Hotair

The Register offers an early review of "Without the hot air" by Professor David J C MacKay of the Cambridge University Physics Department.

Looks good so far. No hype, just numbers and calculations. Oh yes and on the subject of hot air

if we covered the windiest 10 per cent of the country with windmills, we might be able to generate half of the energy used by driving a car 50 km per day each.

Oh, so what do we need then?

The windmills required … are fifty times the entire wind hardware of Denmark; seven times all the windfarms of Germany; and double the entire fleet of all wind turbines in the world.

What about solar energy then? Er no, he's analyzed that too:

All in all, according to MacKay, if you like solar it probably makes more sense to put the panels in North Africa and bring the power to the UK over efficient high-voltage DC lines.

He reviews a number of different options and plans but the one that caught the Gorse Fox's eye was this:

MacKay made no effort to cost plan G, but he offers maps and figures indicating the staggering scale of the engineering. Britain would be literally covered with — and girdled by — massive wind farms, tidal barriers and wave barrages, and every sizeable body of water in the land would rise and fall to the strange new tides of the national grid. We would have literally rebuilt the British Isles as a single mighty renewable generator, pouring concrete and erecting steel on a scale so far matched only by human habitation — industrialising the land and sea in a way that would make intensive agribusiness look like a wildlife refuge. And still we’d be importing power.

That’s the reality of the Greenpeace plan for the UK, in hard numbers. You can see why MacKay is worried about their response.