[sdunwoody]

Some countries yes, but what about others? The UK, Ireland, the Baltics (I was thinking of the Netherlands and Belgium too, although they don't strictly fit in the definition apparently) - not all of these countries have oil reserves or good sources of hyrdo/geothermal electricity.

[tialaramex]

The UK currently has about 15GW of grid wind power (and maybe 4-5GW privately owned that is not attached to the grid it's just used to avoid buying grid electricity). There is no reason whatsoever that can't be 45GW, and more, except that until now it was not politically desirable apparently.

It's very windy here. On the mainland, especially in summer, it might be calmer for days or even weeks so you would need a lot of storage, but you probably can power the UK on wind if that's what you were determined to do, and when it's really blowing (much of the winter) you can export that cheap wind power too, offsetting the price of buying some of say Spain's solar power or France's nukes when the wind is calm.

Most of today so far for example grid wind was steadily about 13GW. Here on the mainland it seems pretty calm, but I guess out in the ocean it is plenty windy enough to turn those blades and make electricity.

[sdunwoody]

I think we're very fortunate in the UK to have a great mix of wind/solar/tidal to utilise for power generation (although I don't think solar is as appropriate for our situation as wind or tidal). TBH I really wish our politicans would actually do more to advance both wind and tidal generation in this country.

But it still doesn't significantly help countries like Belgium or the Netherlands, or even Germany.

I'm actually very interested to see how Germany tried to decarbonise over the next couple of decades, as I think they've managed to get most of the low hanging fruit (for example, from what I've read, I don't think there's really anymore space for them to install offshore turbines without quite significant difficulties).