In a recent presentation at the Royal Institution, a British professor of geotechnical engineering demonstrated how we can anchor offshore floating wind turbines much more cheaply, thus for the first time enabling the world to achieve net zero with offshore wind.

In this episode I calculate how many floating offshore wind turbines we need to achieve net zero. I begin by predicting the amount of electricity we will need on Year 1 of net zero. Surprisingly, this turns out to be substantially less than we use today with fossil fuels, because fossil fuels are highly inefficient, especially for our transport. By delivering this calculation, made public for the first time, I can prove mathematically that we can achieve net zero with wind turbines. In upcoming episodes however, I demonstrate why, along with our long term green hydrogen reserves, we cannot achieve net zero without huge amounts of battery storage , and then in Eisode 4 I will explain how we get it - effectively for free!

People think the wind is too fickle to give us a workable fossil fuel free future, so I set about matching wind farm output to our future energy needs, using the first floating wind farm, Hywind in Scotland, as the model. I find the output from Hywind perfectly matches our needs, because Hywind produces huge amounts of power over our 6 cold months, reliably, and more than enough. Plus the colder it gets, the more power Hywind generates. Meanwhile, Hywind is much less powerful over our 6 warm months, but that doesn't matter because we use only one-third the power every day over that period we do in the cold months, and Hywind still produces enough, which with our other renewables energy sources and the massive hydrogen reserves built up over the cold months, ensures sufficient energy from wind all year round. So Hywind just blew the wind sceptics out of the water.

This video was made with Clipchamp