered at least 10% of the EU's electricity EVERY month all the back to before 2015. 👍
