Doing our little bit….
I noticed on Monday afternoon that our 44 Gigawatt electricity requirement (Great Britain) was being fed into the grid using the following generation methods:
| 12% | Nuclear |
| 48% | Gas |
| 5% | Biomass |
| 25% | Wind |
| 1% | Solar |
| 3% | Coal |
| 3% | Hydro |
| 2% | Other |
It was a fairly windy, mostly cloudy afternoon here in the South East of England.
The one that caught my eye was COAL, which made me assume that there was no capacity to increase generation from any other less carbon emitting source. So I started asking myself a few questions.
We are supposed to be doing away with the gas and coal generation contribution to our electricity needs (51% on Monday afternoon). We then need to consider that in the future we are supposed to be running our vehicles on electricity, so need to add the additional requirement currently met by the diesel and petrol used to power our vehicles. That’s assuming electric vehicles do provide that answer. On top of that we need to add in the power currently provided by natural gas to heat 10’s of millions of homes and businesses. That’s assuming heating with electricity does provide that answer. Then we need to take in a worst case scenario of a long freezing winter under a blocking high pressure with air coming in from Siberia, little wind or sun. That’s certainly going to test all of those heat pumps and make some long numbers at the bottom of our electricity bills. Then we need to ask, does our current distribution network have the capacity to cope with the increased demand? Arwen has just demonstrated how staggering vulnerable that infrastructure is to the elements.
I really feel that demonising fossil fuels at all cost is foolish and is not going to speed up the absolutely essential reduction in emissions of carbon. The carbon emission is the problem, not the coal, oil or gas. The explosion in research and development of both green and blue hydrogen and carbon capture / storage is highly encouraging.There are many sceptics out there but the economic and environmental benefit of getting these technologies scaled up to commercial levels is surely essential. They will buy time to develop further carbon neutral power generation sources and power storage technologies.
Here at Rude Eye we not only keep a very close eye on our planet conscious eyewear production and delivery, we also like to have an understanding of the bigger picture.
We can all do our bit to sustain our incredible planet.
Rebecca Peters
26 January 2022