The Fast Lane to Low-Carbon Energy, a lecture by Andrew Smith

Written by Dominic Neate Tuesday, 09 March 2010

The new government chief scientific advisor on climate change, Professor David MacKay, has proposed a quadrupling of Britain’s nuclear power generation to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.

He believes nuclear power is the only method which would meet the soaring demands for electricity whilst reducing the emissions.

He has quite a task ahead of him in order to comply with the government’s pledge to cut emissions to 140 million tonnes from the yearly total of 680m tonnes by 2050, and concludes that energy from renewable energy production could only produce a fraction of what is needed.

Green Party candidate for Feltwell, Andrew Smith, challenges the professor's claim.

Andrew says the UK could in fact produce enough electricity through renewable sources not just for the UK but for the whole world.

That’s quite a statement until you look at his theory.

MacKay has calculated that each of us uses 195 units (kWh) of power per day.

But is this the case? Andrew has worked out the most efficient spread of wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal power, etc, across the British Isles and has found that we could easily cater for our nation’s needs.

Currently, 30% of our energy production is lost up cooling towers, which wouldn’t be needed if we switched to renewable sources.

Andrew believes Professor MacKay greatly exaggerates our individual energy requirements when he for example incorporates factors like the energy expended abroad for the production of items bought by the UK.

In fact, Andrew believes we use nearer to 90 kWh per day, and if all cars were electric this figure would come down to 60-65kWh as electric cars use 10kWh per person per day, not 40kWh.

Although Andrew hasn’t developed a working scientific and economical model for his controversial workings, he cites examples of countries like Norway and Italy who are making it work.

Unlike the UK they already use deep-sea turbines (>700m seawater depth) which harness a lot more energy than inland ones without significant transport wastage with 80 to 90% of the losses in the transmission to land occurring in the last 10km.

Andrew appears to have highlighted that Professor MacKay is funnelling opinions towards a nuclear solution to the impending energy crisis, when a more rigorous and possibly "politically unbiased" analysis would attest to the real viability of renewable energy production.

Andrew gave his lecture at the Green Party's Spring 2010 conference.