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Ian Braithwaite's avatar

Thank you David for another gripping Sunday morning read. You have created your own genre of horror.

A clue may lie in the name of the influential CCC - an engineering-led Energy Systems Committee might have been better - it appears an at-all-costs mindset prevails, and the Committee is really a group of critics rather than prime-movers. ("Show me a monument to a critic.")

There is now a body of evidence from some US states and Germany, for example, that wind and solar do not provide low-cost, reliable power, because of all the associated costs well-known to your readers, even if turbines and photovoltaic panel were free with crisp packets. Sadly, evidence seems to consist of mass-less particles.

The only positive actions I can think of are spreading the word (thank you again) and lobbying elected representatives. Further down the track, and I expect it would go viral, I propose naming power blackouts "Milibands". Some politicians can be quite thin-skinned over their legacy.

My prophecy of the week is that in the future, maybe not that far ahead, we will wake up to find that India and China, currently notorious for burning coal like there's no tomorrow, have become world leaders in nuclear power and have cracked the cost issues. (And we in the West, could have done it but didn't.)

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Wien1938's avatar

Unaffordable energy...and rationed, unreliable energy too. This is deindustrialisation by the backdoor, which will result in utter disaster.

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