by Sideous » Thu 30 Aug 2007, 05:40:43
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mkwin', 'M')onteQuest -
4) Renewables – You quote current renewable figures but they don’t reflect the possibility of renewables. For just one example, in the UK a plan has been proposed for a 14 billion GBP tidal farm off the river seven that will provide 5% of energy needs of the country – carbon free and perpetual and this is just a fraction of our wind and tidal resources. The next generation PV has such great potential and the production increase in silicon and economies of scale drove down the cost by 40% in 2006. Spain has announced a plan to get the majority of its electricity from solar by 2015, this could be replicated in many southern states (especially Arizona). The current renewable amounts are based on PAST market conditions, frankly given their PAST cost competitiveness I’m surprised they have reached that level in a free market system but those conditions are changing rapidly.
Britain's tidal, wind and wave resources are about the best in the world and in tidal power especially, our resource is a significant fraction of the entire world's resource.
One of the things that struck me when looking at the UK's renewable energy resources is just how finite the total resources were. Tidal, hydro and biomass, have technical potentials considerably smaller than the energy we are now using, and I am talking about electricity and not total delivered energy. Technical potential, more or less assumes that we utilise all of the practically available resource. As I pointed out, the UK has some of the best potential in the world for tidal, wind and wave energy sources and above avergae potential for biomass, by vitue of our good soils and temperate and moist climate. Yet, even wind and wave could only provide a large fraction of our present electricity supply, if developed them on a trully massive scale (that is a scale that is so large that it approaches the actual natural limits of what nature can provide).
Tidal is a good case in point. The Bristol channel is one of the most powerful tidal systems in the world. Impressive plans have been drawn up to build a 12GWe barrage across the estuary, stretching from North Devon to South West Wales. This would be one of the largest civil engineering projects in the history of mankind. Yet, the fact remains that limited capacity factors will reduce the power output of the barrage to just 2-3GWe, equivelent to just two nuclear reactors. And building the thing would ruin the ecology of the Bristol channel.
Expanding renewables will require a lot of time and investmnet money committed to a long term project, something that UK finance is famously bad at.
Now consider the case for a country like Germany or Belgium, which has none of our tidal or wave resources and only a fraction of our wind resource. Having studied renewable energy for some time, I find it difficult to be optimistic about it.