New Offshore Renewable Energy Wind Farms Announced in UK

[Simon47]

Some countries e.g. Norway produce their electricity from renewable sources. Given they have lots of rivers & streams filling fjords, it shows it can be done.

Key thing there is is the "they have lots of rivers & streams filling fjords" bit. They also have much higher terrain than we have, making the energy on those streams and rivers much higher. And I think you'll find that they are much more sparsely populated than we are.
We actually have few good sites for hydro - and most of them already have schemes running on them. The non-pumped ones suffer from running out of water in dry spells, the pumped ones act like big batteries and rely on something else low-carbon (eg nuclear) to "charge" them.
So we have a much higher demand, and far fewer (and lower grade) sites available - hence we don't have much usable hydro capacity.

IMO we use fossil fuels & nuclear 'cos its the easier option.

Only in part - we use them because they work and are reliable. Nuclear can not be described as "easier" when you see the hurdles that have to be jumped to get a new plant off the drawing board.

At some point fossil fuels will be exhausted, unless we've killed off the planet by then.

People keep saying that, but of course, as stuff get "rarer" and the price rises, it then becomes cost effective to pull more stuff out of the ground. And there's a heck of a lot left down there yet.

 

[Dan]

People keep saying that, but of course, as stuff get "rarer" and the price rises, it then becomes cost effective to pull more stuff out of the ground. And there's a heck of a lot left down there yet.

It's not what's down there. It's what we're doing with it. Burning it and releasing the CO2.

We don't even know what's beyond even a onion peels worth of the planet in the grand scheme of things.

But nothing disappears fully. We convert one energy to another. So it's in the atmosphere.

Eventually, too much for us to live with as humans unless we have natural selection to evolve.

And we're developing new tech and burning more fossil fuels at a rate faster than we are evolving naturally.

That's the issue.

It's not how much it is to mine. And how much is there.