PowerSwitch

The Centre for Alternative Technology and its Graduate School for the Environment (GSE) recently published an Alternative Energy Strategy called Zero Carbon Britain and presented it to the All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group on the 10th July where it was warmly received. This was prepared in the full knowledge of Peak Oil and takes account of it. It shows how Britain could be energy independent in 20 years "using existing and proven technology".

Website at
http://www.zerocarbonbritain.com

Download the report at
http://www.zerocarbonbritain.com/images ... ritain.pdf

Dale Vince at Ecotricity is pushing the Zero idea:
http://www.newgreenjack.com/?ezine=120707

I have recently studied the 'ZeroCarbonBritain' document, and I found it absolutely fascinating, well researched and imaginative. Whilst up to that point I thought I could see NO solution to the dual forces of PO and CC, now I can see that a theoretical solution might just be possible. However, the report illustrates what an enormous task it would be to convert Britain to zero carbon over 20 years, mindblowing stuff. And it would need to start happenning now, like from January 2008!

Of course there is absolutely no way it will be adopted any time soon, certainly not from next year by the UK, and certainly not by other major nations on the planet. So good plan, but unfortunately no chance!

It points in the right direction and if it's used as a blueprint to get us going, even if it takes 25 or 30 years, it will have done its job. At least it shows it can be done without nukes.

The report doesn't mention LTS, which is an existing load-balancing mechanism.

http://www.powerswitch.org.uk/forum/vie ... php?t=2102

Another issue is that to provide 99.99% availability requires a tremendous amount of generating capacity on standby.

Looking at Figure 9 here, you can see the order of 3GW needed in standby. By reducing the availability to, say, 95%, only 1GW is needed.

I helped write the report and concede that it's ambitious, but I think that if the reality turns out to be even half way between the scenario in the report and BAU/collapse, then it'll have been worth doing, no?

We're hoping to build on the report and develop the project into an ongoing think tank/research programme, so thanks Bandidoz, I'll mention LTS to the rest of the zerocarbonbritain team and hopefully it'll make it into future iterations/updates of the report.

I'm part way through reading this document. It's very well written: concise, tightly edited, sober and it's all the more powerful because addresses both climate change and peak oil problems.