David Mackay Highlighted Problems With Solar Power In 2013...

David Mackay Highlighted Problems With Solar Power In 2013

NOVEMBER 16, 2016

Back in 2013, the late David Mackay, at the time the Chief Scientific Advisor to DECC, wrote a paper called “Solar energy in the context of energy use, energy transportation and energy storage”. He went into a lot of detail evaluating solar potential, and his Abstract found that “in a decarbonized world that is renewable-powered, the land area required to maintain today’s British energy consumption would have to be similar to the area of Britain”.


*** What Mackay’s analysis shows is that, without large scale storage, even relatively low roll out of solar and wind capacity will lead to underutilisation of that capacity. This, in turn, will drastically increase the cost of solar and wind power.

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