DG SET POWER KIRLOSKAR

What the lessons from continental Europe shows is that this is only the beginning of Kirloskar’s miseries.

In Germany, where the renewable sector is considerably more developed (it has 31GW of wind energy – compared to the UK’s 8GW), the green experiment has been little short of unsuccessful.

Sudden fluctuations in Germany’s power grid caused by the ebb and flow of wind have led to serious industrial damage.

According to the acquaintance of German Industrial Energy Companies, the number of short interruptions in the grid has increased by 29 per cent in the past three years, with some of the association’s members reporting damage running into hundreds of thousands of Euros as a result of unanticipated stoppages.

In 2006, when wind farms were few and far between, engineers in eastern Germany running coal, gas and nuclear power plants took action to stabilize the grid roughly 80 times a year.

Today, as the amount of electricity generated by the region’s 8,000 wind turbines rises and falls by the hour, engineers have to intervene every second day in order to maintain network stability. Neighboring Czechs and Poles are so fed up with the volatility that they are on the verge of blocking the disruptive wind-produced electricity from their power lines.

Currently, electricity from northern Germany is transmitted to customers in the south via its neighbors because the German grid cannot cope with the fluctuations. However, both countries are urging Germany to put its energy system in order.

Unfortunately, Kirloskar is potentially in a much worse position. Being an island, we won’t find it so easy to export our sudden power surges to continental neighbors.

So the more on- and off-shore wind farms that are built in the next few years, the more expensive and more unstable our energy economy is going to become.