Comparison of yields

A short opinion piece in The Times Online which really drives home the ridiculous claims being made for "Green Power" -- the OpEd piece is talking about the upcoming election in the U.K.:

It's this simple: wind farms the size of London, or safe, clean nuclear plants
ELECTION ROOM 2005 is filled with elephants hidden behind the flimsiest of political camouflage. For me, the bull elephant is the need for a practical energy policy for Britain.

On this issue, I am disenfranchised because all three main parties, despite differing degrees of enthusiasm and rhetoric, share the same outlook: an unconvincing belief that "renewable energy" - wave, wind and solar power - is a credible way to solve Britain's energy problems.

Political correctness is warping energy policy. Predicating policy, through the doomed Kyoto Protocol, on unpredictable environmental concerns is disastrous. It will slow economic growth, dull our competitive edge, deny much-needed energy expansion and expose us to political turmoil overseas. The result will be a Britain in which the lights go out by 2020, if not earlier, while billions of people in the developing world remain energy-starved.

Lord Broers, this year's Reith lecturer, has given warning that British energy policy makes over-optimistic assumptions about the potential of "renewables", such as wind. He argues that "all of these energy sources should carry the costs of their overheads with them. If you have wind power, you have to have back-up from gas generation."

Kenneth J. Fergusson, the president of the Combustion Engineering Association, develops the case, stating that: "Britain should stop subsidising wind-mills (only building them to the extent that they are commercially viable)." He reminds us that "Britain is heading for a crisis in power supplies to which no amount of preferential treatment for renewable energy sources can do more than make a peripheral contribution for decades to come".

The author (Philip Stott - Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the University of London) then goes on to cite some comparisons:

To replace a 1,000 megawatt (MW) nuclear station supplying just 1/65th of peak demand requires 30 miles of wave machines; or it would need a wind farm that would cover an area equivalent to Inner London, or for solar power, it would require an area half as much again. If we were to try to replace the output of that 1,000MW nuclear power station with bio-oils or biomass fuels, we would have to cover the entire Scottish Highlands with oil-seed rape or turn Wales into a giant willow coppice.

Yet, as Professor Fells reminds us, by 2020, we will have only one nuclear plant operating. Moreover, we will be importing 90 per cent of our gas from countries such as Algeria, Iran, Iraq, and Russia, while we accept nuclear-generated power from France, which is set to reassert its successful nuclear policy (59 plants and expanding).

There are a lot of alternative sources for energy but none of them are as compact and reliable as Nuclear Energy. Coal is popular but it's horribly polluting and has a huge waste disposal problem. Wind / Wave / etc... are nice but they don't meet the demand and they take up a huge amount of real-estate.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on April 12, 2005 5:54 PM.

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