The bigger foibles are clean coal and nuclear. Clean coal has been impossible to build and CCS of fossil fuels has been a boondoggle whereever it's been tried. Nuclear has also proven to be nearly impossible to build, from France to Finland to the US. The UK has only managed to get one site going, Hinkley, and other planned sites have not had suitable bids, like Wylfa. So more nuclear is not a feasible route.
I think that enhanced geothermal systems (using heat from dry rock, kilometers down), could be a good resource that's just now getting developed in the UK, on the MW scale.
Solar will never be great in the UK, but average capacity factor is at 10%, and currently provides 4% of total UK electricity, which is a remarkable feat given historical costs.
I've said this in other comments, but there's a remarkable amount of hot air that went into the assumptions in this book, and its age is showing terribly. I bet that if MacKay were around still, he'd have massive updates, but the entire world was wrong when it was betting against renewables, and in favor of traditional fossil fuel companies' abilities to innovate.
Nuclear is difficult due to political issues and the poor state of the US industry, but it's not a physical impossibility. China is building quite a lot of nuclear power, including a GenIV plant that just went on the grid.
Political issues are not impeding France, Finland, the UK, or even the US's two sites. This is a misconception.
The underlying Gen3 (or whatever the AP1000 and EPR would be called), is fundamentally incompatible with our construction and logistics capabilities. China probably can't help us fix our processes, and I'm not sure we would trust them. Same goes for Rosatom, who is also building.
Even under the best of economic conditions, however, nuclear is not very favorable. Even China, with its unparalleled construction capability, is only planning a tiny tiny slice of its future energy capacity as nuclear, with much larger generation in wind and solar. And a lot of the planned nuclear will never be built, because renewables and storage are changing the economic case for nuclear.
Biomass is so very inefficient at capturing solar energy (maybe 2%, if that) that even at that small fraction of energy produced it contributes very substantially to the land use of the energy system.
Every right-wing blowhard has heard about Solyndra, but they never mention that the amount wasted of coal carbon capture, which doesn't work or even exist at scale, has spent multiple Solyndras worth of federal money.
http://www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_212.shtml
The bigger foibles are clean coal and nuclear. Clean coal has been impossible to build and CCS of fossil fuels has been a boondoggle whereever it's been tried. Nuclear has also proven to be nearly impossible to build, from France to Finland to the US. The UK has only managed to get one site going, Hinkley, and other planned sites have not had suitable bids, like Wylfa. So more nuclear is not a feasible route.
I think that enhanced geothermal systems (using heat from dry rock, kilometers down), could be a good resource that's just now getting developed in the UK, on the MW scale.
Solar will never be great in the UK, but average capacity factor is at 10%, and currently provides 4% of total UK electricity, which is a remarkable feat given historical costs.
I've said this in other comments, but there's a remarkable amount of hot air that went into the assumptions in this book, and its age is showing terribly. I bet that if MacKay were around still, he'd have massive updates, but the entire world was wrong when it was betting against renewables, and in favor of traditional fossil fuel companies' abilities to innovate.