I'll just add this out of interest. It's a conversation I witnessed between an energy engineer and a German nuclear engineer. I make no comments in it, it's just the two of them. :
Think on this. The Hinkley Point C nuclear station will produce an average output of about 2,900 MW (it's rated at 3,200MW, but needs 3-4 weeks offline every 18 months for refuelling). The station occupies about 400 hectares, and would generate about 7% of our power usage.
To make the same average output, you need about 1,800 5 MW wind turbines (they only make about 30% of rated output in average).
Those are about 150 metres tall and have 100 meter blades. Ideally, they're spaced about 8x the blade length apart. So, if we lay them out in a square array, they'll occupy a square 32 km (21 miles) on a side.
And you still need a gas fired power station as back-up.
Solar's even worse. A 5MW (nominal) solar farm occupies 10 hectares. It actually averages about 550 KW output (200 in winter). For the same average output as Hinkley, you need 7,000 of those - which would occupy a square 25km on a side, with no space between them whatsoever. Realistically, you could double that area.
And that's before we consider storage. We'd need hundreds of large pumped storage hydro schemes.
I us really hard to see how getting most of our power from renewables without eating into wilderness areas.
And in response to a comment about future technology improving efficiency:
unlikely. The limiting factor on wind is a thermodynamic/aerodynamic factor called Betz's law - and current designs are 80-90% efficient against that limit. Similarly, the issue with solar is the available incident power - which in our latitudes and weather have inherent issues (think of the angle of incidence, weather and length of day in winter in the UK).
Finally,
Finally, this was the comment from the German bloke:
Germany's plans to switch to 100% renewable energy sources. It' scheiße.
Renewables can't generate enough power for Germany's needs and is unlikely ever to be able to. The government there makes a big deal about renewable sources, but they keep quiet about them having to import electricity from other countries. Either from France where it's mainly generated in nuclear power stations, or from Poland where it's mainly generated in coal powered stations.
The holy grail of power generation will be nuclear fusion reactors. We can already create uncontrolled fusion reactions - they're called thermonuclear bombs. The breakthrough will be when we learn to create controlled ones.
