Wind farms and solar panels are not enough

There is a growing - and welcome - trend have solar panels on your roof, in an effort to reduce electricity bills, and make houses self-sufficient. I am, of course, all for people providing their own electricity from renewable sources.

However, that is not the whole solution.

The problem is that, if every household was to be completely self-sufficient in electricity, and was running electric cars powered from their solar-derived energy, then there would still be a problem. The residential use of electricity in the UK is only around a third of total consumption. What is more, there are some properties that would struggle to be self-sufficient (tower blocks, for example), meaning that the excess that some would provide would be balanced out by those places that had a shortfall. So while I believe it is possible that our residential use could be self-sufficient, that is only a third of the story. If we could get to residential self-sufficiency, I would feel that we have made a difference.

The two other areas are, broadly, industrial and commercial. Commercial use - lighting and powering the offices and data centres that are the heartbeat of the economy today. While some of these could incorporate solar energy and suchlike, there is little chance that they could be self-sufficient, because their usage is high, and their available solar space is limited. Some of the high-usage areas, like data centres, can be underground, or at least hidden, meaning they are even more problematic.

The answer to the problem of commercial usage is not simple. Often lighting is used for security purposes, and computers are often left on overnight. I know mine is, not least because I will probably be connecting in remotely. The only way to make a real difference to the commercial usage issue is to reduce - using motion sensitive lighting, configure computers to have a very low quiescent usage, drive to make data centres significantly better, and, ideally, self-sufficient from relatively low power provision. Maybe the workplace gyms that are not uncommon could be used as power provision to the building. A new approach to making commercial buildings as energy-efficient as possible might make a real impact on this usage, and enable the commercial usage to be very substantially lowered.

The biggest challenge might be industrial usage. The problem with this is that we cannot easily make small reductions in this usage without having substantial impact. If we include transport, it is hard to see how we could reduce the power usage by the train networks without reducing the service (and reducing the service means increasing car usage, which is not helpful). There is no way to smelt iron without massive power usage, so reducing this would impact the steel industry.

Of course, we could just close down these places, and buy in from other countries. This is not a solution, because it just puts the energy problem to another country who may be even less able to resolve it.

This is why I argue that more and more wind farms and solar panels are not the answer. Yes we need them, but we also need to do everything we can to reduce the usage of power residentially and commercially, where is seems possible to make a difference, to the point where total residential and commercial usage is minor, meaning that the wind-farms and other such renewable sources can be utilised for the energy-heavy and difficult to reduce industrial area.

We are a long way from any of that.Wind farms are not going to save us - changing, reducing, thinking may. Is it possible for the UK to be reusable-energy-independent? I believe so, but it is not an easy journey, and it would involve changes, changes for the good, but difficult to go through. And if we could do it, then so many others could as well.