Power output from Semington A has been fluctuating wildly lately over the last month. A gloriously sunny Sunday resulted in 18.1 kWHrs whereas a foggy Monday gave rise to only 4.2. This was almost exactly the same 2 weeks ago in late February (20.4 & 4.4), and similar patterns have been common over the period since "commissioning". Even in June there were consecutive outputs of 24.1 and 4.3. This shows the fickle nature of solar power, but the Grid seems to be coping well with the feral nature of our output and its serial unreliability. A great pity that it's photons rather than neutrinos that are needed: no shortage of those, even when it's cloudy.
The UK's current installed solar capacity is a modest 1GW. In Germany, the leader of the solar revolution, this is now over 17 GW [Note 1] and Grist magazine, has a detailed account of how much electricity this actually produces (for March 2011). Not at night, obviously, which makes their comparison with nuclear plants in Japan quite tricky.
Note 1 All this is somewhat larger than Semington A whose capacity is 3.86 kW.
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