When Will the Lights Go Out?

Derek Birkett lays bare the facts of power engineering. He assesses the viability of the British government's renewable energy policy and expectations and explains why official targets and pronouncements are essentially illusory.

Since the later 1990s the public and political mind has been preoccupied with global warming. In a bid to develop renewable' energy sources the damaging costs already being inflicted on the electricity consumer, domestic and commercial, have been obscured. Simultaneously, such novel technologies have come to threaten the stability of the nation's electricity supply.

Birkett's study reveals that the lavish incentives offered to developers of new technologies are only one of the many costs being passed on to the customer in the country's scramble to meet pledges on reduction of carbon emissions. Furthermore, renewable energy technologies - notably wind power - are creating widespread uncertainty in the electricity supply chain, resulting in an ever greater dependency on supplies of gas. Meanwhile, the cutting back of nuclear and coal power generation over the coming decade has the potential to provoke an economic emergency equivalent to the 2008 banking crisis.