Shortfall
Thursday 10th November, 2005 16:50 Comments: 0
According to a recent article by the BBC, once we close down our nuclear plants we won't be able to provide enough energy for all our needs.
I'm not surprised by that. Three years ago, I wrote a website as part of a web design project that looked into energy sources, and I came up with the conclusion (these dynamic pages were used to create static html pages, so the links don't work) that:
Nuclear is a very effective short-medium term solution until we have enough capacity from solar power or other renewable sources. Solar power can provide 10,000 times more energy than the world currently uses, but only once we install them. House values go up by approx 10% when the house has decent solar panels, and the money saved on bills over a 10 year period is huge. While government grants can help subsidise the cost (currently a 50% grant), people will not switch to it quickly enough, and (aside from the slight increase in non-renewable sources) the only action the government is currently taking is closing nuclear plants which will result in excessive pollution in the short term, resulting in the UK failing to meet the Kyoto targets. As we cannot purely use solar power in the short term, we should continue to use nuclear power, reduce our dependency on gas and coal, introduce greater subsidies for solar power, and continue the work on building wind farms.
I'm not surprised by that. Three years ago, I wrote a website as part of a web design project that looked into energy sources, and I came up with the conclusion (these dynamic pages were used to create static html pages, so the links don't work) that:
Nuclear is a very effective short-medium term solution until we have enough capacity from solar power or other renewable sources. Solar power can provide 10,000 times more energy than the world currently uses, but only once we install them. House values go up by approx 10% when the house has decent solar panels, and the money saved on bills over a 10 year period is huge. While government grants can help subsidise the cost (currently a 50% grant), people will not switch to it quickly enough, and (aside from the slight increase in non-renewable sources) the only action the government is currently taking is closing nuclear plants which will result in excessive pollution in the short term, resulting in the UK failing to meet the Kyoto targets. As we cannot purely use solar power in the short term, we should continue to use nuclear power, reduce our dependency on gas and coal, introduce greater subsidies for solar power, and continue the work on building wind farms.