John Williamson wrote:

harry wrote:
On Nov 4, 3:28 am, (Windmill)
wrote:
harry writes:
Of course not at night. But it helps lop the daily electricity peak.
Are you being obtuse or just stupid?
Even the arabs are installing vast arrays.
Because _for them_ it makes very good sense.

--
Windmill, Use t m i l l
J.R.R. Tolkien:- @ O n e t e l . c o m
All that is gold does not glister / Not all who wander are lost

When they have all that oil and an existing infra structure?
As it runs out, it will be us that are deperived before they are.
And it is running out.
The Saudis are building nuclear power stations too.

Using the oil revenue to build stuff for when it runs out. Very sensible
of them. They'll also probably be in a position to export energy from
their non-oil plant after the oil becomes either too expensive or too
rare to burn. If we'd done that with North Sea Oil, we'd not be looking
at rolling blackouts within my expected lifetime.


Not that we have vast areas of useless sun drenched lands to put PV on.

But if you meant "used the money to build nukes, whilst becoming a world
leader in nuclear research, safety management and waste handling" I would
agree. We could be selling the stuff over the interconnectors and selling
the manufacture, design and consultancy thereof to the rest of the world.

It's not like we were that behind in such matters in terms of personnel -
bit asleep at the time, but a single minded policy could have kickstarted
everything.

But we (they) ****ed it up the wall instead because splashing the cash buys
you mates and not having nuclear placates the tree huggers and NIMBYs.

Perhaps we should become a world leader in superconductors instead. Cheaper
research and folks'll need quite a few cables to the Middle East when they
are the only people other than the French who actually have any serious
energy production.

Libya's hot and has lots of useless deserts - they could become an economic
power if they follow the Saudies and they wouldn't even need very long
cables to export - eg Tripoli to Scicily is only about 300 miles straight
undersea. Wonder how much of Italy could be powered off the Libyan deserts?





--
Tim Watts