Always Take The Weather With You...

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If I hear yet another Tory quack on about issuing new licences for new North Sea Gas exploration as the panacea for our energy woes, or some twonk spouting utter guff about deploying new nuclear developments to stem the tide of our increasing energy insecurity, I'll scream and start hitting things. There is one simple reality behind these follies: too, late, too damaging, too expensive. The only possible beneficiaries from any such developments are the corporates who are vested in these obsolescent technologies, their shareholders, and the speculator vultures who constantly circle the markets looking for carrion from the fallout.

If I hear yet another vested pundit shrieking hysterically that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow, I'll equally start screaming and hitting things. Anyone who lives in the British Isles knows full well that both of these meteorological phenomena actually occur with regularity, often in - surprise, surprise - a synchronicity of alternation: when one's not happening, it's pretty damn' certain that the other will be. Weather-wise we tend to have the full set, most of most years: the Doldrums it ain't. In Wales, we have pretty much all kinds of weather, most of the time, and we also have two key strands to the ultimate solution to the problem of energy security.

Firstly, we have quietly and without undue fanfare, been building wind and solar installations on and offshore for some time now, currently producing well over a third of our energy generation requirements, and realistically aiming for 100% by 2035; most of which comes from wind power. The other string to our self-sufficiency bow is pumped storage, at which we excel. Using surplus off-peak energy to store kinetic hydro energy in facilities such as Dinorwig Power Station in Llanberis, grid surge demand can be satisfied within seconds by the release of stored water through turbines at the flick of a [large number of] switches on demand. All of this technology is tried, tested and proven, and is operational now. New oil/gas and nuclear are polluting pipe-dreams still sitting on the shelf. Which do you think is the most logical choice for an energy strategy?

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