In reply to mikekeswick:
Before anyone thinks that no more new onshore turbines will be built, all the article says is that no more than the 10,000 already planned will go up.
At the moment I doubt very much whether more than 5000 onshore turbines have been. The company I work for has been involved with a lot of the larger onshore projects built to date - (formwork for the concrete bases) and to date have only supplied equipment for getting on for 1200 or so. Whilst a few developments in Scotland have had more than 50 turbines each, the next group have had between 10 and 30 turbines, but the majority of developments only have between 1 and 6 turbines in an array. We're still a heck of a long way off reaching the 10000 planned.
Offshore is then next 'big' area, but they're still sorting out the technology and economics of the mega base structures needed to site the turbines in deep water.
Wave and tidal have similar technology issues when it comes to scaling up the models first into working prototypes, and then placing them in the hostile locations where they can generate most power.
The most obvious and urgently needed developments are in the Nuclear field, however the ones that are planned are taking an eternity to go through our Byzantine planning system, not to mention the politics of how much subsidy the generators will get for building the things.
This sort of chaos was always going to be the result of privatising the Energy supply sector, and creating 'a market' where traders invariably are only interested in short term gains and pay little heed to the long term strategic needs of the country.
As a nation we've known for decades when our current generating plant would need replacing, yet successive governments have lacked the political bottle to do anything about it.
