The UK Energy Secretary, described opposition to wind farms as “socially unacceptable . . . like not wearing your seat-belt”, whilst almost simultaneously approving a gas-fired station which will be the largest in Britain, producing 2,000 megawatts, two thirds of the total produced by all of the country’s wind turbines. The government has set a target of producing 35% of the UKs energy needs by renewable energy by 2020, to get there from the current 5% level would cost an estimated £100 billion. But putting aside the numbers for a second and not discounting the obvious benefits of a clean energy source I can’t help but think we are missing a fundamental truth. Let me try to illustrate this.

Several weeks ago I was driving along the coast road on the way to small fishing village. A rendezvous with a cool beer and reputedly the best fish and chips within 300 miles. The evening was perfect, the last of the summer sun glancing off the bay and the all that could be heard was the gently lap, lap of the waves against the harbour wall. In the distance the wind turbines stood like great herons, their enormous blades poised, ready, waiting….

….and therein lies the problem. The wind, whilst clean, renewable and free, is inherently unpredictable. Even in those high windy places, or far out to sea, it is unpredictable. It may well blow like a hurricane for 300 days a year, but that’s small cancellation if your trying to boil the kettle on a calm day. Now I realise that there are sophisticated load balancing technologies and that the power used in any particular location is not necessarily generated locally, but surely one of the fundamental requirements of a power supply is predictability. In addition it is likely that the best locations for maximum wind generation, offshore, high ground, remote passes are exactly that, remote. Therefore the cost and effort involved in gathering this unpredictable power is likely to be very high. Compare this to some of the other renewable options that we have available to us and wind power seems to be a bit of a red herring. If predictability is a prerequisite then surely wave power must be in with a shout, or on a global scale how about all of that blazing sun in the Sahara Desert? It seems to me that of all of the options we have to explore, we have chosen the most unreliable option to place our bet upon.

If we take a step back and look at the problem on a global scale, there are whole number of options we should be looking at. In Iceland, there are five major geothermal power plants which produce about 26% of the country’s electricity. In addition, geothermal heating meets the heating and hot water requirements for around 87% of the nation’s buildings. In 2006, 26.5% of electricity generation in Iceland came from geothermal energy, 73.4% from hydro power, and 0.1% from fossil fuels. Not every nation has the geological conditions for geothermal power, or indeed sun, wave or wind power. However, not every nation has oil or coal today. So in order to start to address the looming energy crisis perhaps the focus of our efforts should be more on the method of distribution and transmission rather than extraction. If we assume that we have the basic technology for capturing energy from the sun or the waves, our most fundamental problems exist around the efficient transmission of power.

Imagine the shift in power were the problems of long distance transmission of power to be conquered. Vast tracts of the Sahara, covered in mirrors, providing endless supplies of clean, renewable energy for the African continent. The UK reveling in endless amounts of wave power, whilst the USA builds geothermal powerstations on the previous location of “old Faithful”.