Power output from Semington A has been fluctuating wildly lately over the last month. \u00a0A gloriously sunny Sunday resulted in 18.1 kWHrs whereas a foggy Monday gave rise to only 4.2. \u00a0This was almost exactly the same 2 weeks ago in late February (20.4 \u00a0& \u00a04.4), and similar patterns have been common over the period since \"commissioning\". \u00a0 Even in June there were consecutive outputs of 24.1 and 4.3. \u00a0This 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. \u00a0A great pity that it's photons rather than neutrinos that are needed: no shortage of those, even when it's cloudy.<\/p>\n
The UK's<\/a> current installed solar capacity is a modest 1GW. \u00a0In Germany<\/a>, \u00a0the leader of the solar revolution, this is now over 17 GW [Note 1] and Grist<\/a> magazine, has a detailed account of how much electricity this actually produces (for March 2011). \u00a0Not at night, obviously, which makes their comparison with nuclear plants in Japan quite tricky.<\/p>\n