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Comment by Ericson2314 | Hacker News Reader

Intermittent renewables mean any too short metric is essentially a gamed cherry-pick.

Give me your lowest monthly average, please.

As renewables started to increase, people were saying it wouldn't be possible to keep the grid stable once renewables reached 50%, due to the lack of spinning mass in fossil generators. That obviously has been proven wrong. If I understand correctly, they could have run without any fossil sources on a few occasions recently, but keeping some helps with grid stability. Next step is to reduce fossil fuels to zero for some short periods. But there will be some spinning mass still in nuclear and in biomass generation. Eventually the biomass needs to go too, but each step is good and not completely trivial to achieve.

> Gas and coal accounted for just 2.4% of power generation for an hour last week,

> earlier this month the share of fossil fuels in the generation mix taken over an entire day fell to a record low of 6.4%, on 5 April.

> 15 years ago, when gas and coal power plants made up 75% of the electricity mix, while renewables accounted for only 2%. Last year only a third of Great Britain’s electricity came from fossil fuels, compared with 40% from renewables.

There are several metrics in the article, not just short ones.

You can see here[1] that the trend is extremely good. 25.1 GW of fossil fuel power in 2012 compared to 9.3 GW now. IIRC the UK was the first western power to half its CO2 output compared to its peak.

[1] https://grid.iamkate.com/

We will also have 0% coal by the end of the year (Radcliffe upon Soar has to shut by the end of October IIRC), by law.

https://grid.iamkate.com -> Past Year

66% maximum fossil fuel usage last year: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-fossil-fuels-fall-to-re...

OK, Good! I'm not saying there is no progress, I am saying that the stat that this article chose to lead with is not a useful indicator of progress.

Very much, I think the Guardian could do well by including the graph with min/max/average

Celebrate the small victories: Progress is the sum of many small accomplishments.

Talk about letting perfect be the enemy of good...

Complete misunderstanding.

I am not saying that "Gas and coal accounted for just 2.4% of power generation for an hour last week" is good but not good enough, I am saying that it is meaningless. The problem here is not the degree progress, but the choice of measurement.

I will happily celebrate incremental progress with the measurements that I think actually matter.

I'm not misunderstanding anything, I just disagree with you.

You're totally right that it's a relatively poor metric, but assuming we agree it's unlikely that the energy companies actively 'gamed' the metric (e.g. by agreeing to shut down gas and coal generation for that hour) it's still better to have that result, than to not have it.

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