Can it really be true that UK Prime Minister David Cameron is so staggeringly badly advised on energy matters, that he has allowed himself to sign agreements for new Nuclear plant which fix wholesale prices at TWICE 2013 levels until... 2048 ?
The technological reality of power-generation science is that there are two truly long-term solutions to our energy needs. One is fusion, the other solar photovoltaic. All the others are interim solutions which will ultimately fade in the medium term. Coal is just too filthy to continue with; nuclear fission too generative of desperately toxic wastes with multimillenium half-lives; wind a green dream which is too uselessly variable (unlike the wave power it has stolen attention, and funding, from); gas a wasteful interim which should have been saved for space-heating (for which it is perfect), but having been stolen for power generation in the 'dash for gas', will gasp its last pressure all too soon.
Fusion by comparison is clean, with only pure water as waste product, and capable of generating astonomically large amounts of energy from tiny amounts of heavy water fuel - but is one of those engineering challenges that is just so fiendshly hard to crack, we're probably still a half-century, from switching on commercial stations.
By contrast Solar Photovoltaics - 'PV' - solar panels - are proven science, and simply now on the standard electronics-sector down-slope, of price against volume. There is a chance that in a couple of decades PV will become so cheap that even fusion will be mothballed. The future is, solar farms: clean, silent, harmless: solar pergolas can sit quietly above sheep farms or vineyards or crops without problems, and the vast areas of farmland makes it very viable to co-locate massive power-generation arrays with fully productive agriculture.
By 2048 photovoltaics will be so staggeringly cheap that the 9p/KWH that Mr Cameron has seemingly signed up to pay for the next 35 years will look rather ludicrous. That contract will have to be broken, and as always, it will be the taxpayer who has to bear the penalties of doing so.
Mr Cameron, when a very elderly statesman, will no doubt be called back on to political talk shows to explain how on earth he got - and took - such stunningly bad advice, way back in 2013.
