Squirreled away beneath a recent Telegraph report on the subtleties of badger-culling in the UK was this intriguing morsel of wind energy news, which would seem to challenge the idea that intermittent energy sources such as wind play havoc with grid management. For the 23,700 gigawatt-hours of electrical energy generated by wind in the UK between April 2011 and September 2012, only 22 GWh of electrical energy from fossil fuels ‘was needed to fill the gaps when the wind didn’t blow,’ it reports. Gizmag contacted the UK National Grid to find out the details.

The Telegraph’s figures come from National Grid Head of Energy Strategy and Policy, Richard Smith, speaking at the Hay Festival between May 23 and Jun 2. Gizmag has learned that he was drawing from a National Grid document sent to the Scottish Parliament in response to its own report of Nov 23 2012, entitled Report on the achievability of the Scottish Government’s renewable energy targets.
(Table: National Grid)

Table 1 of the National Grid’s document states that, according to its figures, wind farms generated 23,707 GWh of electricity over the 18 months in question.
(Table: National Grid)

Meanwhile, Table 2 of the report shows the energy provided by the […]