Solar Panels

Image by by Crispy Lettuce on Flickr.com

Take a look at www.withouthotair.com - a fantastic electronic version of a book by David MacKay is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge. It provides facts and figures about how much energy we might get from renewable sources, and how much we might save by energy saving measures.

It's packed with actual figures of how much energy we use, and its real message is that we're going to have to make some BIG changes to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. It shatters our illusions about what is going to really make a difference. For instance it points out that not leaving your mobile phone charger plugged in unnecessarily is going to save as much energy as driving a car for one second. As the wonderful synopsis says, "Obsessively switching off the phone-charger is like bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon".

Looking at renewables, it does find that they can make a significant contribution but they would need to be built on an "industrial scale", covering large swathes of the country. For example covering 5-10% of the land area of the UK could meet something like 40% of our current consumption, as could having wind turbines at sea over an area twice that of Wales.

If we are not prepared to countenance this, then we're going to have to consider:

  • sustainable fossil fuels such as clean coal
  • nuclear energy
  • importing renewable energy e.g. solar energy from desert regions

I'd recommend everyone read the synopsis at least.

 

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