When the lights go out
There is a superb article in this week's Economist about the problems of energy.
The title is How long till the lights go out? and the article makes a convincing case that, whoever is in government, and even if action to protect power supplies is taken quickly, there is a real danger that Britain will suffer power cuts in the next five years as older power stations have to be decommissioned faster than new power supplies can be built.
Britain needs a genuinely balanced energy policy to maximise our energy security. As the Economist rightly points out, one of the serious pitfalls we could easily fall into is an excessive reliance on gas (and on supplies of gas from Russia, down a pipeline which recent history shows is liable to be disrupted by arguments between Vladimir Putin and his Eastern European neighbours).
We can and should invest in renewables and emerging energy sources, but those enviromental extremists, such as the Green Party, who imagine that we can fill the looming energy gap entirely from such sources are completely disconnected from reality.
There was a letter in the Whitehaven News this week from Jill Perry who signed herself as "Green party candidate for Copeland in the general election." It will be interesting to see how many votes she gets in a constituency where 24% of the working population are employed in the civil nuclear industry, and thousands of other jobs are indirectly dependent on that industry. The most bizarre aspect of the letter was that she claimed the Greens have a "Plan B" to do without nuclear power, but made no mention of what this "Plan B" actually is.
While the Green party are a particularly obvious example of a group of people who are in denial about how serious the energy problems facing the UK are, they are not alone in seriously underestimating the scale of the problem.
For their first eight years in office, Labour ignored this problem. For the past four years they have talked a good game but not done enough, fast enough.
Britian needs action, fast. If next year sees a new Conservative government, I suspect a rapid increase in clean power generation will have to be one of our most urgent priorities.
The title is How long till the lights go out? and the article makes a convincing case that, whoever is in government, and even if action to protect power supplies is taken quickly, there is a real danger that Britain will suffer power cuts in the next five years as older power stations have to be decommissioned faster than new power supplies can be built.
Britain needs a genuinely balanced energy policy to maximise our energy security. As the Economist rightly points out, one of the serious pitfalls we could easily fall into is an excessive reliance on gas (and on supplies of gas from Russia, down a pipeline which recent history shows is liable to be disrupted by arguments between Vladimir Putin and his Eastern European neighbours).
We can and should invest in renewables and emerging energy sources, but those enviromental extremists, such as the Green Party, who imagine that we can fill the looming energy gap entirely from such sources are completely disconnected from reality.
There was a letter in the Whitehaven News this week from Jill Perry who signed herself as "Green party candidate for Copeland in the general election." It will be interesting to see how many votes she gets in a constituency where 24% of the working population are employed in the civil nuclear industry, and thousands of other jobs are indirectly dependent on that industry. The most bizarre aspect of the letter was that she claimed the Greens have a "Plan B" to do without nuclear power, but made no mention of what this "Plan B" actually is.
While the Green party are a particularly obvious example of a group of people who are in denial about how serious the energy problems facing the UK are, they are not alone in seriously underestimating the scale of the problem.
For their first eight years in office, Labour ignored this problem. For the past four years they have talked a good game but not done enough, fast enough.
Britian needs action, fast. If next year sees a new Conservative government, I suspect a rapid increase in clean power generation will have to be one of our most urgent priorities.
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