Tag: zero-carbon

Energy Flows in ZeroCarbonBritain

What would daily life in a ‘zero carbon’ Great Britain look like? Since 2007 the Zero Carbon Britain (ZCB) project of the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) has worked to “offer the hard data and confidence required for visualising a future where we have risen to the demands of climate science; to remove fear and misunderstandings and open new positive, solution-focused conversations.”

They have presented a Sankey diagram for the energy landscape in the UK, the way it could look like if Britain’s energy production was actually carbon free and 100% renewable energy.


via Open Energy Monitor blog, original image here (under CC BY-NC 2.0 license)

Flows are in TWh/year. The largest energy sources are wind and biomass. Some of the electricity is used to produce synthetic gas, synthetic liquid fuels and hydrogen (used mainly in the transportation sector). In that scenario there is even an electricity surplus that can be exported.

While I can not judge how realistic such a vision of the UK energy landscape is, I can at least say it is very different from the current situation (see here or here), and even from this UK 2050 energy scenario.