Earth Notes: Can we live on (UK) renewables in the UK? (2009)

Answer: only if the green (renewable generation column) can be made at least as tall as the red (consumption) column. Even when ignoring issues such as intermittency, eg wind doesn't blow on demand to turn turbines during the TV soap break.

(Prices/numbers are ~2009--2010.)

Pick Your Solution

Press the buttons (or enter your own numbers from your own spreadsheet) to find a way to keep the lights on. Your solution must not cost us too much each day nor taking too much space!

Look at the bottom of the green stack and you'll see the cost per person per day and how many UKs worth of land area you need to generate as you've specified. There's also a costs table further down for more detail.

Start Here (press one of these to get to a known state): Reset Business as usual consumption with optimistic generation (book p103)

Costs

Assuming the following:

• Inland surface area of UK ~m², population of UK ~, thus inland area per person ~m².
• All equipment has a working life of ~ years: capital expenditure (capex) may have to be repeated after that time.

costs of the selected plan (eg money, land-area, etc) are:

As to the 'area' costs computed, note that it may be possible to deploy a given land area for multiple uses, eg solar PV on housing roofspace (and heat-pumps underneath), solar farms under turbines with geothermal extraction from under them. Not all the area 'cost' computed is inland, eg for off-shore wind.

FLOWNAME kWh

genWAVE 4