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: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02 2015, @01:18PM
When will poopoo (aka kaka) be an alternative fuel? As the saying goes, everybody poops. That means that everybody could potentially fuel their own cars with their own waste. It would save me a lot of money if, every morning, I could go out into my garage, poop into the fuel tank of my car, and then drive to work on this fill up of poopoo. If I need to make the kaka at work then I can just go out into the parking lot, and fill up my car's fuel tank once more with some poopoo. Then I would be able to drive home at night.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Saturday May 02 2015, @01:42PM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02 2015, @01:46PM
No, biomass is different. It requires processing at centralized facilities and it can consume more energy to make and transport than it provides. I'm talking about pooping directly into the fuel tank of the car. The poopoo won't get flung at anyone because it's in the fuel tank, and there's a tight fitting cap on it to make sure that the poopoo doesn't come out. I know I wouldn't want to be driving behind somebody with a loose fuel tank cap, with their poopoo coming out and getting on my windshield! That's why the cap will be very tight fitting.
(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_
(Score: 2) by BK on Saturday May 02 2015, @03:02PM
"...and could you give me a ride to work today?"
...
"No, my car is fine."
...
"Really! It's fine. It's just... Yeah. ...constipated...."
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02 2015, @07:24PM
Somebody should fix the bad modding of that comment. It was the first comment in the story, for crying out loud. It can't be redundant!
Whoever modded it "-1, Redundant" should never be allowed to moderate again. Abusive moderation like that should be punished with a perpetual moderation ban.
Any past mods made by this abusive moderator should be retroactively removed, too. If this abuser fucked up this badly once, it has probably happened every time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02 2015, @02:58PM
that sounds rather respectable.
how about "U.K. drew 19.2 % from infinity sources"?
-or-
new electric generation capacity constructed in U.K in the year 2015 might be built with 19.2% sourced from infinity sources ...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02 2015, @03:52PM
Lesotho gets 100% of its electricity from enewables.
Bhutan and Paraguay is at something like 99.99% and they even manage to export a lot to neighboring countries.
What kind of third world country is this?
(Score: 5, Funny) by mtrycz on Saturday May 02 2015, @04:10PM
Wind tubiones are fucking ugly: http://i.imgur.com/C87vMI3.jpg [imgur.com]
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Saturday May 02 2015, @08:28PM
I need to change my trousers thanks to you, but still, thanks! Haven't laughed that hard for a while, I should drink more often ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02 2015, @06:45PM
UK is mostly isolated from other countries and large (there should be some HVDC lines to import from Norway and France thou) but also flat and not known for forests and hot springs, so this makes me wonder. Is it 18% hydro, geothermal and forests to energy and 1% from wind or maybe 70% demand was covered from imports (therefore not produced in UK)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02 2015, @08:21PM
Or maybe they just shifted some factories to China. Win-win. Higher profits and bigger renewable energy usage percentage-wise.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @03:33AM
...until you realize that Britons whose jobs are now in China can't buy your products.
...and neither can the Chinese who are paid 80p/hr.
Henry Ford and John Maynard Keynes had this figured out about a century ago.
MBAs, OTOH, never study economics.
(Knowing Excel is enough, apparently.)
This is the definition of Global Economic Death Spiral.
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Informative) by wantkitteh on Saturday May 02 2015, @08:33PM
Breakdown from government figures [www.gov.uk] shows that onshore/offshore wind combined account for just over half (it looks like), "bioenergy" covers about 40% and Solar PV/hydro fills in the rest. Wave and Tidal is also listed as a category on the stacked bar chart, but it's too small a contribution to actually visibly see. (Disclaimer: 3/4 of a bottle of wine and I'm a real lightweight)