Environment Editor
BBCIt is 1am on 3 June. A near gale force wind is blasting into Scotland. Great weather for the Moray East and West offshore wind farms, you would have thought.
The two farms are 13 miles off the north-east coast of Scotland and include some of the biggest wind turbines in the UK, at 257m high. With winds like that they should be operating at maximum capacity, generating what the developer, Ocean Winds, claims is enough power to meet the electricity needs of well over a million homes.
Except they are not.
That’s because if you thought that once an electricity generator – whether it be a wind farm or a gas-powered plant – was connected to the national grid it could seamlessly send its electricity wherever it was needed in the country, you’d be wrong.
The electricity grid was built to deliver power generated by coal and gas plants near the country’s major cities and towns, and doesn’t always have sufficient…
