Breaking: UK seizes lead; Half of 2020 electricity from wind

Wow... I never thought I'd do a "Breaking" diary...

You may recall that the 2007 Energy Bill would repeal subsidies and require utilities to get 15% of their energy from renewable sources by 2020 (Renewable Portfolio Standards or RPS).  Both cause problems for our free-market, can't-do-Republicans.

``I don't think it has a chance because of the tax package and the RPS,'' Republican Senator David Vitter of Louisiana said yesterday. Vitter says he is ``confident'' the legislation won't get the 60 votes it needs to proceed in the Senate.

15%  No problem for a can-do country like Britain.  Today, they announced plans to get 50% of all electricity from massive offshore wind farms by 2020.

Off-Shore Wind Could Power All U.K. Homes

The U.K. today will unveil plans for building off-shore wind farms that will produce enough electricity by 2020 to power every home in England, according to The Daily Mail.

The contrast between can-do Britain and our can't-do Republicans couldn't be starker.

Britain's plan comes from John Hutton, the Secretary of State for Business.  It will be announced later this week (later today according to some sources) but details are filtering out.

The goal? Produce 33GW worth of electricity (or about 30 times that of some prototype DeLoreans we've seen).

The plan would call for massive wind turbines that would reach 850ft in the air to grab the good stuff so each of these generators could produce enough power for 8,000 homes.

Of course, an 850ft turbine is quite visible. And it means that the UK coastline may lose its scenic beauty

There would be 7000 such turbines, roughly 2 per mile of coast.  To put that in perspective, the Statue of Liberty is 300'.  Cape Wind (which would be the largest offshore wind-farm in the world) has a peak capacity of 420 MW or a little over 1% of what Britain will generate by 2020.  The 130 Cape Wind turbines would each be about 250' high (blade tips a bit over 400').  

Obviously, an announcement of a plan is a long way from actually building the turbines.  There will undoubtedly be major opposition from NIMOV (not in my ocean-view) types.

But it is terrific to see a major government that is actively encouraging the use of renewables on a scale large  enough to make a difference.

And this is a clear illustration of the contrast between the UK and the US right now.  The UK government understands the problem and proposes a workable solution to it.

Meanwhile, here in the US, a proposal to get a third as much power from a wider variety of sources is seen as too difficult.

In Britain, pro-business groups take the lead in creating new industries, in the US, we subsidize old industries (like oil drilling) and protect them from new ones.

I'd love to hear more from those with more knowledge of this plan or British politics..

See the first comment of Jerome's post for Oil Drum comments on this story