1.4GW !

If there *is* any detail to their thinking, that would be interesting. I expect is the usual virtue signalling sound bite nonsense. I hope I am wrong!

Stop being pragmatic !

That wasn't the point of the post - take a look again in context.

In any case, most here know that doubling renewables to '100%' wouldn't work - until a method of storage can be found.

Makes sense to me.

There's a list here

ISTR that about that time Welsh Nationalists getting upset that 'Welsh' water was going to Manchester!

Overbuilding solar in the UK isn't practical. The available surface area, solar energy density, isn't good enough. We would need to cover too much of the country. There isn't enough energy reasonably available. There is enough reasonable potential for offshore wind overcapacity, but not for solar, in the UK.

We also don't seem to have got very far with hydrogen generation. Maybe it will ramp up once we have lots of excess wind, but maybe it just isn't economic. The most compelling argument for hydrogen I've heard is that it allows politicians to build new gas powered electricity generators (Apparently the same design works for hydrogen and natural gas).

AIUI, hydrogen storage is a lesser concern.

We could grow trees and burn them. Solar + Storage, the problem again is available land area.

You have one faction of the green lobby advocating NOT cutting down trees and re-wilding most of the UK.

Is burning trees or wood chip actually "green". It may be renewable but not necessarily environmentally friendly for other reasons.

Is it just doubling when the main target seems to be just to build more and more wind turbines?

In the case of wind, on a good day wind can generate around 30% (peak) of our current demand. On a bad day less than 5%. We have approx 11,000 wind turbines so to meet 50% of our demand on a good wind day we need a total of 18,000 wind turbines but to meet the 50% figure on a bad wind day we need 110,000 wind turbines, a 10x increase in potential capacity. In the future when we all have EVs and electric heating we may need quarter of a million wind turbines to meet 50% of that demand. This is equivalent to around 2 wind turbines for each square mile of land mass in the UK :)

Some while ago I costed having enough battery storage to cover those 5-7 day winter periods when you have zero renewable. I was able eventually to find the capacity of those Tesla jobs installed in South Australia, and their storage capacity. Using those numbers I came up with a cost of £1000,000,000,000 and no pence.

You can buy a lot of £34 billyun Hinkley Point C stations for that. Not that we are paying for Hinkley Point C anyway.

So, I wouldn't bank on storage any time soon, to cover the issue.

I might add that if our next car is a plug-in hybrid or possibly an electric, I will be putting some solar in too. But then, see, I will be paying for it - it wont be public money. Unlike all the renewable that's going in.

I think the trillyun quid should be spent on SMR, which could be dotted around the country and make our electric grid rather more resilient against Putin.

Especially as the new govt seems intent on holding up the signs saying "Refugees welcome here". We need all that land for infrastructure to house them all.

And if we get that many, all our available manpower will be required for ongoing maintenance on them. Oh, and don't forget replacement in 25 years time. Otherwise it'll be like the sewer system all over again.

Around a thousand tonnes of enriched uranium couple of million tons of coal

It wont be sorted before at least 2050. There are no technologies that will do the job even theoretically at that scale and at sensible cost.

Nothing has changed since I wrote my paper on this a decade ago, By the time you add in the backup, storage, transmission lines and interconnections to try and make renewables work, even Hinkley point costing nuclear is way cheaper.

Renewable energy is a massively complex land destroying and expensive way to fail to solve a problem that probably doesn't need solving in the first place

If the EU has wanted to reduce carbon fuel usage they would have taxed it. They didn't. They imposed a 'renewable obligation' to make us buy German windmills and solar panels. *Irrespective of whether this actually reduced carbon fuel usage*

It's been a scam since the beginning

No, it isn't enough to do that *AT ALL* Batteries are there to stabilise the grid frequency. They are incapable of storing enough power to run the grid more than an hour at most

Dream on theo. Dont do sums. Trust the Guardian Art Student journalists

It is a complete lie. Solar is not cheap at all. It is around 5 times the levelised cost of nuclear power And no amount of overbuildng will generate electricity in the middle of the night.

Lots of impractical dreamers putting their oars in on this thread. They seem to think you can run the grid on a couple of AA batteries, or that some magic way of storing huge amounts of energy will magically appear, all it needs is to "developed".

The total bollocksness of these dreams will, in time, become apparent even to the dimmest lightbulbs who espouse them, but by then trillions will have been spent to no avail.

We haven't heard anything about fusion generation lately. Isn't it about time they said it will be available in another 10 years?

Fusion was always going to be difficult; herding cats would probably be easier. I'll believe it when it's here; not before. Meanwhile we should be getting on with what we know does work: fission-based generation.