My last post went as below, but the off topic debate began somewhere around here, viewtopic.php?p=1726772#p1726772
roubaixtuesday wrote: ↑29 Sep 2022, 6:28pm Wave power does not have significant potential in the UK.
See for instance https://www.withouthotair.com/c12/page_73.shtml
David McKay wrote a very readable book which reduced the energy debate to a level which, at the time, seemed entirely plausible to most. He was a brilliant academic in subjects quite unrelated to a country's energy policies, but this book was understood and appreciated by civil servants and the government of the time (2008) and he was appointed to advise the UK's energy policy.
I remember hearing multiple critics (from within academia and industry, with a broad range of opinions on how to proceed) of the book at the time, more often than not because he did not factor in changes in human behaviour or advancing technologies, because he assumed CCS was possible to roll out on a massive scale quite rapidly and that nuclear was the sensible long term energy combined with fossil fuel, especially given a UK population "concerned with the cost of their energy". I did agree that renewable energy and nuclear were the poorest of bedfellows.
By 2015 the UK had largely abandoned his advice, an engineer replaced him. The five years we lost following McKay's thinking look even more serious now than a few years ago, given our relations with Russia and post-Covid economics. An atrociously bad deal was made with EDF and the Chinese because we were in a fix, a deal for a nuclear reactor design which has such serious problems the French cannot run at capacity their own (as yet unfinished, delayed by over a decade) EPR reactor at Flamanville.