[theo_luddite]

Additional Bodgit Bollocks

“In 2050, we will still be driving cars, flying planes and heating our homes, but our cars will be electric, gliding silently around our cities, our planes will be zero emission allowing us to fly guilt-free, and our homes will be heated by cheap reliable power drawn from the winds of the North Sea.”

Given I'll be in my 90's by then, I may or may not be around to see it.

Let's see - "our cars will be electric" - more than likely most will, recharging them and the cost of doing so will be interesting to see given all the fuel duty that will become a puff of smoke from the past, governments will recoup that somehow. Tolls, mileage tax, or by then you "rent-a-ride" regardless of the distance you want to travel. It may come as a shock to many but the government owns the car you drive right now. You are the registered keeper, not the registered owner. Check your documents.

Apart from the billionaires, most of us plebs won't be allowed to own a car for personal use. There will still be some old legacy fossil fuel burners around though. Note he doesn't mention trains, so if we still need diesel for some of those those (we will), well, the odd oil burner on the road - mostly delivery trucks and the odd heritage Chelsea tractor, will it hurt, maybe, maybe not? Current dealerships will be the hubs where these vehicles are parked and serviced. Of course, they may leave it on your drive too until someone else books it and ask you to juice it up. Whether you'll get paid for that is another matter.

"our planes will be zero emission allowing us to fly guilt-free" - so right now that means Hindenburg type hydrogen balloons does it? We all know how well that worked out. Batteries are going to have to improve in performance and weight by a huge amount to get similar sized aircraft to those we have now across the pond and even across some continents. This - https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/20...c-devices/ - will need a helluva lot of work to power a plane.

"When power is interrupted, BFree pauses calculations. When power returns, it automatically resumes where it left off without losing memory or needing to run through a long list of operations before restarting." Right - really useful on a red-eye night flight back across the pond that will be.

"and our homes will be heated by cheap reliable power drawn from the winds of the North Sea.” It has also escaped this dweebs knowledge that many days of the year the North Sea, like our normally windy island, is like a mill pond. There isn't any wind. No wind = no frigging power. IT HAS HAPPENED ALL SUMMER. The other thing with windfarms is they have to be shut down in high winds - otherwise they blow the bloody sails off. The one thing that is constant (apart from a couple of hours each day) is tides. As long as there's a moon in the sky there will be tides and we have some of the most powerful on earth.

There is one guy, that Private Eye considers to be either a nut job or a thief, trying to unsuccessfully pocket tax payer cash for developing a tidal lagoon power source in Swansea Bay. I've no idea whether that's the best or worst place to build one or whether his idea is even engineering wise, practical. As much as the PE reports shysters of any political or financial persuasion I know it's something we should be looking at. It happens twice a day come rain or shine, wind or no wind. Stronger in some places than others. The issues are stopping other marine life (mainly plant/algae but also molluscs) growing on it to reduce performance and not putting it in the way of migrating/spawning fish and sea mammals.

Given the billions of £'s of our money these dickheads have thrown at their mates in the name of Covid - why aren't they throwing some at one of their mates to develop this in places where it would make sense?

The other "free" stuff (after you build the stuff) the likes of Norway have is hydro electric power but we don't have enough high mountains or powerful enough waterfalls to tap into. Hence we'd need to retro build additional reservoirs (we couldn't practically retrofit existing ones as we'd pour all the drinking water down the drain) which would flood huge areas inland anyway. As happens every time we get a months worth of rain in 24 hours