I dont think so! ---- Biomass is too polluting, not sustainable, AND NOT ZERO CARBON!!!!

How can it be called sustainable when it is NOT sustainable --- do you want to a Britain looking like some parts of Africa with no trees?

How can it be called safe when other countries are not allowing it because of the toxins in the emissions?

I am not sure about it being energy secure for sure there will be fights over wood in the coming years may be even wars!

I have heard tell that the UK wants to import vast quantities of biomass so how is that local?

I know I am being harsh but I hate pollution and worry about smogs and poor air quality in our urban environments and do not think that Biomass is the way to go -- sorry.

Geothermal in some parts of the world will have a large role to play as will wave and tidal race (we may well realise this here sometime). Hydro-electric and pumped storage (Norway will become a battery), Iceland is still working towards the 'hydrogen economy' but they have to sort out there existing one first. There will be lots more nuclear using existing technology and I hope concentrated solar in Souther Europe/North Africa.
And there will be a huge DC 'Super Grid'. That's just Europe. Wind will not be developed as much as it can and biomass is really very short term, co-firing in existing plants and some small scale ones is all that will happen. Gas will be our main source for the next 50 to 70 years. By then IR energy harvesting will be feasible and hopefully our housing stock will be vastly improved. The big issue is liquid transport fuels, there really nothing better than diesel and gasoline. Improvements in working practices and our transport infrastructure really are needed fast (faster than improvements in the housing stock I think). I am not sold on battery technology, though I do not know that much about it and there are some interesting improvements to be made at the nano-scale and with fuel cells.
Using less and use what we do effectively is really the quickest and easiest way froward at the moment. Two years ago I decided to cut my domestic energy by a third, think I have managed it, but now very hard to improve more without large investment.

I like tidal power which has huge potential once we solve the storage problem while the tide turns (in several respects).

Yes transport fuel is a headache anything big cant work on batteries so biofuel could be an answer but there are huge conflicts with food supply, this is another reason I don't like biomass for heating -- I'd rather eat.

Posted By: martintat what cost could I build a secure enclosure for that lot?!

Feel a case of the Tony Martin's coming on (went to same school as me), not that they have any trees in Norfolk.

Fuel for the 21st Century? ( an for all existance other than the last recent little bit )

The Sun

I agree with Tony that woodland in densely populated areas (much of England) will become a highly contended resource. Also agree that large-scale wood burning is unsuitable for most areas. I see 2 main drivers: 1. Agricultural land will be in great demand for food production once importing food on a large scale becomes more expensive/scarce; 2. We should leave the few good remaining areas of woodland as wild land as far as possible, to allow at least some part of the native biota a bit of space (a desert with nothing but us and our works is too awful to contemplate).

So wood burning in most areas would be very small scale, based on thinnings from gardens, etc. Certainly not enough to cause significant air quality problems.

In many upland areas it may well be feasible to sustain biomass for energy without displacing the remaining scraps of non-human life.

The problem with all non-fossil non-nuclear energy sources is scale. We don't have enough wood to satisfy more than a small fraction of our current needs. We don't have enough land to significantly change that. Marine energy doesn't look like it can scale to anything like current fossil fuel levels, but longer term could be a significant resource nonetheless.

I see the main challenge as storing energy in ways convenient for the point of use, not so much how to generate it in the first place. Reason - apart from pumped storage we don't have good solutions today, and need new breakthrough technology for batteries and utility-scale storage.

Really, everyone interested in this topic should read MacKay's Without Hot Air. It's hard to have a useful discussion about individual sub-topics such as wood burning and marine energy without understanding the big picture with numbers. MacKay's conclusion is clear - we either go nuclear in a big way or change our lifestyles to drastically reduce energy use. I suspect that when push comes to shove it's likely to be a bit of both.

shame it does not exist

And didn't realize quite how incredibly complex a nuclear fission set-up would be until I saw it on the Robert Winston's programme...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00x13kj/How_Science_Changed_Our_World/

Complex, sure, and the idea that anyone could reduce the complexity to a workable scale is difficult for me to get my head around. But then I look back at what's been done just in my relatively short lifetime...

Now that's where development money should be going and it should be an internationally-funded project to limit 'ownership' and make the technology available to everyone. It's too important to reduce to a commodity. But that's a pipe-dream.

Coal fired generation will continue to be the fuel of the 21 Century as use explodes in developing countries due to its relative abundance and low cost. Only technology to replace coal, one for one, at a price less than coal will go a long way to solving the worlds co2, nox, sox and pm and other hazards and become the fuel of the future, but can this be achieved soon enough. Tony implies there is no silver bullet so that must be right mustn't it?

"with some belt tightening and if we were to accept industrialisation of quite a lot of countryside with windfarms etc---we could manage on local renewables"

For sure we could live on it, and a lot less too. Just don't expect that the world will be much like today's.

Building out renewables on the herioic scale envisaged to somewhat displace today's fossil fuels would be a gigantic project. I suspect it would consume a large fraction of our energy and material resources to build and maintain it. There would be huge land use issues. I also am wary about the claimed energy return on investment in a wholly renewable powered world.

Local renewable energy schemes are wholesome and worthwhile, but it's hard to see that replacing today's enormous centralised energy and transport systems in any similar form. 60+ million people in the UK depend on these systems. Major changes to food, work and population distribution and security must follow.

Nuclear invokes strong reactions from many, and it's easy to see why. It's hard to be fully objective, but IMO there seems to be much disinformation about waste management, safety and weapons proliferation. The bottom line, though, is that fission is the only major source of concentrated energy once fossil fuels become too expensive to use (or are voluntarily left in the ground... hogs rising).

Posted By: SteamyTeathe really big one gravity

Can't believe my eyes - I've been scornfully peer-banned from mentioning that on sensible GBF. Course it's the big one - all our present messing about is just messing about.

Posted By: Brianwilson Being surrounded by seas full of tidal energy surely we can harness the massive hydraulic power if we apply our little grey cells.

Brian, the potential is there to generate power enough to exceed our total requirements, but the real lucrative places to site such arrays like off the N of Scotland are also extremely fierce locations to operate and service the devices and I think they are a long way off yet.

Nah, this is gravity, but not as we know it Jim - on a more fundamental level, bending time and space, where no man's gone before (as far as we outside the US Military know).

This is similar to Sandia Labs work on syngas production Mike

http://mobile.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=23996&sr=true&srtype=9

http://www.zyn.com/flcmc/meeting/presentations/Burdick_S2P.pdf

It a nice idea, I like it, but still dependant on low energy density sunlight to do the job and of course even in the best climates only a maximum of about 7 hrs of good sunlight is available per 24hrs. So to produce say 1 million barrels of synfuel would take some enormous amount of land and infrastructure to build and maintain.

This thermochemical process would be better employed in conjunction with a more energy dense non fossil heat source that could run 24/7.

Efficiency of the thermochemical process as linked to by Mike is dependant on maximum temperature achieveable so, with present technology and likely near term future technology an emisions free heat source capable of several 1000 degrees C would be most efficient in the c02 and H20 splitting. ie the Sun as you have pointed out. However effectiveness should be determined by the Capacity Factor of such a heat source which in the case of say, solar would be low due to 2/3 of the day the sun not being around, too weak - early morning and late afternoon, periods of cloud cover, occurence of dust storms and the intensity variation through the seasons.

Earth geothermal heat is from a sun's products rather than from a SUN by way of radiant heat since its energy is derived from radioactive nuclei deep within the earths core who's energy was originally created through Supernova nucleosynthesis of the heavy elements; primarily Uranium, Thorium and also Potassium 40.

Looks like the cupboard is fairly bare for high temperature non fossil heat sources on a commercial scale presently but certainly some of those aformentioned heavy metals have been used to produce temperatures of around 800C+ at several labs around the world over the last 30 years.