SOME years ago I used to think that replacing fossil fuels would be difficult because the alternatives had significant environmental and economic drawbacks.
In recent years, the costs of wind and solar have gone down enormously, and they are now rapidly replacing fossil fuels for electricity generation.
The costs of heat pumps for domestic heating, however, remain high, and must be paid for by customers or taxpayers. The same applies to batteries for storing electrical energy (for when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow) and for transport.
The environmental drawbacks remain. These technologies require the use of non-renewable resources, some of which are scarce: lithium, copper, cobalt, rare-earth elements.
Mining is damaging and may involve political problems. Wind turbines spoil our views. Solar panels are controversial when they take land out of food production. Nuclear remains controversial.
The recent government decision to remove the de facto ban on onshore wind in England is to be welcomed: this is one of the cheapest means of generating electricity.
I wonder what Somerset Council will do to encourage the construction of wind farms in Somerset? I wonder if local communities will welcome them?
The conventional tall horizontal-axis wind turbines may be thought unsightly, but what about placing vertical-axis wind turbines on the hills, designed to be less conspicuous and to capture the high wind speeds near the ground?
Back in 1300, there were more than 10,000 water mills in southern England. There are numerous opportunities for small installations using modern technologies to generate electricity.
They need not be environmentally damaging. A local example is the small Archimedes Screw turbine at Tipton Mill, using water from the River Otter.
The other way, of course, is to reduce our demand for energy: less stuff, less travel and transport, less energy in the home.
Henry Haslam is the author of ‘The Earth and Us’.
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