From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Euan again!

Sir, Lorna Slater (Scottish Green Party) has announced that the Scottish Government is to proceed with up to 6GW of solar PV by 2030 (P&J Oct 30^th). What will this mean for Scottish power supply? In July 2030, for a few hours either side of midday, solar PV would provide all of our power. What is going to happen to all that wind power that on occasions may be produced at the same time? Of course, for a few hours either side of midnight, solar PV will produce nothing at all. This means that all other sources of power have to be varied continuously to compensate for Earth’s celestial journey. But wind cannot be controlled and on a calm night we may produce nothing at all. What then?

In January 2030, 6GW of solar PV will produce barely any electricity during the day and nothing at all for several hours either side of midnight. When the wind doesn’t blow either we would have to depend on backup or imports – so much for being independent. Some readers may be thinking about storage. I will soon get around to explaining the physical and economic impossibility of grid scale energy storage.

At the time of his untimely death in April 2016, Sir David MacKay was probably the most widely known and respected energy analyst in the world. Author of the book “Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air”, he spent 5 years as Chief Scientific Advisor on energy to HM Government. Dying from cancer, he gave a final interview 11 days before his death where he tried to set the record straight. It is easy to find the video and a transcript on line. Below I report some key passages from this interview.

“there’s so much delusion and I think it’s so dangerous for humanity that people allow themselves to have these delusions that they’re willing to not think carefully about the numbers and the realities, and the laws of physics and the realities of engineering.”

“To the credit of the civil servants who I worked with when I went to government – I may have indicated that they had some bad policies – but when it came to whether solar should be in the mix, they had done the numbers for that already and solar just wasn’t on the table at all.”

“..and there was very successful lobbying by the solar lobbyists as well – so now there’s this widespread belief that solar is a wonderful thing, even though it’s highly intermittent and mainly produces energy in July and in December produces 9 times less than it does in July. You know, Britain’s one of the darkest countries in the world.”

It would be foolhardy for our politicians to ignore this sound advice from one of the World’s most highly respected energy analysts.

Dr Euan Mearns

Aberdeen