Re:Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road t...
by tialaramex on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @05:20AM
(#25135133)
One of the things in these proposals that isn't as eye-catching as "ban petrol cars" was investment and subsidies to get to 4x wind power generation.
Right now it's windy and the UK gets about 10GW of electricity from wind turbines (maybe a bit more) the past few days. But at 4x that would be 40GW of electricity, which would actually be enough to just power the whole country on a typical weekday evening (as the sun goes down, day time place of work usage isn't all stopped yet but home usage is picking up).
Now, obviously it isn't always windy, but on the other hand it also isn't always a weekday evening. At 3am on a Sunday in June the country is ticking over at 20GW, and the weather doesn't care so your wind turbines might be kicking out 40GW anyway. We need to store or export that. That's a key challenge for the next decade.
As of June this year, the UK was generating more power from renewables than from fossil fuels. A decade ago hardly any power was being generated from renewables. The UK has gone months without burning coal this year, and plans to decommission the last three coal power plants in the next five years.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52973089
These aren’t empty promises, this is solid progress.