I am grateful to a reader for alerting me to an article in The Chemical Engineer by Stephen Bush and David MacDonald on the subject of the UK's looming energy catastrophe. It's not online, but here are some excerpts:
In the UK, the Climate Change Act 2008 has set the country the challenging target of reducing emissions of CO2 and CO2 equivalents by 34% from 1990 levels by 2020, 50% by 2027, and 80% by 2050, though the 2027 target is subject to review in 2014. Coupled with rising demand and the already painful impact of higher energy prices, meeting this target will be challenging indeed, leaving some engineers to wonder what it will take to square this cirde.
The number of installations required to generate the electricity to replace fossil fuels depends on their capacity and availability. A 1,600 MW Areva-type nuclear reactor working at 80% availability generates 11 TWh/yr, so around 13 would need to be built to meet the 2020 target; an impossible task. A 3 MW wind turbine with 75 m blades on an 80 m mast onshore has achieved average availability of around 24%, while for offshore 30% future availability is claimed yielding 6.3 GWh/yr and 7.9 GWh/yr respectively. To meet the 2020 target would require 20,000 and 16,000 turbines respectively, an equally impossible task over nine years (six to be built every day). The 2027 target is even further out of reach.
Averting catastrophe
Readers will draw their own conclusions from the inexorable figures above. but for these authors only a system with its baseload provided by nuclear power supplemented by gas for peak demand, and retaining the existing wind investment can possibley supply the UK long term with the huge amounts of secure and reliable, predominantly electrical energy it needs. To actually achieve a changeover to a largely non-fossil fuel economy without wreaking catastrophe on our industries the targets set by The Climate Change Act 2008 will have to be pushed back no matter whatever combination of electricity generating technologies is built.