Wind is main source of UK electricity for first time
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
> And electricity only accounts for 18% of the UK's total power needs. There are many demands for energy which electricity is not meeting, such as heating our homes, manufacturing and transport. Currently the majority of UK homes use gas for their heating
Perhaps we should start talking about what % of “energy” comes from renewables? Probably far more difficult to calculate and we’ll never hit 100% I guess?
https://mip-prd-web.azurewebsites.net/ (I don't know of a friendlier URL)
The technical terms are "primary energy" (the amount of energy you put in as fuel) and "final energy" the actual useful stuff you want done.
Cars moving to EV will reduce the need for "primary energy" by about 4x if the useful final energy remains flat. Similar for heat pumps for home heating.
https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/14/wood-bur...
Tree starts as a seed. Grows up and sequesters X tons of carbon. Tree is burned, releases X tons of carbon. Tree is re-planted, grows up, sequesters X tons of carbon. Tree is burned, releases X tons of carbon.
If everything in the world right now was wood powered, we would not have a global warming problem. We would have massive tree farms sequestering the same amount of carbon we are releasing. (We might have a soot and particle problem, but that's another story).
The problem with oil and coal, is we have no way to make more. We burn oil and release carbon.. how are we making more oil and pumping back underground to sequester that carbon?
But I don't feel bad when I burn firewood pulled from a local forest. As that burning is not adding carbon to the world overall.
Unfortunately, it seems like middle-class Brits are completely obsessed with log fires, judging by British home renovation shows.
I’m guessing that if all the open fires were instead “low particulate” stoves, then it wouldn’t be a concern compared to PM2.5 generation from vehicles.
I don’t see a perfect here until we all have heat pumps driven by nuclear.
Exhaust particulate per mile has plummeted over the past couple of decades! By comparison, EPA stoves put out a couple grams of particulate per hour.
But, it seems like it's not apples to apples, because brake dust is metal dust, whereas wood smoke tends to be mostly organic compounds. Maybe the body is better at dealing with organic wood smoke compounds? We've certainly been heavily exposed over many generations.
Also, seems like there are some efforts to make electrostatic filters for fine particulate in flue gas: https://enervex.com/systems/particle-filter-system-for-stove...
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200423005264/en/8mi...
China being the “main supplier” has more to do with them undercutting everyone else in refining by not paying attention enough to their environment, it isn’t sustainable. All of these raw materials have ample reserves outside of China. Some of battery economy comes from that, but not most of it.
There are other ways to store energy than batteries. The Pacific Northwest and even California has a lot of pumped storage hydro capacity. Hydro is a renewable that can be used on demand, and can be combined with other renewables to move water back up to reservoirs.
It's not just a case of them being happy to dig nasty stuff out of the ground without care. If anything it's because they lack a specific type of nasty stuff to dig out of the ground and so their government hasn't been totally captured by fossil fuel interests.
The west actively abdicated their early lead on all these technologies.
China still produces plenty of coal, so I'm not sure what your point is. I guess you mean oil, and their move into EVs totally makes sense from that context even if they can get it cheaply from Iran and Russia these days.
But the cost is huge. Even the Chinese central government is pragmatic enough to admit that they have a huge unsustainable problem; e.g. https://time.com/6258519/china-lithium-mining-environmental-...
> The crackdown in Yichun, Jiangxi province, follows a local lithium frenzy over the past year as miners raced to feed rampant demand for the battery material — and to benefit from record global prices. Now, they’re grappling with a close-up inspection by environment officials sent from Beijing.
You can tour the Chinese countryside and find tons of places like this.
> The west actively abdicated their early lead on all these technologies.
The west could not keep up Chinese refiners because Chinese refiners have little regard for their environment. As the Chinese central government cracks down and the west worries more about their resource security, the Chinese will simply lose that advantage.
At this point somebody usually argues that you can only do that in Australia and the geography for pumped storage is super rare (I call it the "theres a shortage of up" fallacy), and I have to cite the same study proving that it's actually not.
Which makes the geography question moot. But most people's intuitions on renewables/battery are years out of date so it's confusing to respond to their sarcastic "are we just going to build lots of batteries, LOL" with "actually yes that's going to be sensible for 80% of the world's population".
edit: long article comparing Snowy to more solar plus batteries:
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/snowy-2-vs-battery-stora...
>Hornsdale Power Reserve: $690 per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity. If Snowy Hydro 2 comes in at $10 billion, its cost per kilowatt of power will be $5,000, which is 5.6 times more than Hornsdale. But its cost per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity is much lower no matter if you think $20, $29, or $250 is appropriate.
In other words in terms of storing a large volume of energy, cheaply, at high efficiency, pumped storage blows everything else out of the metaphorical water - between 3x and 34.5x cheaper!
I would say that batteries and large scale pumped storage complement each other. I don't agree that Australia will regret building it.
The main drawbacks [of battery storage] are: At the moment, it has a much higher cost per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity. Much shorter lifespan.
If we consider Snowy Hydro 2’s maximum possible energy storage capacity, it comes to only $20 to $29 per kilowatt-hour
$5,000 [buys] 5.16 kilowatt-hours of Hornsdale storage
The article continuously harps on about kW comparisons, and ignores comparing kWh storage: foolish for an article supposedly about electricity storage. For example the article makes the inane point: “If Snowy Hydro 2 comes in at $10 billion, its cost per kilowatt of power output comes to… $5,000 per kilowatt. That’s not cheap. Gas generation normally comes to under $1,000 per kilowatt.”, and again “Snowy 2 Vs. Hornsdale: Assuming Snowy Hydro 2 costs $5,000 per kilowatt of power output, for that cost, we could instead buy . . .”.
Utter rubbish.
So if enough solar gets built that the electricity price falls to near zero every day, batteries are now cheaper than natural gas?
That's a very impactful change that I honestly didn't see coming.
The other 2 months a year sure, you've got either grid power or an off grid oil/gas generator.
> And are there that numbers of batteries available
Not yet — but there are enough people investing in each stage of mining, processing, and making battery factories, that this is probably not going to be an issue.
> Currently dependent on availability of cobalt, lithium,manganese and nickel with China as the main supplier of these and world’s largest producer of graphite, the primary anode material for Li-ion batteries.
Technically, I think, yes; but that's just where we are today rather than a fundamental property of world geography.
While the UK may be using less non-renewables, they are paying more in total every year for fossil fuels.
Articles like this one (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/09/fossil-f...) shows a rather dark trend.
Some key quotes: From 2020 to 2021 they (fossil fuels) received an extra £1bn support from the government compared with 2020, a 10.7% increase
In 2021, support for fossil fuel extraction rose by 20% to nearly £2bn.
Using fossil fuels as reserve energy is only getting more and more expensive.
That fossil fuel generation is centralised so easier to mitigate and not where the usage is happening (ie in our towns and cities).
Plus we already built all that storage for gas and oil, might as well use it as part of the transition.
They are building them, but in the sea which could be interesting with an annoyed Russia.
Wind farms were built at sea, on the surface because of nimbyism on land, but being ever cynical I think the real reason was to push the cost and difficulty up giving oil companies more time.
Later, during Liz Truss's short and disasterous tenure, just as solar panels were getting very cheap, even very low quality farm land was reclassified as a strategic asset for food to be grown on and no solar.
In what was possibly a distraction wind was now to be allowed on land (of course it's much less convenient to put up a wind turbine than to get some very cheap solar panels and that's before all the nimby groups, some of which get dark money funding).
Does this include transmission losses? I think they average 10% for UK electricity.
Quote: Every year, the United Kingdom loses a share of generated electricity through transmission. In 2021, transmission losses amounted to around 25 terawatt-hours, or approximately nine percent of the electricity supplied in the UK that year. Transmission losses stood above 30 terawatt-hours in the early 2000's.
Heat pumps don't qualify for EU Renewable heat incentives if they get less than 2.5 SFP (COP averaged over the year's seasons).
Over in mainland Europe, gas storage was vital to dealing with Russia cutting off supplies because their gas infrastructure was physically incapable of importing gas from non-Russian sources fast enough to keep up with winter demand (if I remember rightly, even if they cut back massively on non-essential gas usage). So they basically needed full gas storage just to survive the winter, and of course Russia had made sure it was emptied out the winter before. The UK didn't have this limitation. This need to fill gas storage caused huge problems - global gas demand was already quite high and it takes a long time for supplies to be redirected and high-energy industries to reduce usage, so prices spiked sky-high at first.
As a result, mainland Europe ended up filling its gas storage at close to the all-time-high price and emptying it out when prices were much lower, effectively buying high and selling low funded by extra charges on people's energy bills with the high prices being more or less a direct consequence of the fact that they couldn't just put off buying their gas until winter. If the UK government had done the same, the press here would never have shut up about how much money they "wasted" on it.
Simply burning gas to generate heat is basically 100% efficient, if you convert it to electricity first you'd need a COP of at least 1.7 to recover the energy lost while generating the electricity.
> Similarly, in Finland, tests of air-to-air heat pump systems from various manufacturers resulted in COPs of 3 at -10C and 2 at -20C.
Source: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-the-energy-crisis...
The main issue is that homes were designed to trap and keep heat in, rather than true insulation, which means that as summers get warmer, our homes turn into ovens, with no way to cool them down properly. Case in point last summer with UK temps hitting 40C and above for a few weeks.
Government are trying to kill off the old gas boilers though, with heat pumps being pushed very heavily, not sure if they're enforcing it yet or not though. Apparently they're also looking at switching out natural gas for a hydrogen mix, but that means having to rework a lot of the piping/valves as hydrogen needs much higher standards than currently applied.
1. It is unlikely that hydrogen will be pushed heavily by the UK gov because of the expensive pipe rework. The reason they're pushing hard for heat pumps is because of the Glasgow Climate Pact; they're on the hook to reduce carbon emissions or pay heavy fines. To that extent, subsidising heat pumps becomes financially less unviable for them than doing nothing.
2. Regarding the heat in summer; the houses insulate well but don't do much to prevent heat coming in from the windows during summer. There are some pretty useful half-fixes; mvhrs+insulation, or recessed windows/overhangs/sunshades massively aid this. For those who rent that's not much help though :(
The average minimum temperature in the winter months in London is 3c above freezing.
https://www.mylondon.news/weather/london-weather-coldest-nig...
But - other comments have noted, some backup generation capability that use less green resources should be acceptable for such rare contingencies.
Probably a good half of our homes have fireplaces and chimneys.
It's not cost effective for everyone to have a wood burner but if only a small percentage used them on the cold days we'd be fine.
People obsess a bit about pollution, as a response to rare events it's fine.
Either way you should take into account you lose about 40% of that by simply converting the fuel to electricity, which is kind of the opposite of what happens when moving from combustion engines to electromechanical engines.
You can generate electricity with a gas power plant at 50%, use that to operate heat pumps, and you will warm your house more than directly burning the gas.
Or put another way, in a gas dominated grid, switching from gas heating to heat pumps saves carbon gas emissions.
while that is true, it is only a stepping stone towards generating electricity renewably (let's say wind or solar).
The consumer ultimately decides the method (via market forces), and they are the easiest to convert first. If the demand for gas heating drops because of electrification, gas demand would fall (but the cost of extraction remains the same/similar), and therefore, makes electricity cheaper and cheaper.
The losses from current electricity conversion from gas at the plant is merely a short term loss for a better long term 'future', and i would consider it a cost of electrification.
Storage is another one. As is multiplicity of energy inputs.
I still have no idea why nobody uses heat reservoirs for shower hot water, like they do in the Mediterranean. (it's not a sun coverage problem, because contrary to popular anecdotes, the UK actually gets quite decent sun coverage a lot of the time)
That was obviously short term stupidity at the time, but has only become more so with hindsight.
Compare with Norway that also has North Sea gas, but heavily pushed heat pumps and is a market leader.
In general, a lot of comparisons with other countries that get published in the British press are like this - they ignore important differences between the UK and those countries or problems and costs associated with what they're doing because the goal is to make it seem like there were easy options that the UK missed out on because our government is evil, not to actually help people understand the world.
Though of course, sometimes there are easy options that the UK missed out on because they are inept and apathetic, which would vindicate some of those comparisons to some extent.
That's 18 years ago. Not exactly recent.
Now I am indeed curious what the minimum amount of sunlight required is. I'm sure the angle of the sun is just as important as the duration, on top of weather and seasons and temperatures.
Plus you have to account for the energy used to grow, harvest, season & transport the wood, even before you throw 20-40% of it away when you actually burn the damn stuff!
It's far more efficient to burn that fuel to move existing energy from one place (outside) to another (inside)... you can turn 1J of fuel into 4J of heating if you're lucky!
Considering this is false as many commenters have mentioned, do you feel any obligation to edit or delete your comment?
But a typical electric heater is probably not going to match the efficiency of a natural gas heater. It matters how much energy is lost in generation and transmission versus extraction and transmission though.
Also I don’t care for your comment. I think if we met in real life, we would not be friends.
Not that I wish to be pessimistic, rather realistic.
Already people in the UK are hooking up electric cars and heat pumps to automated tariffs that charge/heat depending on the availability of cheap power (i.e. wind/sun availability).
The important thing is to double down on what is already working.
Anyone with insight?
Reading between the lines of Tesla investor meetings it sounds as though they have the software but haven't implemented it because it would hurt their brand as a luxury good.
This would be a good thing.
It's literally the introduction of the IPCC Report WG3 Report on energy:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
Just check out the first figures.
Decarbonization of energy use in different sectors will require different technologies, but electricity is key. ENTSOE expects the amount of energy use that is directly electric to rise to up to 50% by 2050 for Europe:
https://2022.entsos-tyndp-scenarios.eu/scenario-results/#dem...
We are talking so much about decarbonizing the electric grid because that's the easy part, but also because its the foundation for what must come afterwards.
The headline is still good and doesn't need to be more specific to be good news.
I do have separate expectations on electricty vs heating.
Aka - the big ones.
From https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/energy-trends-secti...
Energy Trends March 2023 - https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
It's nearly 50% gas (cctg, combined-cycle gas turbine) at the moment.
Nice to see solar at up at nearly 18%!
> https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR
Yet, many people think that nuclear is not the way to go.
It was the way to go in 1970.
People think nuclear isnt the way to go now because it's eye wateringly expensive. EDF's bankruptcy and the rapidly exploding costs and risks of dealing with France's aging plants confirms this. In spite of still spending hand over fist, the % of nuclear power is in decline in France (theyre officially hoping solar and wind can fill in the gaps).
This is in additation to the weird scheme forcing EDF to sell cheap energy to their competitors.
Costs I see to solar and wind that I rarely see anyone mention are:
What happens when you cover large deaths of land with solar and windmills? What does that do to the micro climates of those areas and what affects will that have on the global climate? What does that do to the wildlife (both plant and animal) long term?
What are the true costs of the mines and manufacturing and transportation needed to build and maintain all of that?
I grew up near hydroelectric dams and when I was young they were hailed as free renewable energy. By the time I hit highschool they were demonized for forever changing the river's ecosystem and nearly driving certain fish species to extinction. How does wind and solar not end up the same?
The answer the "compared to what?" is everything. It is clean, continuous, it's compact and other benefits. But it's expensive. You need over 30 years (being optimist) to break even. You need government financial support because no bank would finance that. That's the reason only countries like France or China build them: the costs are partially hidden in the country budgets or public owned corporations balances.
About hydro, that was a "unknown unknown" paraprhasing Rumsfeld. You can't avoid what currently seems our best bet to our current knowledge (wind and solar) because maybe there's an unknown unknown that could bit us hard in 40 years.
17.7% right now, and 7.7% for the full 24 hours of yesterday.
Good to see coal at zero, but sad to see the amount of gas we still require.
Great progress though!
(I tend to like https://grid.iamkate.com/ now )
Plenty of wind up North + Scotland - just no means to transport it over where the most demand is (the South).
On the other hand, onshore wind is cheaper and would have been viable all along, the Tories effectively banned it (technically they just made it very easy to block planning permission) for years because that wins over a certain kind of NIMBY voter. You couldn't build enough onshore wind to replace all the fossil fuels, but you could make a bigger dent than we did.
Severn barrage is interesting but would have a quite large impact on the local nature habitat
The government ban you mention only applies to England, which already has almost half of the UK's onshore wind despite having by far the least space for it. Making complaints that the rural population of England, already under pressure due to soaring population density, doesn't want their remaining rural spaces covered in wind turbines when plenty of other good options exist requires quite a bit of mental gymnastics to justify.
Population densities in people/km2: England 424, Scotland: 68, UK overall 272, Germany: 232, France: 118. Landmass in thousands of km2: England 130, Scotland: 77, UK overall 242, Germany: 357, France: 551.
The main reason we don’t get more of it is a handful of rich land owners not wanting an “eyesore” on their estates and using their influence to get that result.
This is not a democratic country, after all.
I mean, Belgium and the Netherlands and more dense than the UK, and Germany is only a bit less dense. Plus onshore wind can be placed in agricultural areas, in the middle of cropfields.
But the UK's offshore wind potential in incredible, so I get why we do that instead.
When it comes to onshore, as a relatively densely populated island it can be politicly difficult to build large wind farms anywhere but in Scotland. Add to that the reasonable argument that offshore wind is more consistent and our offshore engineering expertise, it's quick to reach the conclusion we should be (almost) all in on offshore wind.
In truth, the UK has horrendous insulation and burns a staggering amount of gas to heat houses made of pasta stainers and wet cardboard; people drive their ICE cars everywhere… There are simple measures that should have been mandatory a decade ago. Instead, the government is too busy arresting the scientists who can help —for the crime of standing there, no less— and handing over subsidies to companies that are making record profits and opening more gas wells.
Far too many Britons dismiss the idea that they’ll be direct victims of climate unsettling. Every model I have seen highlights dire possibilities.
France has been proving for years how to decarbonize fast:
> https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...
> https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?y...
> https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?y...
Can you share your sources please? Here, for example, they claim that the UK produces 5.5 tons per person, not 8. Much less than, say, the US with 15 tons:
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
- This says 5 https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+footprint+per+person+...
- This says 10 https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+footprint+per+person+...
- This says 8: https://www.google.com/search?q=top+carbon+emitting+countrie...
All of those are catastrophic. Any number above 1 ton per person is not tenable. Half would be better.
Perhaps a cursory check is in order?
The UK has 28% on-land protected areas: https://www.protectedplanet.net/en/country/GBR
Venezuela 57%: https://www.protectedplanet.net/en/country/VEN
Germany has 38%: https://www.protectedplanet.net/en/country/DEU
If demand decreases, the supply/demand intersection will switch to the next highest cost producer. Or the same thing could happen if the supply of cheap electricity increases.
Anyway, the reason it's so cheap to give the few people who care 100% renewable electricity is that the people selling the electricity get effectively paper "It's renewable" tokens which they can sell separately from the electricity, they're called REGOs.
So say I make 10GWh of wind energy today, I get 10GWh of REGOs. I sell my electricity for the same grid market price as the gas electricity or coal power†, or whatever, nobody cares electricity is fungible, and I also sell my REGOs for very little because they're almost worthless, to Very Green Energy Co.
That huge industrial site near you which makes stuff (I know, they do exist in the UK they just don't employ many people any more). They consume 15GWh of electricity, they don't care where it comes from, maybe it's from me, maybe it isn't, electricity is fungible, who cares. They don't care about the REGOs, they just need electricity.
People like you, in your house, consume 5GWh of electricity. Again, electricity is fungible, so who cares where it came from, maybe it's gas, but Very Green Energy Co. have 10GWh of REGOs, so they can assure you that you're all getting renewable energy.
† Actually the Subsidy rules mean I might sort of sell for a different price, but we'll ignore that here, it doesn't clarify this situation at all.
As a consumer you can't in the UK choose to be fully exposed to price fluctuations, which would completely destroy you. You can choose to be partially exposed, it's very expensive right now, but can be cheaper in some periods. It's a risk, take only if you understand it, Octopus Energy are the people to talk to.
FWIW for the last few months, the Octopus Energy Tracker tariff has been quite a decent chunk below the Ofgem capped unit rates.
E.g. today's gas unit rate is -59% and electric unit rate is -42% below the Ofgem capped rates for my area.
https://www.agora-energiewende.de/service/agorameter/chart/p...
If I had a car I wouldn't be happy if I suddenly decided to go somewhere and the car was empty because it had just been releasing its stored energy to the grid. The whole point of owning a car is having transportation at any time you need it.
The alternative is nuclear - which has no such requirement, and is consistent baseline capacity.
Gas peaker plants are still required, yes. But they will need to run much less frequently than today.
so, sort of like perpetual motion?
* Smart meters that charge cars/turn on heat pump storage when electricity is plentiful. Already being done. German aluminum smelting (heavy electricity user) is dialed up and down depending on live electricity prices.
* Pumped storage. Coire glass will built soon in the UK - pumping out a max of 1.5GW, snowy 2 in Australia will store 350GWh - at the dirt cheap price of $6 billion. 90% efficient. Published studies confirm that, unlike for dams, the geography for this is very plentiful (contrary to nuclear lobby propaganda which routinely and dishonestly argues the exact opposite).
* Hydrogen/windgas - only about 50% efficient round trip but it's easy to store hundreds of GWhs for months, so will be useful to create seasonal storage when, one day (god willing) we get to the point where overbuilt wind and solar manages to supply 100% of current demand and large pumped storage/battery installations are full and we want seasonal storage for the unshiftable demand during the odd windless and dark weeks.
When is this nonsensical tribalism going to end? Where are all the non-tribal people who are evaluating this stuff on facts and information alone? Why do we hear from the self-disqualifying tribalists?
Rant over. You're right - if we all buy cars with giant lithium batteries in then we need to buy fewer non-car lithium batteries.
And yes, pumped storage exists, and more will exist, but we have to decide how many point-solutions we need to replace consistent generation.
> Hydrogen/windgas - only about 50% efficient round trip
Moving electricity (at least in the UK) is only 90% [0] efficient on transmission alone. So, getting the power to the generation, which then becomes hydrogen at 50% capacity, to later burn at a certain efficiency and turn into electricity that gets transmitted at 90% efficiency, feels wrong. Unless your "round trip" figure includes the transmission losses, but then 50% feels too high to be doing that.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/550583/electricity-losse...
Remember when anthropogenic global warming denial was mainstream? For MANY MANY years after the scientific evidence was completely undeniable.
Appeals to moderation were everywhere. The media would routinely play deniers with the scientific credentials of a ferret against actual scientists to maintain the appearance of balance and neutrality and claim it was an even debate.
Believers in global warming got filed into a tribe (still are, in many ways) hence they got "instant disqualification" from appeal-to-moderates like yourself who craved the fake balance the media served up.
Those people were almost as bad as the denialists. They werent at all interested in the truth - just some kind of social "balance" or harmony.
I'm appealing to reason, as opposed to tribalism. You are citing the hurt of a tribe you have decided exists as a group to hurt, and justifying talking badly to other people who you imagine are in another tribe is, well, tribalism. Just stop and we can all have a useful discussion.
I'm saying stop thinking in terms of sides, and just present reasoned positions. Why is this so hard to grasp?
For me the jabs were about skewering repetitive propaganda from staggeringly wealthy lobby groups with deafening megaphones that emerges from the mouths of the easily duped.
I want to make sure that the easily duped felt seen.
So it'll probably be a while. FWIW, I'm on the intermittent renewables camp, wish there was more civility in the debate, recognize the worst behavior comes from my side of the aisle and still think pro-nuclear arguments are their own worst enemies.
Could you please link this research? I have yet to find a thorough evaluation of pumped hydro resource availability anywhere.
>We found about 616,000 potentially feasible PHES sites with storage potential of about 23 million Gigawatt-hours (GWh) by using geographic information system (GIS) analysis. This is about one hundred times greater than required to support a 100% global renewable electricity system.
Nuclear reactors can have problems, same with natural gas plants right? But no one suggests or has built a duplicate generation system. Why not?
If there are companies willing to sign a cheaper contract that provide equal stability of a nuclear power by using a combination of fossil free storage and renewables, they should then do that.
The requirements are fairly simple. Provide energy when people want it with the capacity that people require, and supply it as cheap as possible with as little subsidizes as needed. No fossil fuels allowed.
A few years ago I was on a train as it went past a wind farm within a very short distance. One person in a group of teenagers sat near me said something like "I can't believe they make the wind with them, how did they make wind before?".
They were not joking. I can't remember how the rest of the group reacted but I think I remember none of them seemed particularly aware of what an absurd question that was.
Sadly it was a genuine question. Education in those parts seems lacking indeed.
Another example: The same Irish person had a nephew who they helped prepare for a presentation about dinosaurs, mentioning they lived millions of years ago.
They were told off by the teacher for spreading such "controversial" information. Church involvement in education is really a no-no IMO. At least if you want to learn more than fairytales.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7725495/Half-adults...