THE WAY AHEAD

It's not a very entertaining document, but the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC)'s Energy and Emissions Projections (updated June 2010) does have some very interesting information in it.

Basically, renewables are expected to burgeon enormously by the end of the decade.

The report assumes - as it should - that the government's own target of 30% of electricity generated by renewables will be met by 2020. As the document's graphs show, this will entail a massive amount of new build for renewables (roughly, from just a few gigawatts to about 35 gigawatts by 2020). Come the end of this decade, renewables are predicted to account for some 150 Terrawatt/hours - between a third and a half of the total produced - with only gas coming anywhere near a comparable amount. Nuclear - both old and new - is expected to provide just a fraction of that: maybe 20 TWh in all.

These are exciting predictions. They tell us that, as things stand, the UK government is fully expecting a colossal increase in renewable energy supplies over the next nine years.

The only things standing in the way are our rather byzantine and cumbersome planning proceedures and the idiotic nimby groups like VVASP which make such a mockery of the democratic process.

All the same, the government's predictions are what they are. Regardless of fraudulent VVASP-type campaign groups and the odd Blimp introducing silly Private Members Bills, the march towards renewables will proceed apace.

Nuclear barely gets a look in. The reason being that it's way too expensive. As Tom Burke, Environmental Policy Advisor to Rio Tinto and visiting professor at Imperial College and UCL, wrote recently in The Independent:

The reality is that for all the rhetoric and manipulated headlines, the nuclear renaissance is far from assured. The awful economics that halted its first wave of nuclear construction remain the biggest obstacle to its ability to contribute significantly to meeting the twin challenges of climate and energy security. Nuclear is a future technology whose time has past. The real future belongs to wind, solar and all the other renewable energy technologies.

The idiot nimby fringe protests that wind power is massively subsidised, and some of their more deluded members even claim that developers like ScottishPower Renewables are only building windfarms in order to get their hands on government subsidies. But, well, that's idiocy for you. There is a levy on electricity usage which helps to invest in the entire renewables industry - it works out at about 0.35 pence per kilowatt/hour.

Compare that with the £3,000 that the average UK household will be contributing to the costs of decommissioning Britain's ageing nuclear power stations. And let's not forget - we're still not entirely sure what to do with all that hazardous waste.

The tiresome argument which continually tries to insist that renewables 'don't work' has already been lost. Only those who are so ignorant of the facts they might as well have been reading the Daily Mail continue to hawk these ridiculous arguments about the place. They're a bit like people who insist that the internet will never come to anything, or that mobile phones 'don't work'. They're wrong, they've always been wrong, and events are outstripping them so fast that, basically, they couldn't be more wrong. They're getting wronger all the time.

So, its by-and-large bye-bye nuclear (and good riddance), hello renewables. The future is bright.

Now we just have to get those bigoted, desperate, hysterical, mendacious, irresponsible, foolish and inconsiderate nookies to shut up.