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The UK generated 19.2% of its electricity from wind, solar, and hydropower in 2014. The country's demand for electricity has also fallen 10% over the last 5 years.
Change doesn't happen in a linear fashion.
Indeed, those of us who have been pushing for a low carbon future would have been forgiven for thinking it was a futile cause just a few years ago. Yet now, change seems to be picking up pace. Dramatically. The latest example of this is news from the UK, reported over at Business Green, that renewables made up 19.2% of the country's power supply last year, up from just 14.9% a year earlier. At the same time, both coal and nuclear dipped, while gas increased its share a little bit too. Digging into what those renewables actually were, it looks like wind and solar were up 16.6% on the previous year, due mainly to new capacity, while hydropower was up 26%. (This was the result of heavier rainfall, so can't necessarily be counted on year-over-year.)
We're going to be seeing many more stories like this in the next few years. It's already been reported that Germany generated 30% of its electricity from renewables in 2014. As industrialized countries, they could well find energy independence through renewables confers key competitive advantages and many positive externalities (such as better air quality). Will the United States ever follow suit?
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Saturday May 02 2015, @02:04PM
Is that even theoretically possible? Does shit (I'm a fucking adult now, I refuse to call it "poopoo". I might be persuaded to call it "feces" when talking to MBAs.) contain enough chemical energy to push a car forward, assuming we have a perfectly efficient process for capturing that energy?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday May 02 2015, @08:16PM
It's already done on farms. The excrement goes into a digester where bacteria feed on it to produce methane.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Saturday May 02 2015, @08:24PM
This was proved possible in S01E03 of Kevin McCloud's Man Made Home [channel4.com]. Pay no attention to the synopsis, it's wrong - the dog poo methane generator was someone else's experiment shown in the episode for extra flavour (uh, bad choice of words, maybe I should have said colour instead), Kevin used human waste. The generator consists of a latrine dropping solid human waste through a one-way valve into an expanding tank that also contained a biological agent that broke the waste down into methane. The tank would then expand and the methane could be extracted by opening a valve in the top, allowing the weight of the tank to push down and expel the methane.
Yes, it worked. But you wouldn't be able to generate enough power to run a car for any realistic regular trip. The guy who did the dog poo experiment said that waste from a single human "sitting" would produce the electrical power equivalent of boiling enough water for two cups of tea/coffee - about 100W if I'm reading this page correctly [energy-association.com] which I might not be - remind me not to drunk post in the future if I screwed this up ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @01:37AM
Short memory.
Bus Powered by Human Poop Begins Service this Week in UK [soylentnews.org]
Process Converts Human Waste into Rocket Fuel [soylentnews.org]
-- gewg_