At five in the morning, Britain’s wind farms were delivering about 2.5 GW, just under 10% of total electricity need and the number was expected to go higher. The opposite happened. After five hours of steep decline as a result of unplanned closures, wind turbines managed a little over 1.0 GW, no more than about 40% of what was forecast yesterday, leaving a shortfall of about 6% of electricity supply. Did the Grid suffer? Did we come close to having the lights go out? No. As the unexpected shortage of electricity became apparent, the price for immediate delivery of power rose from about £30 a MWh to £90 and unused power stations willingly revved up to meet the extra demand.

The crucial indicator of whether the Grid was under stress barely moved: the frequency of electricity supply remained close to 50 Hertz. An unexpected loss of large amounts of power will usually result in a fall in the frequency of Grid electricity but a close look at the numbers every few seconds from 5 to 10 am shows no obvious perturbation. Grid frequency stuck to about 50 Hertz for the entire period. The electricity supply system settled down with first gas fired power stations and then coal plants from 8 o’clock meeting the unexpected gap in supply.

By ten o’clock in the morning, things had settled down. Then the next unplanned event happened. Some of the wind farms started coming back online. The amount of power generated by wind rose almost as fast as it had fallen earlier in the day. By four in the afternoon the electricity from turbines was back at nearly the same level as five in the morning. Once again, Grid stability was unchallenged. Spot prices spiked up and down as operators adjusted to the new supply but the key indicator, Grid frequency, was unaffected.

Now, at 10.30 in the evening, wind is providing about 7% of the UK’s total needs. During the last day, the country’s 3,000 turbines have averaged about 5.5% of all power. However this number has varied by a factor of three during the day, and not in any way that was remotely predictable even 24 hours ago. The average cost of electricity has probably been relatively high as spare power stations have been fired up and down to meet swings in demand but I would guess there hasn’t been a single moment of real anxiety anywhere across the UK generation and supply industry.

What continues to amaze me is that people who scorn the value of wind energy are often also the most fervent believers in free markets and their apparently magical power to match supply and demand. The UK’s electricity market is far from perfect, but it is quite robust enough to handle a near hurricane, followed by unexpected falls in wind speed. What further demonstrations that wind turbines are effective providers of electricity could possibly be required? Today’s weather might have been more of a problem had the UK had 30,000 wind turbines rather than 3,000 but as of early 2012 the freely functioning electricity market is coping very well indeed with intermittency.

The Carbon Trust is the latest body to announce a substantial cut in its funding from government. The 40% reduction in its grant income is marginally less severe than the 50% cut imposed on the Energy Saving Trust (EST) a few weeks ago. The job of both these bodies is to reduce energy use and carbon emissions with the Carbon Trust focusing on large companies and the EST on households. They have both claimed major successes in recent years.

So should those of us worried about climate change be upset with the government’s cost savings? I suggest our reaction should be very muted indeed. Both bodies had become bloated and inefficient. I have dealt with many entrepreneurs and small businesses who have found them to be actively unhelpful. Their contribution to the climate change effort may not be worth the money we spend on them.

First of all, we should put the funding cuts in perspective. The EST had a budget of about £70m in 2009/10. But two years earlier, its funding was only £36m, just over half the current level. In other words, the cuts imposed by DECC last month simply take the EST income back to where it was in 2008. And, incidentally, the claim the EST makes for its impact on carbon emissions as a result of work carried out in 2009/10 is actually less than the figure of two years earlier, despite the much higher level of income. Similarly, the number of people employed at the agency has risen sharply in recent years with no apparent impact on the energy savings it achieved.

The position at the Carbon Trust is very similar. Its income rose from just under £100m in 2007/8 to £166m last year. As with the EST, the reduction announced today simply takes its funding from central government back to where it was two years ago. Chief Executive Tom DeLay says that the 40% cut will mean 35 redundancies but this will still leave its employee numbers substantially higher than they were only a couple of years ago.

Both bodies have large and expensive offices in central London. The Carbon Trust, for example, occupies space in an office block in one of the most desirable areas of the City. I have recently watched an entrepreneur struggling to establish his business gasp at the disparity between the conditions in which he works and the standards he saw at the Carbon Trust offices.

Other small business people have commented to me on the ponderousness of both organisations and their lack of industrial expertise. I have also heard one successful entrepreneur refuse to deal again with these bodies because of his strongly expressed fear that details of his technology had been leaked to a competitor. Perhaps these criticisms are unfair but views like these are very widely held amongst companies and individuals working in the low carbon sectors.

Both bodies can rightly claim that their jobs have got much more complicated in recent years, demanding higher allocations of funds from the taxpayer’s purse and putting strain on their ability to respond quickly and efficiently. As organisations dependent on pleasing their bosses in DECC and other government departments, they are forced to focus on projects given to them at very short notice, such as the domestic boiler scrappage scheme handled by the EST with three weeks notice.

Put together, these two agencies spent around £250m in the last financial year. No doubt there was some benefit from this expenditure: for example, the EST communicated in some way with over 3m people to give energy-saving advice and the Carbon Trust invested in some very interesting new technologies. Nevertheless the scale of taxpayer’s money being spent at these organisations looks wildly disproportionate. Much of the funding seems to go on bureaucratic activities rather than real research. Contrast the £250m bill with, for example, the total spending on research into the use of deep geothermal energy in Cornwall at around £1m a year, a technology which might produce a measurable fraction of the UK’s total electricity needs. If slimming the Carbon Trust and the EST means more money can go directly to pathbreaking research, I don’t think we should complain.

A new paper in Science by Dr Steve Davis and colleagues at Carnegie Institution of Washington in Stanford, California, gives us a clear estimate. Davis says that our existing energy infrastructure will put about 500 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO₂ into the atmosphere during the course of its life (this is about 15 times the world’s annual emissions from all sources today).

The paper calculates this number by examining the number of power plants, motor vehicles and homes around the globe and estimating how long they will remain in use. The research team found that in the past, the average electricity-generating station lasted about 35 years before being demolished. Cars typically run for about 17 years before being scrapped, lorries and buses nearer 30. Since we know when all the power plants in the world were constructed and the average age of the planet’s vehicles, Davis and his colleagues could estimate how much carbon dioxide will be emitted by existing infrastructure during the remainder of its life.

Put another 500Gt of CO₂ into the atmosphere between now and 2050, and the expected temperature rise will be about 0.5C of extra warming on top of what we have already seen. (Of course there is a very wide range to this forecast because of the uncertainties in the models of how temperature change is related to emissions). Davis and his colleagues make the point that if we stopped building new coal-fired power plants tomorrow and manufactured no new cars or trucks we would therefore keep warming well below the 2C increase which global scientists think is the maximum tolerable. Davis’s climate models suggest that CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere would rise to about 430 parts per million (ppm), a rise of about 40ppm on today’s level and well below the 450ppm level that scientists often associate with 2C of warming.

That’s the good news – today’s energy infrastructure probably isn’t enough, by itself, to topple us into wholly unmanageable climate change. The bad news is that this figure assumes that we build no fossil fuel power stations in the future and that all our new vehicles and homes are zero-carbon. That’s not going to happen and the scale of the challenge is grimly indicated by the current rate of growth in low-carbon electricity. Of the 1,300 gigawatts of new power station capacity built since 2000, 31% uses coal, 34% gas and 4% oil. This leaves 2% nuclear and 17% renewables. And even this number substantially overestimates the share of future electricity production coming from renewables since both wind and solar power plants only produce a fraction of their maximum output. The wind and the sun aren’t available all the time.

In a perspective in Science, Dr Marty Hoffert of New York University looks at how much energy we are likely to need to meet the world’s requirements in future. Keeping the world’s economy going requires continuously production of about 14,000 gigawatts of energy. That’s equivalent to about 10,000 large-scale power plants. As the world economy grows, this is likely to rise to at least twice this level by 2050, even if we achieve major gains in the efficiency with which we use energy. So the challenge is to run down existing carbon-polluting energy sources rapidly and to replace them with atmosphere-friendly equivalents.

The scale of this task is immense. My rough calculation is that the world needs to ramp up its yearly rate of installation of low-carbon energy about 30-fold from today’s levels within the next couple of decades.

A few wind turbines aren’t going to be enough.