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That book hasn't aged well in my opinion. Reality has done much better than its doom and gloom predictions. On that very page he is doubting that the UK will ever have 33 GW of installed offshore wind capacity, but we're already at 16 GW.

We don't have to generate 48 kWh/day/person for it to make sense to build a mountain of offshore wind.

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I haven't read it recently but don't think the book, written at the time it was, was necessarily a bad view of things though. I think I first read it in about 2007 or so(?) so we're nearly 20 years on. A lot of it reflected the political debate and projections that were being put out by the government at the time too in what they'd allow in for e.g. offshore installations, so it was basing itself on that too.

IIRC his point was basically that you could make a concerted effort to start building nuclear now, and in 10-15 years you'd be there on having non-CO2 emitting power generation, and that if you even let one part of the renewables equation slip (e.g. banning onshore wind which was the case from 2010 onwards), then you still wouldn't have enough to meet total demand. And that in addition, the cost in terms of producing the actual mechanism to generate the power in both money and in materials in concrete + steel was vastly larger in doing it with wind/solar than with nuclear, with a lot more engineering challenges too.

I'd like to see an updated edition too.

The guy who wrote it died not long after the last edition came out, so unfortunately it’s not likely to see one.

Oh, that's a shame!

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