PowerSwitch

Deloitte have produced a fantastic report on the state of electricity production in the UK to 2020. It's fair to say they recognise the looming energy gap!

Stunning Clarity From Deloitte

Deloitte Report

OMG,

I've just read this...

By 2020 (on 2% growth I assume) we will need either...

30 NEW NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS

or

95,000 ON SHORE WIND TURBINES

or

40,000 OFFSHORE WIND TURBINES

or a combination equivalent to 50GW of new or refurbished capacity.

I haven't noticed 7000 new wind turbines popping up in the countryside this year,

This really brings home the scale problem we are facing, oh and there's that 'peak oil' thing as well.

If we consider these facts in with Mike Pepler's post on the rate at which we can change, are we well and truly done for?


Peter.

Blue Peter wrote:If we consider these facts in with Mike Pepler's post on the rate at which we can change, are we well and truly done for?


Peter.

Realistically, you have to conclude we are Peter. Life as we know it will have to change, of that I have no doubt.

Now, in a more positive vein, the change could be well-managed, good for the environment, good for us humans and good for the planet.

Alternatively, the change will not be well-managed (is anything on a large scale anymore?), will be fraught with war and death, fraught with starvation and death, out-of-control of anybody, organisation or government, every man for himself (Mad-Max like) where we effectively fight to survive - in fact survival of the fittest just like the rest of the animal kingdom has always been.

To justify why I expect the latter, it is because we have a society / civilisation that has become so complex and inter-dependant that when a couple of wheels come off almost any aspect of "the system", we will rapidly sink to depths we simply don't know how to deal with and 99% of us have no idea what to do - present company excepted to a greater or lesser degree.

When there is no food in the supermarkets, people (in the West) will go hungry. When there is no water coming out of the taps - people will start to die of thirst.

Just look around you to see the use of electricity in your surrounding towns and cities and think for a moment what is required to maintain that supply. If the electricity becomes intermittant, things will start to unravel very quickly.

(I used to work for an electricity company and have worked in computers for 23 years so I don't say the above things lightly.)

Ballard wrote:I haven't noticed 7000 new wind turbines popping up in the countryside this year,

Ecotricityare building 20 turbines down the lane from my house. Now where are the other 6980 going this year?

Perhaps we should form a company and build them. We could call ourselves... oooh, I dunno... Powerswitch?

I think the post-peak oil induced recession of the 2010's will curtain demand.

Maybe we'll only n eed 20,000 off-shore turbines.

Definitely time to rethink our 3%-economic-growth-at-all-costs-and-screw-the-consequences thinking!

Hmm, it's daft I know but..

If the UK land area is 241590 square kilometres

Wind turbines, spacing what? 300M between each one so 9 per square Km

95,000 turbines divided by 9 = 10,555 Sq km

241590 / 10555 = 22.88%

So we need to cover approx 25% of the UK with wind turbines.

Ballard wrote: So we need to cover approx 25% of the UK with wind turbines.

So what I'm hearing is... growth market!!

Why build 90000 small ones - just build one giant one 90000 times the size of a normal wind turbine.

Oh dear, the gallows humour is really setting in...

clv101 wrote:Deloitte have produced a fantastic report on the state of electricity production in the UK to 2020. It's fair to say they recognise the looming energy gap!

Stunning Clarity From Deloitte

Deloitte Report

Nice find, nice blogspot, good one.

Hmmm. I'm feeling the need to emigrate somewhere less dependant on fossil fuels. Perhaps Mars?

mikepepler wrote:Hmmm. I'm feeling the need to emigrate somewhere less dependant on fossil fuels. Perhaps Mars?

Suggest Iceland. Bit more practical. They seem to be doing quite nicely on Geothermal. They've only got a few vehicles running on Hydrogen so far but the potential is there to do the whole Hydrogen economy schtick..

Iceland also have sorted out their sustainable fishery policy as well.