There is always the gas interconnector, assuming it makes it from Russia right through Europe, and an electricity interconnector from France. Plus there is LNG shipping. I imagine the gap will be mostly met in the form of demand destruction from ruinously expensive power bills. Expect energy-intensive business to close left right and centre.

As for the elections, once power shortages kick in, Labour will be out the door. But neither party has much in the way of options- the Tory faux tree-hugging is so transparent it's embarrassing.

My bet would be: in the face of shortages planned decomissioning of the nukes will be delayed, first "temporary" and then for indefinate time. The rest should (or they hope to) be covered with electricity imports and with demand destruction caused by the skyrocketing prices and the inevitable recession kicking in.

Anything else, even a single month of rationing will be equivelent to a long-term political death for the party in power.

Tidal power is predictable. A double pond scheme with one pond  filled at high tide and one emptied at enables the generation to match demand peak, effectively combining generation capacity with storage. With this and as much other renewable capacity as we can build we can up the renewable share

To get an idea of how great a resource the Severn is, consider that the 1998 single barrage scheme would produce 17TWhr per year. The largest of the lagoon systems favoured by Friends of the Earth would generate 24TWhr per year. This is equivalent to the output of 2150 of the very largest 3MW 100m diameter offshore turbines at a 30% load factor for the barrage and 3030 of them for the lagoon system. For the 200kW 24m diameter turbines common onshore operating at 25% load factor the figures are 39000 turbines for the barrage and 54800 for the lagoons.

Using Sanyo's best 200W 1.18m² solar photovoltaic panels at 10% load factor you would need 97 million panels for the barrage and  154 million panels for the lagoons.

There are drawbacks and environmental costs on all energy schemes. The lagoon scheme has lower environmental costs but uses much more ballast or concrete. If we turn down every new scheme because there are some disadvantages we will be left with the default option. Conventional oil will peak and decline. For a couple of decades a frenzy or development of filthy alternatives such as tar sands, oil shale, Venezuelan super heavy oil and coal to liquid conversion will struggle to fill the gap before that fails but not before pumping enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to ensure climatic disaster. We will be left in an economic and environmental calamity.

We desperately need tidal power and the Severn is the second  best site in the world.  

Buzzard is the only sizable new field due to come online in the next couple of years and it is predicted to produce 0.18 to 0.19 mbpd barrels of oil by mid 2007.

Of course it's not hard to see why - early cost recovery for operator, early tax revenue for Gov't and production will occur during the (now limited) lifespan of key infrastructure i.e. Forties and Frigg oil / gas gathering systems respectively.  Major NS infrastructure dating from 1970's will soon be approaching end of design life for the corrosive environment and average size of new discoveries would be unlikely to justify such repeat investments.

Clearly Buzzard peak rate cannot be maintained for very long thus, after a couple of years or so UK NS oil production will show an even steeper decline curve following a 'blip' on the downslope as Buzzard is commissioned.

Like Nick I cannot see where the 'rise to 3.4m boe/d in 2007' is coming from - Energy Trends has just reported an 8.5% oil and 4.5% gas decline in 12 months 1Qr 2005 to 1Qr 2006.  From this report I've calculated the declines as 155.4k bopd (oil) and 94.4k boe/d (gas) i.e 249.8k boe/d in total.  Even if Buzzard peaks at 190k bopd within 12 months of startup combined energy output from NS for that year would still decline.