From this morning's letters page in the Guardian:
There are far cheaper, safer, quicker, more efficient ways of addressing the climate challenge than pursuing nuclear power. Accelerating the deployment of energy-efficiency measures, demand-response, demand-reduction and distributed-generation policies, and renewable technologies, would help drive wholesale electricity costs down and deliver more value for money as a pathway to decarbonising electricity generation.
The Green New Deal Group, of which I am part, outlined just such an approach in a report last week. Investment in renewables, alongside a nationwide project to make every building in the country energy-efficient, would create hundreds of thousands of high-quality jobs across the country, as well as reducing both fuel bills and emissions.
Caroline Lucas MP
Green, Brighton Pavilion
I too, of course, am a member of the Green New Deal group.
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How are we going to power the UK when you are all long and dead. The Labour party allowed millions more people into the UK. The Lib dem want us to embrace it and they said this week its really good. However this leaves the problem about future energy needs in this country. We are running out of power and we rely on electricity much more. Many houses have tvs, computers games machines, ipads etc that all need power. Plus the increase in people all wanting this power.
So far there have been no real figures o show how where this increase in power will come from. Its okay to complain about the price of fuel going up each year.
Real life needs power, for millions of new people.
Tidal
Solar
Wind
Efficiency
Insulation
Changed life styles
It’s a step in the right direction. A step further would be to recognise that making buildings energy-efficient could be funded by money created from nothing, provided it was proportionate, without fear of inflation as it would be used for creating the wealth with which it would then be backed. in fact, the same goes for creating buildings themselves too… whither mortgages and the banking industry which largely depends on them then? We’re possibly opening the door to more than is understood here.
Sympathetic to Green New Deal but it is long on aspiration and short on evidence. Green Technologies at present are heavily subsidised. Where are your models, your pilot runs etc? Advocating billions spent on Green Technologies in a top down approach is like gambling blindfold. Let’s start perhaps with a case by case regional development plan and assess the results- properly- so Green Technology is ditched where it is not efficient and adopted where it is.
I have said time and again
Insulation works
Solar works
Wind works
Housebuilding works
Do you really have problems with those things?
If so, why?
Solar only works during the daylight hours, as long as it is bright.
Do you have solar panels on your roof? How useful are they for a working family?
Take for instance mum dad work, kids at school. Do you use a timer on the washing machine and just hope. Or do you stop working and then have time to sit at home for when it is sunny.
Oh dear
The grid and integrated energy seem to have passed you by
I have put rather large Solar panel installations on some of my factories and from an economic perspective it only works because of subsidy, the feed in tariff to be precise.
As to an integrated grid, the sale back price for excess electricity is pathetic and would never make it worthwhile.
For a house, without a feed in tariff, you would be looking at 30 years to break even without any inflation. Plus that does not include servicing and replacement panels.
Solar does not work without much higher energy costs which is kind of against the whole idea!
This is complete nonsense: solar is now cost effective without feed in tariffs
I don’t want to doubt your proposition, but where is the evidence for each of your headings? Each of your headings has disadvantages, the onus is for your case to show whether the advantages outweigh them-before you advocate the expenditure of billions. For example why not say Country X is in this state of Green Development and these were resulting pros and cons. Then we can use it as a model for own Green Development-but not go blind in an orgy of top down spending-there are lots of nasty people who will take advantage of that.
You mean you doubt the virtue of housing?
Shall we start there?
Stephen, why does green development need to be so rigorously considered when compared to say, HS2?
The Government are quite willing to p*ss £50 billion up against the wall on a vanity project based on flim flam!
I apologise that my exasperation has led me to spell the above out so graphically.
To whom will this money eventually go? Into their friends back pockets, one imagines, which would explain it. Seats on the board all round!
Richard, further to the renewables versus nuclear power argument, perhaps the naysayers should read this:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/26/us-climate-germany-solar-idUSBRE84P0FI20120526
So – once again Germany leads, and AWAY from nuclear towards solar. WE in the UK could have been the leaders in this, but our political elite were too busy paying court to the nuclear lobby – I wonder why? Backhanders? Probably.
But the man this is that an advanced economy is phasing out the ruinously expensive nuclear power option. Wish we could do so here, when we have idiots wanting to build Sizewell C, which will be flooded if sea levels rise by very modest maounts thanks to global warming.
Sizewell has scared me wine I was a teenager and my father was involved in its construction
I well remember many a household argument on the issue
And my concern has not gone away. Stand on. Beach at Dunwich as I have done with my children sand say two phrases. Scare yourself
The first is coastline erosion
The second global warming
And then realise what its legacy will be for life in East Anglia
The second link on this article doesn’t work. How many times do you want me to tell you. Please listen.
Actually, Germany is also going coal….
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/new-coal-fired-plants-could-be-key-to-german-energy-revolution-a-854335.html
Since the “smart” grid is restricted to being “smart” in that it will [at first] change billing costs on an hourly basis [already being done in the US] thereby forcing users to chose between use-it and lose-money. One wonders how they [users] are to be informed as to the change times…
Eventually high-energy-use machines will be forcibly disconnected from the grid to cope with demand fluctuations, but the machines are not being made yet, and the grid infrastructure is not made either.
Although it has been mooted that domestic electricity storage is the way to go to cope with grid disconnects.
Of course, schemes such as wind generation cannot be cost effective without the subsidies, at least not at current gas/coal generation costs.
Whatever happens (coal/gas/nuclear[fission/fusion]/solarPV) electricity costs are going to rise (forecast 50%, all types, in the next 4 years). That’s where your solarPV costs going down are coming from. Meanwhile, at a town in China, where the solar cells and their basic component elements are mined/made, have a cuppa on the edge of the stinking waste pits.
” Luoyang Zhonggui, a major Chinese polysilicon manufacturer, is dumping toxic factory waste directly on to the lands of neighboring villages, killing crops and poisoning residents”
http://www.enn.com/pollution/article/32974
Of course, we have strict environment regulations here, which is why we can’t make solar cells at a competitive cost no doubt.
As others have pointed-out, wages and salaries are going down at the same time as basic needs are going up.
I can forecast, however, that everything will be “reported” as rosy sometime around 2015.