LONDON: Five years ago, commodities trader Wayne Bryan hardly considered Britain’s famously overcast skies when buying and selling UK natural gas. Now he can’t afford to ignore them.
Within the last year, the sun has taken on newfound importance across the cloudy island nation with photovoltaic cells providing as much as a quarter of the UK’s daily power supply on some days, from almost no capacity in 2011. And generation can swing sharply as it did last week, when peak generation fell 64% from Tuesday to Wednesday before more than doubling on Thursday.