Sunday, May 28, 2006

Windsave - a PPS

I don't know what the bill for Tony's brand new nuclear power stations is likely to be, but I'd guess that it's going to be quite a few billion (or maybe more).
So what if instead every house got a windmill?

The CIA World Fact book reports that UK electricity consumption in 2003 was 346,100 GWh. So that's about 39.5GW of generating power. If everyone in the country has a windmill then that'd be 60GW of production.
Now I'm not saying that everyone should have a windmill, nor should we expect them to work 24x7 all year round. But if everyone in the country had their own capability to produce 1KW then we'd certainly not need any new nuclear plants (and therefore no environmental arguments to overcome). With combined heat/power, and all sorts of other personal electricity generation, maybe small is the new nuclear. And with a Windsave only costing £1500 or so, even 60m of those would be cheaper than all those nuclear stations!

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