Renewable energy | ukwatch.net

Renewing our obligations

Ellie Keen — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:32:33 +0000

The government is committed to massive new nuclear build in Britain. We do not yet know the details of Gordon Brown’s nuclear plan, least of all how all the new nuclear power stations are to be paid for. But substantial public subsidy is definitely part of the deal, as described by David Lowry on Commentisfree and David Burke, writing in Prospect. After all, EDF would hardly have paid £12.5bn for British Energy if it did not have a clear promise of jam tomorrow.

But while the Brown nuclear plan (I am referring here to Gordon Brown, of course, not his brother Andrew, EDF Energy’s head of media relations) glides serenely ahead, where does this leave the UK’s renewable ambitions? Remember that the UK already has a policy to generate 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, and that this target will need to be doubled to around 40% for the UK to achieve its share of the new EU-wide target to source 20% of all energy from renewables by the same date.

So far, Brown has been far more active in trying to water down the UK’s EU renewable target than in finding ways to meet it, in spite of the enormous renewable resources of wind, wave and tide, which sweep our shores. But even if he succeeds in the latest ploy to knock 11% off the UK’s target by not counting the energy used in aviation, the UK still has a lot of renewable generation capacity to build – approaching 50,000MW of wind for a start.

And this creates a problem: nuclear power and intermittent renewables make a very poor match. Ministers and most nuclear advocates now insist that they have nothing against renewables – on the contrary, they adore them, and all they are advocating is a sensible mix of nuclear power and renewables to give the UK a wonderful new low-carbon electricity system. But the idea does not add up.

The wind turbines (onshore and increasingly offshore) that will have to produce most of our renewable electricity can only generate when and where the wind is blowing. The problems of over- and under-supply created by this intermittency can be minimised by spreading wind turbines over a broad geographical area, and by mixing them with other intermittent renewables, such as wave and solar PV. But as the renewable fraction increases, so the need to smooth out the intermittency in the electricity supply rises, and to do this with coal-fired power stations is to defeat our purpose.

Nuclear power has a similar but opposite problem. Once a nuclear power station is up and running, the best way to run it is to keep on producing electricity at a constant rate – until it develops some fault and cuts out altogether, that is. Add the two together, nuclear and intermittent renewables, and what do you get? You might imagine the two complement each other.

But the opposite is the case. Because nuclear is “always on”, it does nothing to smooth the supply curve from wind, or to better match total supply to demand, which is also highly variable. Indeed, the renewable supply profile fits consumer demand better than the nuclear straight-line output because the wind blows more during periods of peak electricity demand – that is mornings and evenings, and winter. By adding nuclear power into the mix, electricity supply actually fits demand worse, not better.

So, the more the government backs nuclear power, the more it is undermining the future of renewables in the UK’s energy supply. By backing the nuclear horse so strongly, it is revealing its probable real long-term aim: to use the ineffective and costly Renewables Obligation to fail to meet its targets (which it is guaranteed to do) and then claim that its nuclear power should count as “renewable” because it is low-carbon. Anyway, 2020 is several elections away, and whoever is in charge at the time can deal with the problem then.

But maybe I’m wrong and the government really does want renewables to have a major role. If so, here are five important things it ought to be doing to demonstrate its good intentions:

1. The natural companion to intermittent renewables is not nuclear but hydropower, which can be turned on and off to supply electricity when it is needed, and to store energy for when it is in surplus. So, we should seriously expand hydropower capacity in the UK, which currently stands at about 1,500MW, with a view to using it not for baseload generation but to balance gaps between supply and demand. The pumped storage facility at Dinorwig in Wales is already doing this on a huge scale, if for brief periods, with its ability to kick a colossal 1,320MW into the grid at 12 seconds’ notice. We need a large number of plants designed to perform a similar role, but over periods of hours and days, rather than minutes. Small-scale hydro could also have a big role in balancing the output from individual wind farms, perhaps sharing the same grid connections. The new 100MW station at Glendoe (Scotland’s first new large hydro plant in 50 years) is to be welcomed, but there is an even bigger role for small-scale hydro, which could produce a further 650MW.

2. We should also improve our connections to other European countries, as this will help to smooth the overall renewables supply curve, and so benefit all countries. Denmark, Germany, Spain and Portugal are far enough away from the UK for their wind farms to be out of sync with ours, so by linking them all together, wind power surges in one country can compensate for dips in others. There is also growing output from photovoltaic panels (PV) in Germany, Spain and Italy, which can further smooth the renewable supply curve. Also note that Denmark uses its connection to Norway, which gets 99% of its electricity from hydro, to dump surplus wind energy, and draw on the hydro when the wind drops. We should do the same. Concentrated solar power (CSP) from Spain, Portugal and North Africa will also make a huge contribution to renewable generation and supply stability. Like hydro (and unlike solar PV), CSP can store up energy (as heat) and use it to generate electricity when needed.

3. We also need to beef up our own UK grid to link the places our renewable power will be coming from far away from existing power stations – and using undergound power lines so as not to disfigure our upland landscapes. A new west coast interconnector would be an excellent way to link the many power sources along the UK’s western seaboard, and link to Ireland at the same time. The electricity distribution system also needs to be re-engineered to accommodate small- and medium-scale embedded generation, from local combined heat and power plants to solar PV tiles on domestic roofs. We also need to use price signals on the grid to make our demand responsive to supply, so that, for example, freezers stock up on cold when electricity is cheap, and coast along when the price is high.

4. Scrap the failed Renewables Obligation and replace it with a feed-in tarriffs system, or another system of fixed-price contracts to give renewable developers much needed security for long-term investment. This system would aim to deliver electricity quality – that is a smooth output matching demand – not just quantity. To do this, it would pay a premium for diversity of supply to bring in less productive locations, and less economic technologies such as wave power and solar PV. Note that the British Pelamis wave power technology has now been deployed in Portugal thanks to the far greater commitment to renewables of the Portuguese government.

5. Finally, the government should come clean about the deals it has made with EDF and other nuclear generators. It must be seen to hold firm to its promise not to subsidise nuclear power, either overtly or covertly, made in the 2006 Energy Review: “It will be for the private sector to initiate, fund, construct and operate new nuclear plants and to cover the full cost of decommissioning and their full share of long-term waste management costs.”

Why greens must learn to love nuclear power

tim — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:18:37 +0000

“If nuclear power is the answer, it must have been a pretty stupid question,” went an oft-cited slogan of the 1970s environmental movement. But the question was not stupid, and it is even less so today when the challenge is even blunter: how are we going to provide for our energy needs in a way that does not destroy, via global warming, the capacity of our planet to support life? The hard truth is that if nuclear power is not at least part of the answer, then answering that challenge is going to be very difficult indeed.

Unfortunately, just by writing the sentence above, I will already have prompted many readers to switch off. Being anti-nuclear is an article of faith (and I use that word intentionally) for many people in today’s environmental movement and beyond, just as it was during the 1970s. That the Green Party, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have held the same position on the subject for 30 years could show admirable consistency – but it could also be evidence of dogmatic closed-mindedness.

When I first broached the issue in these pages three years ago, the reaction was extraordinary. A close acquaintance sent me a tearful email saying that I had “destroyed” her motivation for environmental campaigning. Other friends here in Oxford accused me – jokingly, of course – of having formed a romantic liaison with BNFL’s spokeswoman. Just last week, after tackling the subject once again, I received a one-line email from a well-known environmentalist accusing me of having “done a considerable disservice to the cause of combating climate change”.

So why does the nuclear issue evoke such strong reactions? For answers, I think we need to look to nuclear’s past, when today’s entrenched positions were first formed. Civil nuclear power began life as a heavily state-subsidised industry largely designed to produce plutonium for bombs. Civil nuclear power was part of the military-industrial complex and shrouded in secrecy. An association with the mushroom cloud has tainted the nuclear industry ever since – and clearly continues to be an issue in countries such as Iran, North Korea and Pakistan.

Then there is radiation. Most people are terrified of radiation precisely because it is invisible, making it all the more threatening, and because of its potential to cause cancer and genetic deformities. (Many other cancer-causing agents such as food or smoke seem innocuous by comparison.) Nuclear accidents and near-meltdowns – such as Three Mile Island in 1979 – provoke scary headlines throughout the media, as did popular treatments such as the film The China Syndrome (released, by an extraordinary stroke of luck for the film-makers, just 12 days before Three Mile Island), in which a sinister nuclear cabal covers up evidence of an accident.

It is undeniable that nuclear fission generates radioactive by-products, some of which will inevitably enter the environment. It is also undeniable that exposure to radiation increases the risk of cancer (though radiation can also be employed to treat cancers). But it is the level of risk that counts, and here the story is less fearsome than many would have us believe. Take Three Mile Island, which exposed local populations to one millirem of radiation on average(1). This equates to roughly what we all receive from natural sources (cosmic rays and naturally occurring radioactive elements in the ground) every four days(2). The number of deaths from Three Mile Island – the worst civil nuclear accident ever in a western country, and one that ended the US nuclear programme (not a single reactor has been built since) – is therefore officially estimated to be zero(3).

Even Chernobyl, surely the worst-imaginable case for a nuclear disaster, was far less deadly than most people think. In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, 28 people died due to acute radiation sickness(4) – all firemen and power plant workers, some of whom had been exposed to radiation doses as high as one million millirems(5). By comparison, 167 men were killed during the Piper Alpha disaster on a North Sea oil rig in 1988. But it is the long-term effects from Chernobyl that tend to scare people most. In a 2006 report, Greenpeace claimed that “60,000 people have additionally died in Russia because of the Chernobyl accident, and estimates of the total death toll for the Ukraine and Belarus could reach another 140,000”(6).

These figures, if correct, would make Chernobyl one of the worst single man-made disasters of the last century. But are they correct? The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation reports 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer in children and young people in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, but very few deaths (thyroid cancer is mostly treatable). Indeed, it concludes, “There is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 20 years after the accident”, and no evidence of any increase in cancer or leukaemia among exposed populations(7). The World Health Organisation concludes that while a few thousand deaths may be caused over the next 70 years by Chernobyl’s radioactive release, this number “will be indiscernible from the background of overall deaths in the large population group”(8). Without wishing to downplay the tragedy for the victims – especially the 300,000 people who were evacuated permanently – the explosion has even been good for wildlife, which has thrived in the 30km exclusion zone(9).

A plentiful supply of free fuel

One way of statistically assessing the safety of nuclear power versus other technologies is to use the measure of deaths per gigawatt-year. This technique is cited by Cambridge University’s Professor David MacKay in his book Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air (available free on the web), and shows that in Europe, nuclear and wind power are the safest technologies (about 0.1 death per GWy), while oil, coal and biomass the most dangerous (above 1 per GWy)(10).

A focus on statistics is also useful when assessing the financial costs of nuclear power. The high price for nuclear waste disposal and decommissioning – with a hefty chunk always payable from public funds – is surely one of the environmental lobby’s strongest arguments, particularly if any subsidy from taxpayers means taking money away from investment in renewables. Helen Caldicott’s book Nuclear Power is Not the Answer discusses the finances of nuclear under a chapter subheaded “Socialised Electricity”, quoting figures for nuclear’s subsidy in the US over recent decades of $70bn. To make a direct cost comparison, the International Energy Agency in a 2005 study looked at life-cycle costs for all power sources – including construction costs, operations, fuel and decommissioning – and concluded that nuclear was the cheapest option, followed by coal, wind and gas(11).

But how about nuclear power’s potential contribution to mitigating global warming? One persistent myth is that once construction and uranium mining are taken into account, nuclear is no better than fossil fuels. However, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), total life-cycle greenhouse-gas emission per unit of electricity is about 40g CO2-equivalent per kilowatt-hour, “similar to those for renewable energy sources”(12).

But why not ditch nuclear and focus only on renewables, as the greens suggest? MacKay calculates that even if we covered the windiest 10 per cent of the UK with wind turbines, put solar panels on all south-facing roofs, implemented strong energy efficiency measures across the economy, built offshore wind turbines across an area of sea two-thirds the size of Wales, and fully exploited every other conceivable source of renewables (including wave and tidal power), energy production would still not match current consumption(13).

This is rather different to Britain being the “Saudi Arabia of wind power” as many in the environmental movement are fond of asserting. Indeed, MacKay concludes that we will need to import renewable electricity from other countries – primarily from solar farms in the North African desert – or choose nuclear, or both. Indeed, it is vital to stress the neither I nor MacKay nor any credible expert suggests a choice between renewables and nuclear: the sensible conclusion is that we need both, soon, and on a large scale if we are to phase out coal and other fossil fuels as rapidly as the climate needs. As MacKay told me: “We need to get building.”

The UK’s Sustainable Development Commission, in its 2006 report on nuclear power, argued that new plants should be ruled out until the existing waste problem could be solved(14). But what if a new generation of nuclear plants could be designed that, instead of producing more waste to leave as a toxic legacy for our grandchildren, actually generated energy by burning up existing waste stockpiles? This is the solution proposed by Tom Blees, a US-based writer, in his upcoming book Prescription for the Planet(15). Blees focuses particularly on so-called fourth-generation nuclear technology – better known as fast-breeder reactors. While conventional thermal reactors use less than 1 per cent of the potential energy in their uranium fuel, fast-breeders are 60 times more efficient, and can burn virtually all of the energy available in the uranium ore.

This gives these fourth-generation reactors a big advantage. As Blees puts it: “Thus we have a prodigious supply of free fuel that is actually even better than free, for it is material that we are quite desperate to get rid of.” Moreover, fast-breeder reactors can also run on the “depleted” uranium left behind by conventional reactors, and help reduce the proliferation threat by burning up plutonium stockpiles left over from decommissioned nuclear weapons. Blees estimates that supplies of nuclear waste and depleted uranium are sufficient to “provide all the power needs of the entire planet for hundreds of years before we need to mine any more uranium”. Although these reactors produce plutonium – which might be used for nuclear weapons, and could therefore pose a proliferation threat – weapons-grade material is never isolated in the fuel-cycle process, making fast-breeders less dangerous to international stability than conventional reactors, and relatively simple to inspect.

But what about the waste these reactors themselves produce? Since the by-products of fast-breeder reactors are highly radioactive, they have much shorter half-lives – rendering them inert in a couple of centuries, instead of the longer time over which conventional nuclear waste remains dangerous. (Once again there is a powerful myth here – that high-level waste from reactors remains dangerous for enormous lengths of time. Greenpeace states that “waste will remain dangerous for up to a million years”(16). In fact, almost all waste will have decayed back to a level of radio activity less than the original uranium ore in less than a thousand years.)(17) Fourth-generation nu clear technology is also inherently safer than earlier designs. The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), discussed at length by Blees, operates at atmospheric pressure, reducing the possibility of leaks and loss-of-coolant accidents. It is also designed to be “walk-away safe”, meaning that if all operators stood up and left, the reactor would shut itself down automatically rather than overheat and suffer a meltdown.

So why, given the purported advantages in safety and fuel use, have fast-breeders not been developed commercially? The US Integral Fast Reactor programme was shut down in 1994, possibly – Blees suggests – because of political pressure levied on the Clinton administration by anti-nuclear campaigners. (Even so, fourth-generation nuclear power plants are being built in India, Russia, Japan and China.) Ironically, the Clinton administration may have inadvertently killed off one of the most promising solutions to global warming in an attempt to please environmentalists. Even if the decision were to be reversed immediately, 20 years has been lost.

It is worth remembering the contribution that nuclear power has already made to offsetting global warming: the world’s 442 operating nuclear reactors, which produce 16 per cent of global electricity, save 2.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year compared to coal, according to the IPCC. Blees agrees that “the most pressing issue is to shut down all coal-fired power plants” and urges a “Manhattan Project-like” effort to convert the world’s non-renewable power to IFRs by the thousand. This sounds daunting but it is not unprecedented: France converted its power supply to 80 per cent nuclear in the space of just 25 years by building about six reactors a year.

An anti-nuclear report published by the Oxford Research Group in 2007 concluded that an additional 2,500 reactors would need to be built by 2075 to significantly mitigate global warming(19). The report’s authors suggested that this was a “pipe-dream”. But it sounds eminently achievable to me, given that it is only a five-times increase from today. The question is this: are those who care about global warming prepared to reconsider their opposition to nuclear power in this new era? We are no longer living in the 1970s. Today, the world is more threatened even than it was during the Cold War. Only this time nuclear power – instead of being part of the problem – can be part of the solution.

References:

(1) United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Fact Sheet on the Three Mile Island Accident, http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.htm…
(2) Chapter 5 in ‘The Nuclear Energy Option’ by Bernard Cohen, 1990. http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/blc/book/chapter5.html
(3) United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Fact Sheet on the Three Mile Island Accident, http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.htm…
(4) World Health Organisation, ‘Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programmes’, 2006. http://www.who.int/entity/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/WHO%20Report%20on…
(5) Chapter 7 in ‘The Nuclear Energy Option’ by Bernard Cohen, 1990. http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/blc/book/chapter7.html
(6) Greenpeace, ‘Chernobyl death toll grossly underestimated’, 18 April 2006. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/chernobyl-deaths-180406
(7) UNSCEAR, ‘The Chernobyl Accident: UNSCEAR’s assessments of the radiation effects’, http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html#Health
(8) World Health Organisation, ‘Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programmes’, 2006.
(9) National Geographic News, April 26, 2006: ‘Despite mutations, Chernobyl wildlife is thriving’. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/0426_060426_chernobyl.ht…
(10) David McKay, ‘Sustainable Energy – without the hot air’, Part 2, ‘Making a difference’, p174. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/cft.pdf
(11) IEA, ‘Projected costs of generating electricity – 2005 update’.
(12) IPCC, 2007: ‘Mitigation’. p. 269. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-chapter4.pdf
(13) David McKay, ‘Sustainable Energy – without the hot air’, Part 1, ‘Numbers, not adjectives’.
(14) SDC, ‘Is nuclear the answer?’, http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/pages/060306.html
(15)Tom Blees, 2008: ‘Prescription for the Planet – The painless remedy for our energy and environmental crises’. http://www.prescriptionfortheplanet.com
(16) Greenpeace, ‘Nuclear power – the problems’. http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/nuclear/problems
(17) World Nuclear Association, ‘Radioactive Wastes’, see figure ‘Decay in radioactivity of high-level waste’. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf60.html
(18) IPCC, 2007: ‘Mitigation’. p. 269. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-chapter4.pdf
(19) Oxford Research Group, 2007: ‘Too Hot to Handle: The future of civil nuclear power’, p.7 http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/briefing_papers/pdf/t…

Renewables do add up

eddie — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:28:32 +0000

“I can’t do the sums any way without having a slice of nuclear power in the mix. It doesn’t work. I ask my enthusiastic green friends if they’ll do the sums – and they can’t” said Professor Ian Fells on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday. As a stalwart member of the nuclear lobby it’s unlikely Fells has many green friends. Last year we did the sums and found that through a radical rethink of how we use energy and massive investment in renewables, the UK could meet its energy needs without fossil fuels or nuclear. “The sums”, as Professor Fells calls them are contained in our report, Zero Carbon Britain.

Fells’ comments coincide with the release of his report, A Pragmatic Energy Policy for the UK. The report claims that without a nuclear revival and investment in coal the UK will face an “energy gap” within the next decade. The report also states that renewables have a role to play, but the hope that they could provide large amounts of energy is “wishful thinking” and demonstrates a “staggering lack of understanding of the technical and engineering reality of what can be built”.

Zero Carbon Britain provides exactly the “technical and engineering reality” that Professor Fells claims is missing.

The report models current UK energy demands across all sectors of the economy and assesses the potential for different renewable sources to replace fossil fuel and nuclear generation. This isn’t wishful thinking; we’ve carefully modelled exactly where and when we use energy, and how we could replace current generation with renewables. The scenario uses a broad spread of different sources – onshore and offshore wind, solar, small-scale hydro and tidal power. It’s true that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. But we’ve mapped the UK for renewable energy potential and found that by distributing the generation around the country, using storage and managing our energy use intelligently we can even out the ups and downs in supply and demand.

Energy saving is crucial. The scenario requires us to reduce our
energy use by almost half. This won’t mean a few energy saving lightbulbs and washing your clothes at 30C. It means big changes in our energy infrastructure – switching to electric cars and public transport, serious investment to insulate our existing buildings, and rethinking how we use energy to deliver our wellbeing.

The combined threats of energy security and climate change mean that these changes need to happen quickly. The latest climate science suggests that we need to make reductions in greenhouse gases much faster than government targets – faster even than most campaigners and NGOs are calling for. If we want to avoid seriously destabilising the climate we’ve got roughly 20 years to reduce our emissions to zero. Zero Carbon Britain proves that this is technically possible. Because the timescale is so short this energy scenario only uses technology that is developed and ready to go. The urgency of the situation means we need to invest our limited resources in technologies we know are going to deliver within this 20 year timeframe.

At the Centre for Alternative Technology we produce all our electricity from our own renewable sources. I’d say we are pretty in touch with “technical and engineering reality”. We know what works and what doesn’t. We’ve been building, installing and living with these technologies for 35 years. Zero Carbon Britain shows that the UK can achieve energy security without fossil fuels and nuclear power. If Fells wants some new “enthusiastic green friends” to do the sums for him, he should come and visit.

Whitehall Farce over Nuclear Clean-up

Ellie Keen — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:12:50 +0000

Well, what do you know? Another news story has broken which demonstrates that the UK’s nuclear industry is not the robust, well-managed machine our ministers would have us believe. The government has sneaked out a report assessing the working practices of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) which is managing the clean-up of existing power stations and waste. They were clearly hoping no one would notice as there’s no doubt that many people have been caught with their pants anklewards.

Setting aside the spiralling costs of nuclear waste management (which are now about the same as the bill for the Apollo moon landings), we find the NDA in a sorry state of mismanagement. Staff apparently lack basic financial skills and were confused about accountancy terms, leading to severe errors in the balance sheets. I’m happy to report that employees in the finance team have been sent for retraining to brush up on their times tables.

It’s not just specialised knowledge that’s lacking. Simple tasks like taking notes at meetings seem to have been overlooked, to the extent that major decisions made between the NDA and the Treasury have gone unrecorded, leading to gross misunderstandings over budgets. Everyone has since agreed that it would be a good idea to write these things down and put them somewhere safe. Like a filing cabinet.

The audit goes on to say that there are "inherent risks" in the way the NDA operates, pointing out that half of its income is dependent on unreliable sources such as fuel reprocessing at Sellafield’s Thorp plant (closed since a leak was discovered in 2005) so perhaps a more stable financial model might be in order.

Given all this, investing in less volatile and more reliable sources of energy might seem appropriate. But oh dear, it looks like the government is still set on knobbling those in favour of its twin obsessions, nuclear and coal.

The proposed EU renewables directive – legislation designed to set minimum levels of energy generated from renewable sources across Europe – wants to see the UK getting 15 per cent of its energy from clean sources by 2020. A section has been included in the directive to ensure that "member states shall also provide for priority access to the grid system of electricity produced from renewable energy sources", but British ingenuity has been focused on changing "shall" to "may".

A teeny tiny change, you might think, but in practice it would remove any obligations on our government to make sure renewable sources were given access to the National Grid before others such as, well, nuclear power and coal. And it’s a stance at odds with the energy strategy launched by Gordon Brown last month which promised to "[remove] grid access as a barrier to renewables deployment". But then maybe someone didn’t take minutes at that meeting.

And I can’t finish without mentioning the fourth leak from a French nuclear power station in just two weeks. Safe, reliable energy, no doubt about it.

Whitehall Farce over Nuclear Clean-up

Ellie Keen — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

And I can’t finish without mentioning the fourth leak from a French nuclear power station in just two weeks. Safe, reliable energy, no doubt about it.

Leaving the fossil century behind?

Tim Holmes — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 04:09:44 +0000

The past two years have been thrilling and frustrating in equal measure. We have begun to glimpse the green holy grail: reliable renewable electricity. Studies by people as diverse as the German government and the Centre for Alternative Technology have shown how, by diversifying the sources of green energy, by managing demand and using some cunning methods of storage, renewables could supply 80% or even 100% of our electricity without any loss in the continuity of power supplies.

But while this work has been causing ripples among scientists and green campaigners, the government has appeared stuck in the fossil century. As recently as October last year, the business secretary, John Hutton, was secretly lobbying to abandon Britain’s target for renewable power supplies.

I have not yet been allowed to see the consultation paper, but the details obtained by the Guardian suggest that the government has at last begun to take renewables seriously. Some of its proposals appear to be radical, innovative and bold. It shows how its target of producing 35% of electricity from green power by 2020 might be met by greatly boosting wind, biomass and solar energy. The document will propose a synergy between large-scale renewables and electric cars, which can be charged at night when wind power might otherwise be wasted.

Most radically, and controversially, it suggests forcing people to insulate their homes and to fit renewable devices when they build extensions. The paper suggests that oil-fired central heating might eventually be banned.

The brief summary I have seen raises as many questions as it answers.

Is the government really proposing the mass installation of micro-wind turbines? If so, it will be wasting our money. While solar thermal panels (producing hot water), wood pellet boilers and heat pumps offer good value, micro-electricity doesn’t.

Why is the government proposing to use biomass for generating power, when it would be much better deployed producing heat? Does it support the German government’s proposal to build a European supergrid, using high-voltage direct current lines? I hope so: our renewable resources could then be used as part of a much bolder scheme for balancing supply and demand.

But by far the most important question is this: we now have an idea of what the government will be commissioning, but what will it be decommissioning? Cutting carbon pollution is as much about what you don’t do, as what you do.

The paper proposes that the flights we take will keep growing: by 2020, it says, they will account for 11% of the country’s energy use. If so, then airport expansion, because of the other greenhouse gases flying produces, will cancel all the savings the government proposes, twice over.

Will the government drop its plans to build new coal-fired power stations? It would be profoundly ironic if it bans oil-fired central heating in people’s homes while approving new coal plants tens of thousands of times bigger.

And will it produce a supply-side policy for tackling climate change? At the moment it proposes to maximise the extraction of fossil fuels and minimise their use: these positions are plainly incompatible. Gordon Brown will appear in Jeddah tomorrow to demand that the Saudis raise oil production, just as the consultation paper demands that we reduce consumption. The government cannot pursue both policies and claim to be meeting its commitments on climate change.

Green vs Green

tim — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:15:25 +0000

Environmentalists are used to fighting battles. But with environmentalism going mainstream – wind farms, biofuels and nuclear power stations, for example, are fast becoming some of the most controversial issues in British politics today – environmentalists increasingly find themselves skirmishing with one another as they see-saw between pragmatism and idealism.

The Lewis wind farm – rejected by the Scottish Executive earlier this week – is merely the latest example. The Scotsman reported that “environmental agencies welcomed the news” of the massive wind power project’s demise, thanks to concerns about impacts on rare peat bog and birdlife habitat. Yet according to the developers Lewis Wind Power – a coalition of AMEC and British Energy – the wind farm would have made a substantial contribution to reducing Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions, wiping out a quarter of a million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year. With climate change at the top of the list of political priorities, most now agree that Britain desperately needs to expand its renewables sector. How this can be done without major negative impacts on wildlife and landscape remains one of today’s toughest challenges.

Wildlife groups such as the RSPB have a particularly difficult task in deciding where they stand. The Lewis wind farm’s impact on the landscape would have been substantial – with 181 turbines each standing 140 metres tall, erected on massive concrete bases drilled into the fragile peat surface and connected by dozens of miles of new stone roads, this was unavoidable. And while the developers insisted that strenuous efforts would be made to mitigate the effect on birds, including not putting turbines in areas important to rare species such as merlins and golden eagles, the RSPB objected strongly to the proposal.

Yet the real-world result of defeating the wind farm is that the electricity that would have been generated cleanly from the wind will now be generated using conventional means – a mixture of coal and gas. This in turn will worsen climate change, which will in the long run have a far more serious effect on fragile habitats such as Lewis’ peat moors than any number of wind turbines, as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns shift. Indeed, global warming is now thought by many biodiversity experts to be the greatest extinction threat facing the planet today. Up to a half of all species could be consigned to oblivion with just two or three degrees of further warming.

But with wind farms consistently opposed by a powerful coalition of conservationists and locals concerned about the landscape impact of turbines, it is difficult to see how the planned emissions cuts – or indeed the new renewables target of 15% of UK energy by 2020 – can even be approached. The Lewis project, although supported by the Western Isles Council, received 11,000 objections from members of the public, with only 100 comments in favour. Lewis Wind Power responded to the news of its project’s refusal by saying that it was “bitterly disappointed”. Similarly, the British Wind Energy Association – environmentalists all – is furious that £5m has been wasted on a failed scheme, and warns that this will damage investor confidence in new wind projects.

Conservation bodies such as the RSPB are, of course, well aware of the global warming threat – the RSPB was a founding member of the environment and development agency coalition Stop Climate Chaos, and has also launched its own green electricity tariff, RSPB Energy, in partnership with electricity company Scottish and Southern, to supply consumers with renewable electricity, much of it generated from wind.

Some contradiction perhaps? RSPB doesn’t think so. “We are committed to tackling climate change,” it says. But “we cannot support any renewable generation proposal which would have a significant and adverse impact on wildlife and habitats, particularly sites which are protected by law specifically for their wildlife value.”

It denies that there is a conflict between meeting renewables targets and protecting wildlife. But this conflict keeps on happening. The biggest single source of renewable power in the UK would be the tidal barrage that is proposed across the Severn estuary – it could potentially generate 5% of the country’s entire supply. But building it would have severe ecological consequences on the tidal mudflats, which host a panoply of aquatic life and wading birds – and once again, the RSPB, this time supported by Friends of the Earth (FoE), is strongly in the anti camp. FoE has proposed an alternative system of tidal lagoons, but these would generate less power and might not be economically feasible. Jonathon Porritt’s Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) last year proposed building the barrage but ensuring that compensatory habitats were established elsewhere for displaced wildlife – especially if these new habitats could help birds and other species adapt to rising sea levels and other impacts of climate change.

What is clear is that all energy-generation technologies have an impact on the environment – and environmentalists are going to have to think more deeply about what their hierarchy of priorities is. For example, nuclear and hydro power were both anathema to environmentalists for decades but are slowly and reluctantly being accepted back into the fold due to their perceived potential for producing low-carbon energy. The nuclear option was recently considered by the SDC – and although it was still ruled out on cost and proliferation grounds, its report did have to concede that “nuclear is a low carbon technology”, which “could generate large quantities of electricity, contribute to stabilising CO2 emissions and add to the diversity of the UK’s energy supply”.

This is a world away from Greenpeace’s flat refusal to even consider moving away from its outright and long-standing rejection of nuclear power. Similarly on biofuels, even as environmental campaign groups lobby against the new government-sponsored biofuels mandate (a reversal from their favourable position a few years ago), the Royal Society still insists that biofuels “have a potentially useful role in tackling the issues of climate change and energy supply”.

All this suggests that environmental concerns of a generation ago – which were conservation-based, principally – are increasingly being trumped by the climate-change concerns of today. Indeed, if climate change does come top of the list, given its potential to devastate both biodiversity and the British landscape, then it certainly needs to be given more weight in planning decisions.

As Sir Martin Doughty, chairman of Natural England, said in response to the SDC’s Severn Barrage proposals: “We have some difficult choices to make if we are going to get serious about reducing the impact of climate change on the natural environment.” And making these difficult choices means knowing what we value most, and how to protect it.