The "debate" thread

[Ed Doe]

/facepalm.

Sorry, again, we have 40 years of fossil fuels which we have uncovered; i think we've discovered 3% of the earths reserves? something like that...
there are a LOT of fossil and non-renewable energy sources around that we havn't un-covered yet.

Secondly, why havn't we prepared? Because the government can't tax air/water/sun.

I think it was Hitler that once said something along the lines of "to rule the world, you must find a way to tax whats free" ?

It's not the point though. we're using the reserves that are easier to remove. Once they're gone we're looking at more expensive fuels anyway.

Wind imo is a bit of a red-herring. The capacity factor isn't high enough to be able to rely on them for a substantial portion of the power.

The best thing imo is to start looking at Nuclear. And without starting to bang on about my job, people seriously need to start to look at how they use their energy. The government are in the process (they've been delaying and changing it for the last 2 years) of implementing grants for renewable heating whereby you can get a full repayment on an entire heating system in 3 years, and the grants are available for 7 years after commissioning. so you're looking at a hefty return on investment if you put the right thing in already. And the beauty of heatpump systems is they're on for long periods of time, meaning it's good for smoothing out power demands. hence you can increase the % of energy generated by less fossil-fuel intensive sources such as nuclear, without having to ramp up and down at short notice.

Things like PV will also help, as they can delay or smooth spikes in demand on a house by house basis, rather than the current situation of requiring the top % of the grid to have really short response time, and hence a reliance on Gas (which has the fastest black-start response time of all generation fuels).

The solution to the energy industry whether people agree with climate change or not is a combination of alternative technologies both on a microgeneration scale and on a large commercial scale. The benefits of this on its own means more oil available for petrol and diesel, so we can go for longer with our cars!!

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We are preparing, there is a huge offshire wind farm being built of the north east coast in-between us and Denmark. Not to mention all the other ones being built around you don't see them because people throw fits because it "ruins" their view out the window etc
Solar power wise, it's got a lot of government backing and funding but most people aren't interested in going through the effort/putting any of their own money in it. Plus I'm sure ive read somewhere the oil to produce a solar panel contains more energy than you get out of the panel in its lifetime. Though that might have been the early models.

They did round 3 of the offshore Crown Territories auction a year or so ago didn't they?

Solar PV tech has improved massively in recent years. The government got it wrong when incentivising it intially, and the system was prone to abuse. Hence why they pulled the funding a year ago completely. They have obviously addressed the flaws and are offering incentivisation once more, but the down-side is there is less money to incentivise consumers to commit to it. It's still well worthwhile going for it though imo...