At the start of
this election year, not to be outdone, RenewableUK (RUK) produced its own Manifesto. It said
that, by 2020 ‘wind should be meeting a quarter of
the UK’s electricity need’ and that ‘by
2050 there is the potential for 50% of the UK’s power to come from offshore
wind alone, depending on the development of an interconnected grid’. It suggested
that up to 20% of UK electricity could come from wave and tidal by 2050. So, if fully achieved, that’s 70% in
total by then, even leaving aside solar, biomass, hydro, and geothermal.
Overall, RUK noted that, in the Committee on Climate Change’s projections, wind
doubles or triples between 2020 and 2030 and wave/tidal expand 20 times. Why
not? At least that. And more after.
If the political will is there. www.renewableuk.com/en/publications/guides.cfm/general-election-manifesto
On
that issue, RUK said that a poll had found that 61% of Conservative voters, 72% of
Labour and 79% of Lib Dems backed wind, as did (surprisingly) most UKIP voters.
A
good pitch!
To
push things on RUK said that whoever was in power needed to ‘set a clear path for investors by
setting a 2030 decarbonisation target, with an accompanying extension of the
Levy Control Framework, and an indication of how different technologies will
play their part. The strongest signal of all would be a 2030 renewables
target.’ Continued
support was also needed for technological innovation to get costs down e.g. for
offshore wind.
The cost of all
this would certainly be a central political issue. While the right has made
much of the alleged major impact of supporting renewables and the electricity
market reforms, Ofgem said Feed-In Tariff related cost were £14m in 2010-11, £151m
in 2011-12 and £506 m in 2012-13. And, looking at the Electricity Market Reform
overall, DECC said ‘household electricity bills will on average be £41 (or
6%) lower per year over the period 2014-2030 under EMR compared to meeting the
Government’s objectives with existing policies. For businesses, bills are expected
to be 7-8% lower’.
However not
everyone has been convinced by claims like this. The FT carried an energy
policy Blog saying: ‘deals which guarantee index linked prices - from a
starting point way above the current wholesale price for 15, 20 or in the case
of new nuclear for 35 years are indefensible. Each element of the system should
be competitive, with performance incentives, which allow suppliers and
consumers a share of the benefits if the providers succeed in bringing costs and
prices down. EMR should be scrapped and a review process created to come up
with the details of a better scheme which can be implemented once the election
is over.’ http://blogs.ft.com/nick-butler/2014/07/06/can-energy-policy-be-rescued-can-the-uk-accept-that-current-policy-is-failing-and-come-up-with-something-better/
By contrast,
Matthew Knight, director of strategy at Siemens UK Energy, told an energy
fringe meeting at last years Labour Party Conference: ‘The UK is better off
to the tune of 1.5% of GDP if it follows the decarbonisation path rather than
doing nothing. It’s just a myth that this is all hopelessly expensive.’ And RUK pointed to local benefits: ‘on average a wind farm contributes £100,000 per installed
MW to the local community’, so ‘a typical wind farm with five 2MW turbines represents a £1m investment in the local
area through employment, contracts and community benefits over its lifetime’
Taking
a very different line, earlier this year, former environment secretary Owen
Paterson launched an attack against the ‘wicked green blob,’ and its climate views at the
Conservative party conference: ‘There has not been a temperature increase
now for probably 18 years, some people say 26 years’. UKIP meanwhile said it wanted
to repeal the Climate Change
Act and shrink the Dept. of Energy and Climate Change!
The nuclear issue
may yet rise up the electoral agenda. In the euro election last year, the Lib
Dems didn’t mention their (U-turn)
support for nuclear within the Con Dem coalition, Labour was and is also all
for it, so is UKIP, and very hostile to renewables, leaving just the Green
Party as the only pro-renewables anti-nuclear party, apart from the SNP in
Scotland. The Trade Unions are mostly still backing nuclear, with employment
being a key attraction, and jobs could well be an
issue in the election. But that cuts both ways. RUK says that in 2013 the wind,
wave and tidal employed 18,465 people directly and from the left, the Campaign
against Climate Change trade union group has a new edition of its ‘1 million
climate jobs’ booklet: www.campaigncc.org/greenjobs#pamphlet
With the impact
of cheap oil and local resistance to dodgy shale gas also now on the agenda, the scene is set for some interesting exchanges. The EU
will inevitably be central. In the Euro-election last year, the Conservative
party outlined what it saw as its
achievements in relation to the EU, including: halting EU attempts to ban
further offshore oil and gas drilling, stopping EU attempts to over-regulate
the UK’s emerging shale gas industry, and ensuring that the proposed 2030
renewable energy target is non-binding on individual EU countries. All very
negative.
So what will be
in the election manifesto’s for May? An on-land wind
freeze from the Tories? They have indicated as much and it would appease those
with anti-wind farm view in the shires.
Support for green gas from Labour? Labour’s energy spokesperson
Caroline Flint has baked gas grid upgrades for green gas injection, so as to
continue to provide heating, which she said would cost much less than for the
electrification of the heating systems in the UK. The current government plan
is to do that via electric powered heat pumps, which she said would need an
electricity transmission and distribution system four times its current size.
Community energy
is also a new political focus for nearly all the parties, most obviously the
Greens. However, the Labour linked Co-operative Party
wants German styled local ownership and mainstream Labour is also evidently
keen on it: www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/community-energy-would-bypass-the-big-six-under-labour-9923413.html
Meanwhile,
in its recent report on the development of UK energy networks, reflecting views from at least one part of
the current coalition, DECC has been talking lyrically about a future in which ‘consumers will become active players in the energy
system’ and in which ‘our electricity mix will no longer be
dominated by a small number of large generators.’ DECC said it expected to see ‘a growth in the
deployment of generation at the local level, where generation and heating can
be delivered through a more integrated system which will also deliver storage’
In
particular it said ‘increasingly, communities will come together to manage
their energy needs locally, building their own generation, managing their
energy use to maximise the use of locally produced electricity and using
revenues to invest in energy efficiency and local amenities. This will enable
communities and other smaller players in the market to establish local markets where they
buy and sell their own energy and become increasingly self-sufficient’
All
this is of course a long way from reality. As the problems and delays with the
smart meter roll out programme have indicated, there are major implementation
issues and there are also some institutional and legal problems facing community
energy projects. The
Financial Conduct Authority
has changed the
rules under which new energy co-ops can be established: www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2015/jan/23/community-energy-companies-big-six-big-society
And the Treasury has also cut access to tax breaks
for some co-ops: www.theguardian.com/money/2015/jan/31/treasury-tax-breaks-green-energy-schemes
It is
also hard to see how this all decentralisation fits in with DECC and the
government’s love affair with large inflexible centralised nuclear plants. That
commitment would no doubt
remain unchanged under a Labour-led administration. It seems to be locked in place in establishment
thinking. For example, DECC’s 2050 Pathways Team Leader, Katherine
Randall, recently told the Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology that
‘while it is possible, technically ... to generate a pathway that does not
use nuclear’, it is not
desirable, because excluding nuclear would put significantly more pressure on
supply and the use of other technologies, some of which, such as CCS, are
unproven. It would, she told them, also require ‘a great deal more effort
... on the demand side’
which has so far proven to be difficult and a ‘significant effort on
balancing’ the supply of
electricity in the system. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201012/ldselect/ldsctech/221/221.pdf
So
while on one hand DECC, and by implication the government, seems to have signed
up to the decentralist green dream, it is also still locked into the exact
opposite. Or does that just reflect a conflict between the LibDem and Tory
parts of the coalition? One thing seems certain, the election will split it
further. Though, with support for the Greens apparently growing, what that will
mean in terms of new coalition options is anyones guess.
No comments:
Post a Comment