This argument is one massive false assumption. Renewable energy sources are becoming cheaper and are already cheaper than coal and nuclear. Cheap means they will become pervasive and replace the majority of existing sources. There is technically no reason we couldn't do it [3], rather "the key roadblocks are: climate change denial, the fossil fuels lobby, political inaction, unsustainable energy consumption, outdated energy infrastructure, and financial constraints".

It's only a question of time until renewables will kill fossil fuels. If only we'd stop subsidising fossil fuels [2].

The report you're quoting is itself highly questionable. Just as an example, wind speed averages are based on Cambridge, which isn't anywhere near the coast where wind turbines should live. Anything from a comprehensive report. Furthermore, he compares the energy to a random amount of energy (50% of energy consumed by cars). The report itself seems a little bit of warm air.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_transition_in_Germany [2] http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/fossil-fuels/in-2... [3] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v301/n5/ful...

It's not a report, it's an almost 400 page book. He doesn't compare random energies, instead he looks at what, under reasonably generous conditions, the daily power budget each energy source could provide per person. The very generous 20kWh/d of power per person is the key point. 6 m/sec is already high, with few places reaching such speeds consistently. And almost no one will reach double that, so you can look at an optimal 17 W/m^2 for wind. http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/global_winds.html

In chapter 25, he acknowledges that while the cost of photovoltaics will fall, he does not see it doing so in a timeline that will be useful in terms of getting everything deployed for a ~2050 deadline. Economically speaking, carpeting deserts with concentrating collectors will be the cheaper of the solar options. The book is careful about doing all the math, citing all its sources and carefully explaining the scenarios it models. It is a very good book[+].

But cost is not the only issue—even as prices fall, there is still the problem of land use area. Efficiencies aren't going to pass 30% (without going to much more expensive materials) and for mass production, we can halve that; cheap as panels may someday become, places with high pop densities (on top of seasonal variations/not being near the equator) are going to have trouble meeting their needs. Especially if they don't want to get rid of their curling irons, hair/clothes dryers, toasters and electric stove/kettles. But panels/turbines aren't the whole picture.

Already today, panels take up only a fraction of the cost of solar. You ideally, want an MPPT controller. You might need voltage regulators, you'll need a rack for the panel and batteries, an appropriately sized inverter, wiring and installation. Batteries—to save more money long term—you want to oversize them so you rarely hit a low depth of discharge. But more batteries means more panels. You also want enough batteries such that you can wait out ~4 days of low light (speaking from experience, on cloudy days you can go the entire day at ~13% typical amp output). Even those at the equator will only get ~6 good hours of sunlight (~8 hours for an appreciable amount), so even for the best case scenario, 12 hours of storage per person is not going to cut it. Solar is great but it's no panacea. And the math doesn't work out for chemical energy storage. Molten salt storage, compressed air look to be more logical at the grid level but even they won't be sufficient.

That said, Mr Theil is also incorrect to place Nuclear in opposition to renewables. Renewables will be in addition to Nuclear [-]. As well as looking into more DC appliances, more HVDC and working out circuit breakers for them, optimal manufacturing layouts such that 'waste output' can be redirected to where it is needed. More energy efficient devices, energy routing algorithms (and a global grid of superconducting HVDC while we're at it—seems far fetched but still at a much higher technological readiness level when compared to fusion), better city planning, climate control with geothermal heatpumps, more material reclamation and recycling, nuclear waste as fuel, carbon capture, extracting CO2 from the ocean for fuel and a cultural move away from an over consuming disposable society.

[+] I am biased in that I'd already known the author for one of the best free books on information theory and machine learning. Anyone interested in the link between learning, energy and thermodynamics should see this book as a starting point. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.pdf

[-] Ch. 24 of sewtha.pdf goes into numeric data backed detail on why most build out, waste, cost arguments against nuclear are weak. Personally, I think at best, we only have a couple hundred more years where we can all be justifiably irrationally paranoid over Nuclear. We should have DNA repair down by then.

The UK relatively recently backed full cycle of Uranium fuel production in Kazakhstan. Tony Blair became personal advisor to Nazarbayev. And I ve heard, the UK is going to build new nuclear plants. Its supply is secured and the know how will be both French and USSR (Kazakhstan). Those interested can ask themselves, what Atomic Kitten was doing in Astana in 2010?

Are you suggesting that UK is going transport electricity from Kazakhstan back to the UK? presumably via Russia? If so, that seems like a really bad plan.

No, transporting U3O8 is enough. Upd: http://namrc.co.uk/intelligence/uk-new-build-plans/ 4 sites are already acquired for development on British grounds.

Oh sorry I misunderstood that you're talking about fuel production.

But this highlights what I think is the main problem with the large scale nuclear energy vision, it would replace oil with Uranium as the root of geopolitical resource control wars.

This is nonsense the amount of uranium required is incredibly small compared to oil or coal. We are talking on the order of 1:100,000 or in the case of a proper breeder reactor even less.

Worse, this concern is making the usual mistake of only considering uranium. Thorium is a waste product from rare earth mining and is very abundant in the USA (and elsewhere). If we build thorium based reactors, fuel is practically unlimited and free (compared to the costs of running a reactor).

Uranium is fairly abundant AFAIK. Sourcing it is less of a problem than overcoming NIMBY.

Uranium available for enrichment is not fairly abundant. And U ore deposites are distributed far from fair. Like I said, China has no access to deposits, the UK secured for itself. Russia was effectively cut off Kazakh U resources, leaved with a _single_ mine in Chita region.

BS, solar is not great in the UK, but your comparing electric generation at 2009 efficiency levels with powering cars, heating using resistance heating etc. (Heat pumps break 100% nominal efficiency by extracting heat from outside air.) It's also perfectly reasonable for the UK to continue to import significant amounts of energy in one form or another and or increase efficiency levels.

EX: We can manufacture 40+% efficient solar cells, sure there expensive, but saying the only thing possible is some lower efficiency level is clearly BS. [They use 10% as some sort of arbitrary limit on page 41.]

PS: Photovoltaic panels with 20% efficiency are already close to the theoretical limit (see this chapter’s endnotes Current, world record for concentrated solar is 46%.

> PS: Photovoltaic panels with 20% efficiency are already close to the theoretical limit (see this chapter’s endnotes Current, world record for concentrated solar is 46%.

They are likely referring to the theoretical limit for crystalline silicon based cells (~30% IIRC). This is due to silicon's particular band gap. The record is held by multi-junction cells, which don't suffer from this limitation (which is part of their problem, as they use materials far more expensive than silicon).

I don't think you need to be overly generous when they suggest the UK needs to be both 100% energy independent and 100% free from fossil fuels, and grow 100% of it's food locally, when the UK imports ~35% of it's electricity in 2013 and ~40% of it's food (1). Let alone fossil fuels. And if we can't meet those goals we need to do X.

1: In 2010, the UK produced 73% of ‘indigenous-type foods’, and is about 60% self-sufficient when exports and local consumption are set against production http://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/food/uk-facts.html

I wasn't arguing for all his calculations, it's just that his evaluation of the theoretical limit of crystalline silicon cells is accurate. He is correct that it is unlikely that they will get much closer to the theoretical limit than 20% in real life situations.

Some GenIV nuclear reactor technologies have a somewhat clearer path to viability than multi-junction solar cells, which have not been able to beat traditional cells in a price-to-performance ratio. We don't even know if there exist materials and processes that can replicate the performance without the costs; see high temperature superconductivity for a technology that's been stuck at that stage for a while, even in the face of the helium shortage.

There are multiple well-attested routes around the Shockley-Quiesser limit most of which do not involve just silicon. One, which MacKay touches upon, is multi-junction systems. Another, which he does not (not being an expert in the field) is via so-called multiple-exciton generation systems. Contrary to most engineers' understanding, this phenomenon is pretty well explained from the point of a low-energy continuum QFT for the materials that most care about for implementation. The real game changer would be to mate these systems with topologically nontrivial materials with surface charge transport protection. Unfortunately with current fabrication capabilities, 70% of the conductivity is in the bulk, which does not possess the topological prohibition to one-particle (or one e-h pair) backscattering. (It would also be interesting to see if the known allowability of 2 particle backscattering applies to excitons in these systems)

Later on on page 44 he changes the assumptions based on 50% efficient farms growing plant matter for biomass. Even if you had 50% efficient panels and you covered 200m^2 per person with them (there are only about 900 m^2 per person that are not covered with farm land or roads), you'd only get about 32KW/person/day which is less than what the energy used for transportation alone (40kw/person/day).

200m^2 at 500w/m2 * 8 hours a day x 20% efficency = 160kwh. Which you could get in the UK using mid range solar cells right now. 50% would get you 400kwh.

Further you can mix solar and wind farms as the wind farm does not take up much space.

Also, he uses mixed units when not realistic. A Tesila roadster for example gets 390 km from a 52kwh battery pack. Doing a direct petroleum has X energy so you need that much electricity is dum as cars have terrable efficency.

But, most importantly the UK already imports a lot of food and energy, making this a really silly comparison. Solar cells in Africa can more cheaply provide energy so that's a better place to put them.

That analysis uses solar panels with 10% efficiency in its calculations...

10% efficiency is about right for low cost solar cells that have been out in open air for a while. 20% is about right for affordable single crystal cells, and the theoretical maximum efficiency for silicon is 33%.

Getting significantly better than 10% is very expensive. Getting beyond about 25% is currently well beyond feasible for large scale power generation.

Most new panels announced these days top 20% efficiency[1]. Output is guaranteed to 90% after 10 years, 80% after 20, real world often better[2].

[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Is-SolarCitys-N...

[2] http://sroeco.com/solar/solar-efficiency-losses-over-time/

Note that this doesn't included the price of building the reactors (!). A little research will show what a big cost that is.

What's wrong with importing power?

Britain is in very good spot from renewable energy generation point of view. It has lots of wind, tidal and some solar energy too. Countries next to it have worse situation considering renewables and have just as high population density. Importing works if you accept producing electricity for Britain with nuclear power plants located in France or Belgium.

I love that book. It really opened my eyes to how big the energy problem is.