

Energy and climate change


What to do?

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Wrong. Not everyone is "green." Our planet is blue--blue oceans, blue skies. "Green" is a silly, passing fad.

But you are right about the need to get beyond fossil fuels, and the obvious answer is nuclear power. The equally obvious question is when we will find the moral and political courage to rebuff the environmental extremists and move ahead with the knowledgeable and skillful development of nuclear power, instead of allowing ourselves to be held hostage in energy limbo by technological and environmental ignorance.


Average wind speed over a period tells you what Energy you might get over the period. The UK average of 6m/sec quoted by Stonehenge, with a tall-windmill-short_anemometer markup of 20% will deliver 250 KW from a Nordex 2,500 KW wind turbine, brochure, on the web.

Wind speeds NOW, will tell you if you can meet the demand for Power, NOW. If you can’t, the lights go out, screens go dark, dialysis machines stop,… In Johannesburg, raw sewage was pumped into rivers,…

This morning, at 0800, that brochure, plus the Met Office wind speeds from their 78 observation sites, showed that the aggregate output, if each had a wind farm, would be 4% of the installed capacity. Scotland did 9%.

UK maximum demand was about 42 million KW, (National Grid Real Time), so if we had 1,000 million KW of Turbines we would be alright. Three similar anticyclones covered UK for about a fortnight each in each of the last four winters, when our demand was 62 million KW, in the dark at 5-6 pm. Within those anticyclonic spells our windpower calculated at less than 1% on many occasions. We need fossil or nuclear, or lots of candles. Nuclear is cheapest, and the French know how to deal with problems.

Bill Hyde, DFH, C Eng, Fellow IET, electricity supply engineer.
Lane End House, Teston Road, Offham, Kent, ME19 5PD, 01732 843134


MacKay's attempt to provide an insight to the numbers involved in the overall energy challenge and make it publicly available is laudable. Unfortunately, he is not always very exact with his assumptions (and garbage in -> garbage out...) For example, he assumes an average wind speed for UK of 6 m/s, but a brief look at the European wind atlas http://www.windatlas.dk/Europe/landmap.html instead of guessing would have told him that e.g. for the whole of Scotland the value on hills and ridges (where usually wind turbines are placed) is at least twice as high, therefore he underestimated the available energy (which goes with the cube of the wind speed) by a factor of 8 there. In fact, for a value of 6 m/s you'd have to look for some sheltered place anywhere in the UK!
On the positive side, though: all his calculations are very easy to follow so it's no big deal to replace faulty input with some more realistic data to get a more accurate picture.

Judy Cross

"Nature can not be fooled", but people sure can be. The hottest year of the 20th Century was 1934.

The warming of the 1920-1940s just might have been more dramatic than that of the 1990s with little in the way of human CO2 contribution to account for it.

There is no need to ration energy based on the simplistic understanding of climate that says CO2 can change it. Temperatures are going down and CO2 is still up there at 390 ppm doing very little except helping plants to grow.

With the lack of sunspot activity we will be very lucky if we don't have a prolonged cooling as promised by Russian physicist and mathmetician Khabibullo Abdusamatov two years ago. "Instead of professed global warming, the Earth will be facing a slow decrease in temperatures in 2012-2015. The gradually falling amounts of solar energy, expected to reach their bottom level by 2040, will inevitably lead to a deep freeze around 2055-2060," he said, adding that this period of global freeze will last some 50 years, after which the temperatures will go up again."


Just the other day a really fundamental report was released by the british "Sustainable Development Commission" - The Government’s independent watchdog on sustainable development.

The commission deals with the really fundamental question: is our myth about continued growth really possible, can we return to business as usual?

"Prosperity Without Growth?" can be downloaded at

After reading all the articles about finance and defaulting in the Economist during the last year I get the feeling The Economist sticks to old myths, as if the true change of the world is not coming through.

This report goes further in setting things right. I hope to to read about the report on the next front page of The Economist.


The figures about energy from wind turbines do not make sense to me as a Dane.

In Danmark 20 % of our electricity comes from wind tubines - which I believe is the highest percentage in the world. We have around 3.100 turbines of different sizes, and the capcity is around 3.500 MW.

When I ride the train around the country, I notice some turbines once in af while, but they do not in any way dominate the landscape.

Many new turbines are placed off shore, but still most of them are not off shore.

If the figures quoted in the article are applied directly to Denmark, 20 % of our country should be occupied with wind turbines. I can assure all readers that this certainly is not the case.

One reason could be that the danish electricity consumption pr. capita is way higher than the british. I dont belive so.


McKay's book is certainly a breath of fresh air.. in the suffocating atmosphere of hot air pumped around by the Climate Catastrophologists .. and the smart business exploting the trend..

I am looking forward to taking the time to read it in depth .


Although annual temperature values are irrelevant, values higher than the 1998 temperature were observed in both 2005 and 2007.

The 1980-89, 1990-99, and 2000-09 decades, in increasing order, had the three highest average temperatures observed during the last 129 years.

Unblinking Eye

I just skimmed though McKay's book. Heavy on facts -- which is great -- but he's making some faulty assumptions. I didn't bother with the other books, since I assume that they're fact-light given the review of the Economist.

The biggest faulty assumption is that he's not fully taking into account the importance of energy efficiency. Houses, apartments, and commercial buildings are going up *today* that are net *contributers* to the grid. This is a direct result intelligently designing them so that they don't need active heating and cooling, or even lighting when it is bright outside. These are buildings will allow for removal of fossil fuel capacity... even if you do nothing on the renewable electricity end. Furthermore, these buildings are *profitable* over their lifetimes. Buildings are one of the largest (if not the largest) users of electicity in the grid of an industrialized economy.

The Rocky Mountain Institute headquarters, built in 1983, is a good example of an "islanded" building. The Empire State building is currently being retrofitted to use 40% less energy... at a profit.

In transportation, inexpensive hybrid cars that are built with carbon composites can easily go 100mpg. The Boeing 777 Dreamliner built with these composites uses 20% less fuel/mile than the previous model. The list goes on.

Even if renewables currently don't have the ability to produce the same amount of power (although we can get top tier solar panels up to 40% efficiency right now, with the price falling sooner than you think), that doesn't mean that we actually need the same amount of energy.

What we need are the energy *services*. You care that you have a hot shower in the morning, not that it took 100KwH or 5KwH of power generated. Intelligent use of resources, coupled with renewables is certainly up for the job.

romer jt

Interesting article, complicated subject about which I have wondered; what about the affects of particulate matter in the atmosphere that reduce sunlight and cool the earth . . . why is it that no one mentions this . . it seems that it would counteract the apparent effects of CO2 . . . has anyone ever heard of articles or studies that deal with this . . . Just curious . . . and for an illustration of the extent of this look up what happened to visibility in the night sky in the week after 911 when there was little air-traffic.

Yankee Doodle

AfterOil wrote: "Our destiny is to make do with around 25% of the energy we use now, either by a planned "energy descent" or by the constraint of resource depletion. Once this basic premise is accepted, we can get on with "re-engineering" our society."

Who made you the Energy Tsar? Why would we want to adopt a fascist social policy since we can retain democracy? Please support your weird assertions.

Yankee Doodle

Anjin-San wrote: "@PieIsGood We still have the issue of the final disposal of high-radioactivity nuclear wastes such as spent fuel."

Actually this was solved fifty years ago. Where do you think France puts their waste? The recycle it using old American technology. Google reprocessing. We recycled Uranium before we recycled anything else, Uranium is worth more than gold is, so it gets re-used.


The world's population has been shocked but not by science but by PROPGANDA regarding climate change.

We're in the middle of an interglacial - its going to get hotter and the oceans are going to rise and in 50,000 years we'll probably all freeze again as we go into another glacial period.

This is about taking money from one group and giving it to another with the middlemen (the promoters of climate change) positioning themselves to make billions in the exchange.

No Thank you.


The hottest year on record remains 1998 - that's 11 years ago or roughly 10% of the known, detailed global temperature history.

What will it take to end the hysteria of man-made 'global warming'?

Continued belief in the irrational is the sign of a religion more than a science. Perhaps man is not secular by nature and is shifting from Christianity to Pantheism?


Has anyone noticed that in the past 10 years or so the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased by 5% and global temperatures have remained constant?

This fact and a multitude of other observations make it very unlikely that human activity or CO2 concentrations have anything to do with climate change.

We should stop worrying about this unproven hypothesis, and solve some of the real problems that plague humanity.



I personally advocate lunar disposal using totally unmanned repository on the Moon. Existing nuclear waste canisters can survive rocket explosions and subsequent impact to sea without breach, so it's just the matter of building rockets big enough to launch one to the Moon, or to downsize the canisters to fit Ariane-5 (say).

Another potential solution may be sub-critical nuclear reactors, which relies on external neutron source (particle accelerator targeted on known neutron seed material) for the trigger of nuclear fission. This process can be used on long half-life fission products to break them down to short half-life radioisotopes.

Anyway, it is important not to ignore any elephants in the living room, regardless of their size and colour.


Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air by David Mackay is really superb. It does talk extensively about nuclear power and the wind power.

Given that the whole thing can be downloaded for free hopefully those who level criticisms at it and this article will at least have a look at it. It does explicitly talk about two of the issues raised in the comments already.

It's a pity that the recent popularity of climate skeptic books has been given no attention by The Economist. To understand the informed skeptic's position best it would be well worth looking at Climate of Extremes by Patrick Michaels.


The fact the nuclear energy is only mentioned once in this article, and in a bad light, attests to the proficiency of the "not in my backyard" movement. Seriously, it's time to get over your petty fears and do some research. We have meltdown proof reactors, we have the ability to produce them, and they produce the most energy with the least consumption. It angers me to no end that people are actually trying to AVOID using nuclear power instead of supporting it. Seriously... what is wrong with people?


If Mr. MacKay suggests that covering only 10% of Britain with windmills produces about 10% as much energy as covering all of it, then he must consider the winds of Britain to be uniform. I doubt this and suggest that a selected windy 10% of Britain might produce up to 30% of the potential wind energy. An area where wind blows twice as fast can produce eight times as much energy. Surely he doesn't assume windmills would be placed randomly?


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