SierraTango
I wish I knew more about our policies when it comes to renewable sources of energy. What are we as a country doing to harness different sources of energy? I?ve seen windmills going up and seen solar panels here or there, but nothing on a widespread scale that could replace our current primary fuel sources. Surely, as an island our main source of power should be tidal energy?
An awful lot of questions, and as a non-expert I'll try to give you a bit of an idea about the issues here.
When you're considering how much power the UK needs, you need to consider a few things. The first is that our requirements change depending upon the time of day, the day of the week, the weather, and so on. This is called the base load.
The second thing you need to consider is that transporting electricity is expensive and wasteful. The longer those electricity lines are from the place where the power is generated, the more electricity you lose.
The third thing to consider is that when you want electricity, you want it immediately, not in 2 hours' time. This means that a power solution needs to be scalable. That means that it should be easy to increase the amount of power from that solution. Nuclear is a good example of this - it costs as much to run a nuclear power station at 100% of its capacity as it does at 1%.
So the best power solutions are ones that can give us that base load, that scalability and that short transport distance for the power. The worst ones are ones that don't give us any of them. Most renewables fall in to this category.
Take wind as an example. Wind power is only available at certain times. If the wind is blowing too hard, or not at all, there's no power. You can't turn the wind up when you want more power. And because wind farms have to be in exposed places, that means that you have to have huge long cables to deliver the power.
Because wind is on and off, we either have to find a way to store the power when it is generated in huge battery arrays, or we have to use the electricity when it's available. The first is not cost effective and is far more environmentally damaging than a coal-fired power station, the second is what the eco-mentalists are trying to force us to do, and it's madness.
Realistically, we need a base load that is reliable. If we don't have one, the economy grinds to a halt. Renewables can't power the country, because they can't guarantee that base load.
How do we find out more about these issues? How do we get involved to bring about change?
What sort of change do you want to bring? There are already a number of projects that are bringing change, but not perhaps in the way you would hope.
The EU has written various laws to subsidise some forms of electricity generation and not others. These are bundled under its Renewables Directive. What these laws do is give taxpayers' money to wind, solar, biomass, and the like, and put a 'carbon tax' on coal, oil and gas.
One of the consequences of this is that fuel prices have doubled, pushing hundreds of thousands in to fuel poverty. The reason you're spending more on heating your house and cooking your food than ever is this directive. It takes taxpayers' money and subsidises inefficient power generation, and then you pay more for your electricity on top of that.
The solution in the short term is gas, some coal and plenty of conventional nuclear power. In the long term, the solutions should include thorium fission and fusion. China already has an operational thorium reactor. Thorium nuclear is far superior because, unlike uranium, there's no waste.