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Hello. My name's Mark Brinkley.
I'm a writer and a commentator,
mostly on housing issues but also energy issues.
The two are interconnected in a big way these days.
And I've been asked to look at the project in front of us here
and play with the spreadsheet.
A few comments.
I feel qualified to talk about parts of it but I'm certainly no expert.
I've looked mostly at the demand side
but the supply side is very, very interesting.
I'm largely agnostic about the big debate
about whether it's nuclear or wind energy that we need.
One of the interesting things of doing the exercise
is that it's very easy to create far too much electricity.
You're swamped with the stuff, trying to work out what to do,
which was an eye-opener to me.
So, obviously, it seems to me,
we need to get a large amount of our infrastructure -
our housing and commercial infrastructure -
over to electricity in the next decades.
The other thing that really worries me
is that you can't actually get to a good result
without quite a high input of bioenergy.
I'm worried about the stress of bioenergy
and whether this really is the solution,
but the way the model works
you have to have some amount of bioenergy to really replace oil.
So my feeling is, we have to get to a solution
where most of the demand side
is met as much as possible by electricity,
and concentrate on minimising
the amount that we have to use oil or oil substitutes.