Re: Decommissioning?
30 million homes is the whole of the UK, so you'd only need that much backup if wind power was 100% of your generation. Not even the most ardent wind power proponent is saying that.
With a strong nuclear baseload supplemented by solar, hydro and geothermal where appropriate, you would need max 30% wind-sourced generation. Then with interconnectors to Europe (and possibly from Moroccan-based solar) you could supplement most of the difference - it's rare but possible for there to be no wind at all across all of the UK at the same time for a week. It's pretty much impossible for that to be the case across all the UK, the offshore farms in the North Sea AND all of Europe.
So you would probably need storage for approx 10% of total demand for a week (3 million homes rather than 30 million), or 900 of those installations.
That's still a bloody lot of batteries!!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
