David MacKay is a Natural Philosophy professor at the University of Cambridge and the chief scientific advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change. In this Tedx talk, he explores the mathematics behind our sustainable energies and what it means for the future.
MacKay covers two main points: the worrying limits that our renewable energy systems are going to face and why we should nonetheless pursue them.
If we were to try and fulfill the UK's energy demands (1.25W/m² ) using wind power (2.5W/m²) we would need about half of the UK to be covered in wind farms. Solar parks create about 5W/m² which means we would have to cover 20-25% of the UK's land mass in solar panels in order to meet the 1.25W/m² demand.
This is how much energy each renewable source can produce:
Each of these technologies would require a huge amount of land mass in order to meet the UK energy requirements (and that is without counting investment prices, costs of running and maintaining them...) An interesting note to make here is that nuclear power creates 1000W/m²
"People are anti everything and we have got to keep all the options on the table. What can a country like the UK do on the supply side?" MacKay proposes a combination of three things:
- Renewables in the UK (in our countryside)
- Renewables in other countries (in their countryside)
- Nuclear power
However, we can also affect the demand side of energy systems by making it more efficient (heating, new technologies, less wasteful transportation...)
By manipulating both the supply side and demand side we can completely change what our energy systems look like. However it seems unlikely that we would be able to achieve an acceptable balance only with the use of renewable energies.
On the next blog post, I will explore what kind of combinations of energy supply and energy demand could work and what would be there costs using the UK government 2050 energy model (here)
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