Dave Elliott

Fukushima still a mess

2012-02-01T15:05:00.000-08:00

At the end of last year the Japanese authorities announced that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex's devastated reactors had been brought to ‘cold shutdown’, nine months or so after the disaster. But that just means that temperatures are now lower, not zero, thanks to continued cooling and reduced melted core activity levels. Much still needs to be done however to make the plants fully safe, and some reports say that, since no one really know exactly what happened inside the cores, it’s not clear how to move to the next set of issues, which include locating and stopping the flow of toxic water and removing the melted nuclear fuel and radioactive debris. Reuters noted that ‘Fukushima Daiichi is hemorrhaging enough radiated water each month to fill four Olympic-size swimming pools’ and quoted Hajimu Yamana, a professor of nuclear engineering at Kyoto University, who heads a government committee studying how to decommission Daiichi: ‘We don't know what we should do. After all, we don't even know what's happening inside the plant.’ But they are doing their best, although its been claimed that it will take thousands of people, and decades to clear it all up: TEPCO’s current plan is for final full decommissioning of the site by 2041-2051.

Possible US Impacts

Joseph J. Mangano and Janette D. Sherman, writing in the International Journal of Health Services, (Vol. 42, No. 1, pp 47–64, 2012) note ‘an unusual rise in infant deaths in the northwestern United States for the 10-week period following the arrival of the airborne radio-active plume from the meltdowns at the Fukushima plants in northern Japan’. They say that ‘U.S. health officials report weekly deaths by age in 122 cities, about 25 to 35% of the national total. Deaths rose 4.46% from 2010 to 2011 in the 14 weeks after the arrival of Japanese fallout, compared with a 2.34% increase in the prior 14 weeks. The number of infant deaths after Fukushima rose 1.80%, compared with a previous 8.37% decrease.’ They add ‘Projecting these figures for the entire United States yields 13,983 total deaths and 822 infant deaths in excess of the expected’. They say ‘these preliminary data need to be followed up, especially in the light of similar preliminary U.S. mortality findings for the four months after Chernobyl fallout arrived in 1986.’ They suggest that while impacts in Japan will inevitably be much higher, the impact of exposure to low levels can also be significant elsewhere, especially for infants. See www.radiation.org/reading/pubs/HS42_1F.pdf

This report was rubbished by the US nuclear lobby as being unreliable and based on dubious use of statistics and it may indeed be a little premature. Similarly the views of Prof. Chris Busby have also attracted a lot of criticism. He is ardent in his belief that low-level internally absorbed radioactive particles are more dangerous than is officially thought, but he has his detractors. Make up your own mind. For an overview see : http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Christopher_Busby. And then his web site: www.llrc.org Also see www.greenaudit.org/ and www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMnwcb-N1Ls Then, from a hostile but anonymous source: http://junksciencewatch.wordpress.com/
The most balanced overview of the issue I’ve seen is this:
www.safegrounds.com/radiation_risk.htm

Clearly there are conflicting views. Prof. Gerry Thomas at Imperial College told New Scientist that ‘not an awful lot got out of the plant – it was not Chernobyl.’

This seems wide of the mark. According to recent estimates, 770,000 terabequerels of radiation seeped from the plant in the week after the tsunami, more than double the initial estimate of 370,000 and about 20% of the official estimate for Chernobyl, rather than the 10% initially claimed. The amount of plutonium released is said to be 120 billion Becquerels, plus 7.6 trillion Becquerels of Neptunium-239. As neptunium-239 decays, it becomes plutonium-239.
http://enenews.com/leaked-tepco-report-120-billion-becquerels-of-plutonium
-7-6-trillion-becquerels-of-neptunium-released-in-first-100-hours-media-concealed-
risk-to-public

But even that may be an underestimate. Nature noted that the Norwegian Institute for Air Research found that, in fact, the accident released more total radioactive material than did Chernobyl, though some was in the form of xenon which is less harmful. Even so it claimed that caesium emissions were in total about half that from Chernobyl. www.nature.com/news/2011/111025/full/478435a.html

It is perhaps not surprising then that there have been huge demos around the country, with a 60,000 strong gathering in Tokyo last Sept kicking off a whole spate of ‘Occupy Tokyo’ actions. In parallel, rail workers went on strike to resist the re-opening of the track from Hisanohama Station to Hirono Station, which they say is still highly contaminated by radioactive fallout from Fukushima.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvxscUDKLXA

Their concern is that rolling stock is contaminated- its been passing through the area reguarly. The Trade Unions have become increasingly active, organising an International Workers rally: www.doro-chiba.org/english/english.htm

They are not the only ones worried about radioactive contamination. Local residents in Tokyo, unconvinced by government reassurances that all was well, have been measuring radiation levels themselves. The Tokyo citizens’ group, the Radiation Defense Project, which grew out of a Facebook discussion page, in consultation with the Yokohama-based Isotope Research Institute, collected soil samples from near their own homes and submitted them for testing. Some of the results were shocking: one sample collected under shrubs near a baseball field measured nearly 138,000 becquerels per sq meter. Of the 132 areas tested, 22 were above 37,000 becquerels per square meter, the level at which zones were considered contaminated at Chernobyl. Hot spots are of course different from full scale contamination as at Chernobyl, but Kiyoshi Toda, a radiation expert at Nagasaki University’s faculty of environmental studies and a medical doctor, told the New York Times ‘Radioactive substances are entering people’s bodies from the air, from the food. It’s everywhere. But the government doesn’t even try to inform the public how much radiation they’re exposed to.’
www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/world/asia/radioactive-hot-spot…
Tokyo-point-to-wider-problems.html?ref=global-home&pagewanted=print

There’s also been strong opposition to radioactive debris being brought to Tokyo by train to be burned and dumped in Tokyo Bay: www.stopspreadingradiation.org

Studies by a US scientist Marco Kaltofen of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) of air filters from car air-conditioning units sent from Japan, evidently show high levels on contamination by hot particles in Tokyo. Studies have also been made of shoe laces gathered from kids in Japan- they pick up dust.
http://vimeo.com/31370998

Some of this may be unduly alarmist, and some may be unreliable, but given that few now trust official pronouncement, it’s understandable that fears mount and pressures for a nuclear phases out increase.

As you may have guessed from the above, I’m writing a book on Fukushima. Stay tuned!

Markets rule

2012-01-01T10:32:00.000-08:00

I was asked last year to write a commentary piece for the Shell-backed ‘visions’ web site, focusing on ‘how to support innovation’ in the sustainable energy field. I decided to take a wide-ranging approach. See what you think - from this slightly edited version:

"Given the urgency of responding to climate change, the move to low carbon energy seems unstoppable, even by the recession, but how do we best proceed to develop and deploy the appropriate technology?
When it comes to deciding on which technologies to support, and how best to support them, there is basically an ideological split in views.
While those from the left of centre see a key role for government direction and often tend to favour renewables over nuclear, right of centre free-market competition enthusiasts are basically after a system in which targets are removed and markets, perhaps suitably modified by carbon or energy taxes, decide on technologies – which to develop and which to deploy.
The trouble is that, as we have seen with the EU Emission Trading System, unless very tight carbon caps can be imposed (which is politically hard across the complete EU, especially in a recession), trading can be very lucrative (and even corrupted), but not many emissions are saved – it doesn’t drive many carbon saving projects and the ones it does drive are the easy, cheap, short term options. Market oriented support mechanisms, like the UK’s Renewables Obligation, similarly just focus on the ‘near market’ options- it doesn’t support the earlier innovative phase of technological development.
Those adhering to a more left of centre view, argue that you need targets and support mechanisms like Feed In Tariffs, to force the pace. And more support for less developed options for the next phase. That does mean you may incur extra costs, but they argue, that is an investment in the future- helping the technologies to mature and fall in price, so that overall costs then fall, at least in the longer term – especially given that then, less use need be made of increasingly expensive fossil and nuclear technology.
Oddly, given that it has been around for some decades, some free market enthusiast seem sanguine about providing support for developing nuclear technology, but sometimes argue that we should wait until renewables have developed more before supporting their wide diffusion. Failing that, free market enthusiasts may say that shale gas means that there is a new, rival, cheaper and plentiful option, which can be made lower carbon with Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).
Many governments, under pressure to cut emission and maintain security of supply, but also to cut costs, would clearly like that, but they are also aware the CCS may not work effectively or economically on a large scale, and that CCS, and certainly Shale gas extraction may not be socially accepted or environmentally sound .
So they hedge their bets – backing nuclear, renewables and CCS more or less equally, while recognising that each of them may be problematic, nuclear, especially so, after Fukushima. But the same is true for renewable – progress is seen as slow at least in some countries – even if, arguably, that is mainly to do with the way some governments have approached providing support.
The three pronged approach (renewables, nuclear, CCS) may be portrayed as more diverse and robust than having just one or two, spreading risk. Or you could see it as diluting efforts- you may end up developing none of them successfully. And it could be argued that, for example, renewables are not just one option, but several, so that, if you want diversity, they represent a better deal, at various scales and levels of development.
There are of course also some cross cutting technologies, moving away from just electricity production, like CHP/co-gen linked to district heating and possibly heat stores. That can be, and mostly is, fired using fossil fuels, but once established, heating networks can be supplied using biomass as a fuel and possibly also large solar arrays- there are some large solar -fed DH projects already in existence in N Europe, some linked to interseasonal heat stores. It is sometimes argued, usually by those on the centre left, that this more collective approach to heating and power production is better technically and economically than the market driven ‘microgen’ domestic scale technologies.
That division of opinion shapes priorities for research and innovation. Should we be focussing on new cheap micro generation devices that can be sold on the conventional market, or on infrastructure issues like heat transmission and storage?
It’s the same in the wider area of overall energy supply and use, although here the ideological fault lines can get a little tangled. For example, advocates of large scale HVDC supergrid links often argue that they can open up wider markets to more competition, while some microgen enthusiasts trade on the idea that consumers can, to a degree, become independent of wider markets and corporate control (as long as they buy the kit!). However, they may both agree on the need for smart meters, although they may not share the same perspective on who will benefit most, economically, from them – producers or consumers.
I’m not saying that all the big energy innovation and deployment issues of the day can be framed in simple ideological terms. Some are based on more general technical concerns and issues. For example, should we be focussing on electricity, as an easy to transmit but hard to store energy vector, or gas/hydrogen/heat, as easier to store, with the potential for negative carbon if biomass use is combined with CCS. But even here there are some possible political divergencies, although also some overlaps.
The ‘heat and pipe’ lobby stresses ideas like biogas production, the use of solar for hydrogen production, and on the utilisation side, district heating, and conversions and storage of excess electricity from wind generation as heat. The electricity lobby is backed by nuclear enthusiasts and by some renewable energy supporters, who see electricity as supplying heat and battery electric transport power. Interestingly though, much of the new nuclear R&D in the USA is aimed at developing new reactors for process heating for industry and maybe for hydrogen synfuel production, for vehicle use. And perhaps even for CHP/district heating. So we may be seeing radically different technologies being developed for maybe similar end uses.
How does my perhaps rather laboured attempt at an ideological account stand up when you look at specific countries/regions and their programmes? The USA has adopted a market driven approach, avoiding carbon caps and targets, while the EU has adopted the EU Emission Trading System, which is bureaucratically defined, but market driven. In addition, many EU countries have introduced Feed-In Tariffs (FiTs).
The FiTs have clearly worked to boost renewable – putting countries like Germany ahead of all others, initially, in the deployment of wind – at lower cost per kW and per kWh than market let mechanisms, like the UK’s Renewable Obligation (RO) quota/certificate trading system. Basically FiTs provided a more secure investment climate, making it easier and cheaper to finance projects, including innovative projects. So much so, that the UK has now introduced its own small FiT system and is planning to replace the RO entirely – although, in a backward looking move, possibly by a form of competitive Feed In Tariff system, with tenders/auctions. Whether that would work remains to be seen, but it certainly needs a new approach since, so far, using a market led approach, it has only developed its huge renewable resource very limited extent.
Free market advocates nevertheless point to the US, where renewable energy deployment has now begun to accelerate rapidly under what amounts to a free market ‘technology push’ approach – with the US taking the lead in wind power from Germany as a result.
However China has now taken the lead from them, in wind power especially. How do you characterise their approach? They use Feed-In Tariffs but also auctions, and they have state targets and central directives, but also commercial enterprises.
Back in the EU, the recession and concerns about passing high cost on to consumers, has led governments to throttle back on the FiTs, with caps and tariff cuts for PV solar. It has been argued, usually by free market advocates, that PV was perhaps not well suited to FiT support since it started out with high costs. The counter argument is that, if the FiT system had been left to work, costs would have fallen- cutting back was a failure of nerve, or worse, a reflection of a preference for nuclear.
And so the debate continues. Maybe the IPCC was right to say in its recent report on renewables that ‘There is no one-size-fits-all policy for encouraging renewables’. But equally, there do seem to be some ideological fault lines."

This didn’t seem to attract any comments. Maybe most of their contributors/ readers are on the other side of the fault line?
www.commentvisions.com/

Exit from pv?

2011-12-01T10:36:00.000-08:00

Although it is confident that Germany can obtain 100% of its electricity from renewables by 2050, the German Advisory Council on the Environment (SRU) has called for a major slow down on solar PV, which it claims is too expensive and could slow the overall programme down. This at a time when Feed In Tariffs (FiTs) for PV are being savaged across the EU- including in Germany.

Germany has been a leader in PV, which has boomed dramatically under the Feed In Tariff system it pioneered. That was copied elsewhere and led to similar booms- initially in Spain, but also in France and Italy. And even finally in the UK. But the boom came at a price- increasing the cost pass-through to electricityconsumers bills. In theory, as PV boomed and the market built, prices should fall, with tariffs being progressively cut via the built in degression mechanism, so the extra cost to consumers should fall. But that process doesn’t seem to have worked well enough or quickly enough. The boom and the module price fall was too fast, leaving the tariffs too high. Given the recession, and sensitivity to consumer prices, governments have panicked and stepped in with extra cuts, or emergency capacity caps.

In the case of Spain, this was arguably done too harshly, resulting in a crash in the PV market. That left lots of PV modules unsold, so their price fell, stimulating faster uptake elsewhere, notably in Germany, until it too slapped on tariff cuts- most recently up to 15%. The UK, a latecomer to the party, has just imposed cuts of up to 72%. So a classic boom and bust scenario played out- further accelerated by the import of cheap Chinese PV modules. The down side reaction was also stimulated by hostility to PV and to FiTs from right wing free-marketeers and their allies in some of the large power utilities. The media dutifully relayed stories about vast extra costs being loaded up on consumers, as if PV and FiTs were the main reason why energy costs were rising, justfying the drastic cuts by the mostly right of centre governments - including the UK. All of this has shaken confidence in PV and the FiTs. It is in this context that we might see why SRU had recommended backing off from PV. Are they right?

SRUs retreat

You might see a strategic withdrawl from PV as being a wise thing in the current political and economic climate, so as to be better able to defend other renewables. But throwing PV out of the mix is an odd idea. Economically it’s almost certain to get very much cheaper, so if the FiT price degression system can be amended to take that on board more effectively, there should be fewer problems. After all the worst is now over- the initial high prices are falling. And SRU’s technical case against PV is not that strong- yes it doesn’t work at night and so you need grid backup/balancing, but PV can make a lot of sense for day time occupancy buildings, for summer air-conditioning and for topping up night time storage heaters during the day. More generally, although load factors are low, we are going to have to get used to balancing variable supplies, as we have more renewables on the grid. SRU may be right that PV will make it harder, but it’s a huge resource well suited to access via roof tops, easy to install and run-with no moving parts to go wrong. It may have been unwise to try to use FiTs to get its initial very high price down rapidly, but that doesn’t means the technology is rubbish. Or that FiTs are no use.

FiTs to go too?

SRU backs FiTs for offshore wind and other renewables, though it’s interesting that they also talk favourably of tendering mechanisms (e.g. for offshore wind farm grid links), and point to the UK Non Fossil Fuel Obligation. That’s very odd. NFFO was very ineffective at building renewable capacity- low bids were put in and accepted, but projects often couldn’t be delivered in practice. Why on earth repeat that? Though of course that’s what the UK government now wants to do- with, instead of a German style fixed price FiT, auctions linked to the proposed ‘Contracts for a Difference’ market-based system.

In part the sub text here is all about supporting nuclear, which is likely to do well under the CfD system, but it’s also being presented as a way to avoid the boom and bust syndrome that is allegedly associated with fixed price FiTs. Thus Tim Yeo, chair of the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, talks of ‘an automatic mechanism for feed-in tariff strike prices to respond to changes in cost and thus avoid the problems seen recently with the solar PV feed-in tariffs.’

The German government is trying to do something similar with its FiT system, to keep PV on track. SGU says this won’t work, or at least that it won’t be enough, and wants to back off PV dramatically to avoid the problem. That certainly risks playing into the hands of those who are opposed to FiTs, PV and indeed, you could argue, renewable generally. But what’s the alternative? A seriously revised FiT system would also probably slow PV down. In the UK PV is mainly to be supported, not by the CfD, which is seen as being for the larger options (offshore wind, nuclear and CCS), but by the UK’s small FiT, the Clean Energy Cashback system- if that survives. PV may therefore be boxed up.

Wind better?

Standing back from the fray, it does all seem a little odd. The UK FiT cost consumers a massive £1.40 extra on their annual electricity bills, and even though DECC says this could rise to £26 by 2020, that’s still tiny. Their cuts would they say take it down to £3. Does this make sense? Isn’t it worth investing in this new technology? Or are there better uses for £26 per head per annum? Some say it was wrong to try to accelerate PV via the FiT, but that has teased out capital from those who could afford the investment cost. True, they then have been well rewarded by the FiTs, paid for by all the other consumers, and that can be provocative in a recession. Compared to the UK, that’s been less of an issue in Germany, where the uptake of PV has been so much wider across the population.

Even so, the ‘opportunity cost’ issue is still important. Would it be better to spend this money on, say, wind - since it’s cheaper? That begs the question of whether the money would be available- an attraction of PV is that individual consumers can buy it for their homes. Micro turbines apart, that’s not an option for wind. That said, the German FiTs main success has actually been in supporting wind, now at 27GW, compared to 19GW for PV. The German wind boom has been helped by the fact that, as in Denmark, many projects are locally owned, so spreading the benefits. There are also some solar co-ps, but SRU says the focus should now be more on wind. Is that the way to go?

* ‘Pathways towards a 100 % renewable electricity system’, SRU
www.umweltrat.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/02_Special_Reports/2011_10_Special_Report_Pathways_renewables.html

Free market contradictions

2011-11-01T14:31:00.000-07:00

The basic tenet of free market capitalism is that trade should be free, unencumbered with state controls and intervention. In reality there is nowhere that complete market freedom actually exists- even the most rapacious capitalists have come to terms with regulation, taxes and so on to reflect wider longer-term social and environmental concerns. But free market enthusiasts do usually draw the line at the state trying to overstep the mark by intervening to support selected technologies via subsidies. That’s almost as bad a state socialism!

You can hear complaints along these lines emerging from the likes of the increasingly oddly named Renewable Energy Foundation in its new Green Mirage report and also from climate contrarian Lord (Nigel) Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation. A bit more surprisingly (although see my previous Blog), a new University of Califonia Berkeley study seems to adopt a similar stance.

The basic argument is that free markets are undermined by subsides and government intervention, leading to less then optimal economic development. But they go further and attack some of the usual economic justifications for intervention - e.g. that countries who get into an area first have a competitive advantages over those who follow. Instead they say, ‘first mover’ advantages are overstated, and it can be better to wait until new technologies are developed by others before buying into them- if they succeed.

This is a form of risk aversion- it says leave the risks of innovation to others. Capitalise instead on less risky market activities e.g. building and controlling markets for exsting products and (especially) services. To some extent this is what the UK has done in recent years. You could see it as a ‘losers’ approach- abandoning involvement with the cutting edge of new developments. That’s sometimes what leftists say we have done- but they tend to link it with claim that the UK has also abandoned industrial production. However it’s more complicated than that. Business school theory argues, with some justification, that the most lucrative parts of the ‘value chain’ are at the front and the back- product innovation /R&D can be cheap but yield huge profits if it works, and there can be huge gains by adding value to products via clever marketing. By contrast production itself is a mugs game, with small profit margins: leave that to others. In the case of the UK we seem to have limited our engagement in R&D and focused most on services and marketing.

For free market enthusiasts that’s presumably fine. It may have come a bit unstuck with the collapse of financial sector confidence, but the remedy is more of the same- not Keynesian reboots of the economy via state programmes and subsidies, green new deals and the like. And so we have REF, GWPF et al sounding off about the horrors of subsidies and specifically saying that we should not privilege renewables, for example, over other low carbon options. Which these days seems to include nuclear, with, for the UK, the technology being bought in from France!

So REF take the ‘One Million Jobs’ report by the Campaign for Climate Change apart- claiming that there will be no significant jobs from subsidised investment in green energy, while GWPF argue that this is partly since it is , and will remain, more expensive than other energy options: ‘there is little evidence that there are large additional economies of scale or learning to be gained, except perhaps for solar thermal equipment. Indeed, US figures suggest that the average cost in real terms of both wind and solar power installations stabilised and/or has been increasing since the middle part of the decade 2000-09. It is unlikely that there is some large reduction in the costs of renewable energy which can be achieved without a major shift in technology’.

So how does this view square with reality?

Solar PV is one new emergent technology - and it’s being progressed rapidly by China, using huge loans from the Chinese Development Bank, which are helping Chinese solar companies push American solar firms out of the market. As Stephen Lacey reported for Grist (part of the Guardian Environment Network) last Sept. ‘In 2010 alone, the bank handed out $30 bn in low-cost loans to the top five manufacturers in the country. This has enabled China's solar producers to grow to GW scale in a very short period of time, turning the country into a leading exporter of solar and pushing down prices dramatically’.

Aggressive, but good to see prices falling - and surely fair under free trade rules. But with some spectacular US company failures (including Solyndra and Evergreen), the US solar industry has been pressing the government for protection against ‘dumping’. An alternative, more progressive, approach would be to compete on technological innovation. GTM Research has noted that ‘It will be difficult for the U.S. to compete with China at its own game - namely, high-volume manufacturing of a commoditized product -given the cost advantages available for Chinese manufacturing. However, the U.S. can and should continue to develop and commercialize innovative technologies that offer lower costs than traditional panels. These new technologies are generally proprietary, require a more skilled labor force, and are difficult to duplicate’.

That could be risky - and may need government support. But that can be justified economically- as well as more generally, in terms of protecting jobs and the planet!

However the University of California Berkeley report is unmoved by ‘common arguments for subsidizing renewable power – green jobs, energy security and driving down fossil energy prices’ . But it does admit that ‘the role of intellectual property spillovers is a strong argument for subsidizing basic science research’, although it still insists that it is ‘less persuasive as an enhancement to the value of installing current renewable energy technologies’.

Oh dear. With negative views like this becoming common in the reaction to Obama’s already watered down intervention polices, it looks like the US could end up trying to rely mainly on shale gas...
.
• REF report: www.amazon.co.uk/Green-Mirage-Low-carbon-Economy-Further/dp/1906837309
• GWPF report :www.thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf reports/hughes-green_jobs.pdf
• University of California Berkeley study http://ei.haas.berkeley.edu/pdf/working_papers/WP221.pdf

Centralising power - markets rule

2011-10-01T07:08:00.000-07:00

‘For the first four decades of its existence the U.S. nuclear power industry was run by regulated utilities, with most companies owning only one or two reactors. Beginning in the late 1990s electricity markets in many states were deregulated and almost half of the nation's 103 reactors were sold to independent power producers selling power in competitive wholesale markets. Deregulation has been accompanied by substantial market consolidation and today the three largest companies control more than one-third of all U.S. nuclear capacity. We find that deregulation and consolidation are associated with a 10% increase in operating efficiency, achieved primarily by reducing the frequency and duration of reactor outages. At average wholesale prices the value of this increased efficiency is approximately $2.5 bn annually and implies an annual decrease of almost 40 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions'. http://ei.haas.berkeley.edu/pdf/working_papers/WP217.pdf

You can read this bit of analysis, from researchers at the University of Berkeley, California, in variety of ways. Free market enthusiasts may see it as confirming the wonders of competition and the horrors of state regulation; liberals (in the US sense) may quail at the spectacle of 'reconsolidation' and the creation of powerful monopolies- able to control prices as they see fit (e.g. not passing on any savings to consumers). UK observers might note that 'liberalisation,' or what we call privatization, initially created a lot of small power supply/ distribution companies, who later got swallowed up into a few foreign owned giants, big enough to run nuclear plants. And, allegedly, to do that more efficiently, as in the USA. However, consumer prices haven't benefited much, indeed they (and profits) seem to march relentless upward, with minimal regulation and a continued enthusiasm for nuclear.

Faced with all this, nostalgic lefties may look back to the days when the whole UK power industry was nationalized and managed in an, allegedly, more coherent and planned way. Lastly, environmentalists may look at the last sentence in the quote above and ask, are these carbon savings real- wouldn't you have got more cash and carbon savings by investing in renewables/ energy efficiency.

So the Berkeley study seems to raise more questions than answers. For example, if degregulation makes the market safe for nuclear, is that a good thing? Has liberalisation led to investment in new more efficient plant and distribution? Does 'concentration' improve the level of service and security of supply? From what has happened in the US in recent years, the answers to all these questions seem to be 'no'. After deregulation, California famously suffered major power blackouts, as a result of the lack on investment in new plant and grid infrastructure- that in turn being partly due to the high cost of running the increasingly uneconomic nuclear plants. Price hikes followed to try to keep the show on the road.

If deregulation and privatisation continue as the major theme world wide, we can expect more problems like this- outages and endless price hikes. Of course attempts will be made to blame this on the enchroachment of renewables- leading to higher costs and grid instability, due to the variable outputs of wind farms and so on. It may well be true that prices will have to rise initially in order the set up a sustainable energy system, and that one option for balancing grids is to have dynamic demand management- i.e. rephasing some loads from peak times. But once the system is fully in place, running cost should be lower, even given the extra costs of grid balancing- indeed peak shaving/ time shifting should cut costs.

All of this would get much easier if we could reduce demand and also avoid nuclear- the latter just pushes prices up and gets in the way of a flexible, interactive grid system. Otherwise we may have to prepare ourselves for more chaos. Interesting then that the International Energy Agency has just published a report on 'Dealing with Temporary Shortfalls in Electricity Supplies', which includes 'problems in electricity market liberalisation' as one possible reason why we might have to resort to 'saving electricity in a hurry'. Others include 'heat or cold waves', no doubt worsened by climate change, and 'safety problems at power stations', as has now been demonstrated so starkly in Japan.

You won’t get any sense of these looming problems if you read the tirades against ‘wasted subsidies’ on renewables emerging from free market enthusiasts like the Renewable Energy Foundation and Lord (Nigel) Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation. They seem to be so concerned about the short term costs of subsidues, and what they see as their negative impacts, that they are willing to forgo what others see, given the inevitable rise in cost of fossil fuels, as the longer term benefits of developing future-proof renewable energy systems.

See: www.thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/hughes-green_jobs.pdf and
www.amazon.co.uk/Green-Mirage-Low-carbon-Economy-Further/dp/1906837309

Greening the UK

2011-09-01T08:10:00.000-07:00

Can the UK become a power-house for the green industrial revolution? The potential is there- the offshore wind, wave and tidal resource could if fully harnessed supply six times our electricity needs. But the government is relying mainly on inward investment to try to get offshore wind turbine manufacturing going in the NE and Scotland. That's a bit dicey- the US company Clipper wind has just pulled out of the giant 10MW Britannia Turbine project that was to be based in Newcastle. But Siemens, Vestas, GE, Gamesa are still planning major offshore wind turbine manufacturing investments in the UK.

The government has set up a series of new Enterprise Zones, with reduced planning controls and lowered business rates to help. Building on that, Hull is developing a 'Humber Estuary Renewable Energy Super Cluster' fussing on offshore wind turbine manufacturing. But this is all just good old fashioned regional business support policy, backed by cash strapped local councils, desperate for jobs, with very little money coming from central government. The government is more lenient about supporting nuclear (while saying there will be no state funding!). That's what the radical new Electricity Market Reforms are all about, via its new proposed market-led variable price 'Contract for a Difference ' (CfD) Feed In Tariff (which is not really a FiT at all). In the end it’s the consumers who will pay.

Some see the greening of the UK coming from the bottom up. But smaller scale stuff just took a big hit- the government has imposed savage up to 72% cuts to the existing (Labour government initiated) 'Clean Energy Cashback' (CeC) Feed In Tariff , for PV solar projects over 50kW. When the CEC was first introduced, it had a project capacity limit of 5MW- higher than some had envisaged. DECC explained ‘We want to give ourselves a bit more flexibility... to include projects like schools, hospitals and community schemes’. But now the effective ceiling is 50kW for PV. So no more community scale projects. That really is a preliminary to switching over to the CfD, which seems designed mainly to help big projects and especially nuclear. More FiT cuts are likely- the last Budget called for £40m to be shaved off it. In energy terms the CeC FiT is marginal stuff (it’s only expected to deliver 2% of UK electricity by 2020), but locally may be worth fighting.

Overall though the governments approach is all about spending less- and getting us all to expect less from the state- and also do more for ourselves and others in the wonderful new Big Society. So the emphasis is increasingly on personal action, and low cost 'nudges’, rather than politically sensitive financial or other aggressive measures aimed at changing consumer (or company) behaviour. Or on investment in new clean technology.

The Cabinet Office has just published a study of 'Behaviour Changes and Energy Use' which reviews 'ways that do not require a new legislative initiative or spending programme'. My favourite example of that was a New Zealand government campaign which included the use of the slogan: 'If you sing in the shower, choose shorter songs'.

Some of this may be useful for reducing demand, but some might feel that what we are seeing is an attempt to reform peoples behaviour and expectations so as to fit in with the 'needs' of an unregulated profit-led market and whatever technologies it happens to favour. Shale Gas is the latest, which may even replace nuclear, which may be looking a bit problematic to investors, as of course do most renewables. Apart perhaps from genetically modified advanced biofuels for cars and aircraft, and maybe a bit of wind power to run overnight-charged electric cars. As well as a few micro-generators flogged direct to consumers.

To be fair that is one area where the government does seem to be stepping in with real money, via the grant-aided Renewable Heat Incentive. But one of the main domestic micro-gen options they seem to be keen on is heat pumps, which could be because they would use excess overnight electricity from the nuclear plants the government is also still keen on.

Some of this may be seen as green, but otherwise we seem to be a long way from a sustainable energy future or a new industrial revolution.

Energy after nuclear

2011-08-01T03:07:00.000-07:00

With public opposition leading the way, nuclear power is on the defensive nearly everywhere around the world, even in France, where a poll in June showed three quarters of the French people interviewed wanted to withdraw from nuclear, against 22% who back an expansion programme. Globally opposition is running at around 62%, with massive majorities in Italy, Germany and Mexico being against - 94% in Italy’s recent referendum .

Local agitation and grass roots reactions, following Fukushima, has forced governments and parties to rethink- famously in Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Japan has now said it wants to exit from reliance on nuclear, in favour of renewables. And so also now, perhaps, may France, with presidential elections due in May and a policy review of options for future energy mix underway. Energy Minister Eric Besson said ‘We will study all possible scenarios. It will be done with total objectivity, in full transparency, without avoiding any scenario (...) including the scenarios of a nuclear exit.’ One scenario would be a total exit from nuclear by 2050, or even 2040. Reuters noted that shares in EDF, which runs 58 nuclear reactors in France, ‘fell nearly 1% after news that France would examine a full exit from nuclear’.

While the centre-right UMP party mostly supports the extension of nuclear, the opposition Socialist Party has called for a moratorium on new reactors and pledged a national debate on energy transition if elected in 2012. That leaves the UK as one of the few remaining safe havens for nuclear in the western EU, with strong support from the government and only around 52% of the pubic opposing new nuclear. We need to try harder.

Given that France gets 74% of its electricity from nuclear, the French example should help (if they can consider a phase out, anyone one can- the UK only gets 18% and falling), even if cynics may feel that the new French energy review will end up ‘proving’ that France needs nuclear, much as some fear that the German phase out will falter, since not enough investment in renewables will occur, so that nuclear will be ‘needed’ again.

In case a French phase out sound hopeless, do remember that the 74% figure is just the electricity generated at the plants. Some of this is used by the plants themselves and for new fuel fabrication and spent fuel reprocessing (maybe 10%), and some is exported. And then a lot is lost in transmission and distribution (maybe another 10%) on the way to users. Also remember that its only electricity, and that’s typically only about a third of total energy use (even in France which uses a lot for heating). Nuclear generated 410 TWh/y at plants in 2008, with 60 TWh/y being exported, while total primary energy uses was 1,860 TWh/y in 2007. So nuclear met just 22% of France's recent energy demand (if non exported), or 19% with current export arrangements. For comparison, renewables were supplying 12.9 % of primary energy in 2010: www.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/ IMG/pdf/Rep-env-eng.pdf

So, if nuclear went, it would not be such a huge loss as may first be thought, and given that most of the plants were built around the same time, in the 1970 and early 80,’s , there will be a need for some sort of replacement of them all soon. Now is a good time to take a new path.

That certainly is what Germany is trying to do. It is phasing out all its nuclear plants by 2022. Cynics say that will mean it will use more coal. But actually it is still planning to meet its carbon targets, and expects to do that by a combination of much expanded renewables (35% by 2020 and then in stages up to 80% by 2050), energy efficiency savings, and a switch to natural gas as an interim option. However it can cut emission from some residual coal and gas burning via Carbon Capture and Storage. That will be useful since, for some while, there will be a need for some fossil-fuel backup for the variable renewables, even though the fossil backup plants will only have to run at full power occasionally- and can gradually convert to using biomass.

Of course there are limits to how much biomass and biogas they can get, so they will also need other approaches to balancing variable renewables. There are plenty- most obviously pumped hydro storage (they are building more). And also supergrid links across the EU and beyond, exporting excess wind and solar power and importing green energy from those that have excess, when wind/solar is low in Germany. Geothermal is also being pushed ahead.

In addition, there is also another newer idea- generating ‘green gas’ via electrolysis, using electricity from renewables when there is excess- and then storing it for use when there is lull in renewables. That produces hydrogen, which can then be converted into methane gas – using some CO2. Gas is easy and cheap to store and transmit to where it is needed for heat and power generation, and can also be used in vehicles. Biomass could be used as a carbon feed stock: in effect you would be upgrading it by adding hydrogen. And then, if you also have CCS, and assuming the biogas is produced from renewed biomass, the overall process is net carbon negative. The same would be true if you used CO2 from the air as feed stock, but ‘air capture’ of CO2 is currently very expensive.

Green gas sounds a wonderful idea, providing a truly carbon- free, and indeed potentially carbon negative, back up to intermittent wind power and variable solar power . But won’t all these energy conversions be very inefficient? Well it’s not too bad, since you can use some of the waste heat, though there are still some losses. See the paper from the Fraunhofer institute/ Kassel University at www.iset.uni-kassel.de/abt/FB-I/publication/2010-088_Towards-renewables.pdf. But you do get a flexible storage system. Just what you need if you are going for a massive expansion of renewables. And it’s a way to get valuable green gas without using so much biomass - and land. More at www.concito.info/en/udgivelser.php

Some clever green chemistry to see off nukes!

Community energy: small is big

2011-07-01T03:46:00.000-07:00

Local community initiated and run renewable energy projects have been very common in Denmark for many years- about 80% of the wind generation capacity is locally owned. It seems to be one reason why local opposition to wind is much lower than in the UK, where there are very few locally owned projects. As the Danes say ‘ your own pigs don’t smell’.

It’s similar in Germany where many wind projects are locally owned. The local ownership idea has also spread to other technologies. As well as being a leader in wind, Denmark, makes a lot of use of district heating, and it is now developing some solar-fed heat networks, with some of them being run as community cooperatives.

So how far have we got in the UK? The Bay Wind co-op in Cumbria was the first breakthrough, and several more wind co-ops have followed including Westmill near Swindon: www.westmill.coop/westmill_home.asp

Scotland has been the home to several more projects, the most recent being the community wind power scheme at Udny, Aberdeenshire, which started up last year to be followed by Torrance Farm Community Wind Energy project at Harthill. AAT in Wales has been trying to do the same thing. But it’s up uphill struggle, not least to raise finance. The Renewable Obligation is not much use for smaller schemes- it’s designed for large-scale commercial projects. On the continent the various Feed In Tariffs were by contrast much more use, and the UKs small new FiT may now help here. There had been hopes that some community owned solar farms could emerge, but the FiT for large PV projects has now been drastically cut back- by up to 70%.

However, the new energyshare.com scheme, backed by British Gas, is promising. To help community energy projects get off the ground, it has launched a special consumer tariff designed to help fund such projects. Its EnergyShare scheme is being run in partnership with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage. It will pay £10 into a fund for every year that the customer stays on the tariff. Individuals and communities register their projects on the EnergyShare and consumers who are on the tariff will vote for projects they want to support. British Gas has pump-primed the fund with £500,000. It has a target of reaching £15m, which means signing up 290,000 customers. Approved community projects will be able to bid for up to £100,000 each, and it could eventually fund about 150 projects, although many hundreds of groups have registered projects on the site.

More at www.energyshare.com/

This lets you create a group and invite others to join or support you to help with your funding application. Or search for a group in your area to join: www.energyshare.com/groups/.

If you’re looking for inspiration, check out these films about what others have achieved and how you can get started: www.energyshare.com/groups/case-studies/

You’d almost believe that David Cameron’s Big Society ‘self help’ localism idea was real, reading this! That issue was explored in a recent Radio 4 programme which asked, did the ‘Big Society’ have any relationship to Schumachers 1970's ‘Small is Beautiful’ idea?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0122n2g/Archive_on_4_Schumachers_Big_Society/

The conclusion was that there were some overlaps with Cameron’s policies, but also some major conflicts: not least that Schumacher was profoundly anti- nuclear, as a large scale dangerous centralised technology. There is also the fundamental issue that the underlying aim of the Con Dems is to cut state support and ‘Big Government’. So of course they like local ‘self reliance’. That doesn’t make self-help bad, but they see its practical impact as small.

Last years new National Policy Statement commented: ‘The Government has put in place financial rewards as it would like to see decentralised and community energy systems make a much greater contribution to our targets. Whilst the Government believes that these measures have a very important part to play in meeting our energy and climate change objectives, they will not enable us to meet these objectives on their own’.

The implication is that we also need big stuff- like nuclear power. In theory that’s not meant to be state subsidised, but it’s now becoming pretty clear that it will be- one way or another. For example nuclear operators insurance liability is to be limited to the first £1bn in any episode. The rest would be met by taxpayers. Fukushima looks likely to costs Japanese taxpayers many hundreds of billions.

It’s hardly surprising then that, when given a change to vote on the nuclear issue, most taxpayers oppose new nuclear overwhelming- 94% of those voting in the Italian referendum on nuclear voted against it. And interestingly, even in France, a MORI IPSOS opinion poll now shows 67% opposing nuclear power, with there being signs of a break up of the long running support amongst the technocratic elite. But it’s not the same everywhere. The UK figure was only 50% against. And with the UK government keen to support investment by EDF and E.ON, and Germany, Italy, Switzerland, along with Denmark, Austria, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Greece, and even perhaps now France, all being off limits, the UK now looks like the main site for EU nuclear expansion.

Call me Dave

2011-06-02T04:32:00.000-07:00

I had a dream last month in which I had to sell the idea of a sustainable energy future to a bunch of sceptics who were high tech free market enthusiasts, beloved of capitalism. One seemed to be David Cameron. My answer went like this.

Centralised political, economic and technological system are complex and in theory are held together by market forces. Market info flows (and elections) ensure that what consumers (and voters) want drives the system. In reality, many of the agencies and corporations actually run internally via strategic planning - on lines which would make Stalin proud! And they try to make sure that we want what they want - again all very Soviet. Cybernetic information theory says we can do better than this- we can have instant electronic feedback on needs and preferences. Up to a point, the current system has adopted some of this, as long as it doesn’t challenge basic patterns of ownership and control, and the distribution of power and wealth.

Decentralists and ecologists (and, dare I say, green socialists) think we can do better still, by changing the structure as well. By making more components of the system self-managed, as happens in nature, although set within an overall framework of homeostasis- balancing and protecting overall system priorities (survival being a central one, along with reproduction). Philosophers have tried to describe society like this (e.g. Hobbes’ Leviathan - though with a king!) and anarcho-syndicalists and their ilk have tried to create societies run this way. Some worked briefly, but most have fallen foul of what is sometimes called human nature. I’d say it was just human failings. But no doubt reinforced by the pressures of the sea of capitalism outside.

I was much taken by the system that was developed in Yugoslavia after the Second World War. All enterprises with more than 15 employees were run by an elected workers council who dispensed profits to staff and some to the local community, at their own discretion, less 15% that went to the central state for national projects - including defence, transport links and regional grants to cope with the fact that the north was richer than the south. It sounded ideal and survived quite well, independent of the Soviet block, and with strict limits on inward investment from overseas, for many years- until the generally popular charismatic wartime partisan leader, Tito, died.

Then all hell broke out. The ancient religious and ethnic tensions, which you might hope had been washed away by a few decades of democratic self-management and wealth redistribution, resurfaced with a vengeance. The rest is history- a bloody mess. Scholars of history may be able to tell me more about why, but it was certainly saddening. However that’s no reason not to try again. The system we have now is in no way proof against blood letting- indeed it seems to thrive on it.

At this point I woke up. So now it’s over to you. Is this part of your dream too? Can we do better- in reality, not just in dreams? Or do we to have more business as usual, possibly just adjusted to be a bit more green?

The alterative technical agenda seem relatively clear - although there is a lot of detail to thrash out. But the political agenda is much less clear. Who will push for the right way ahead? On what basis of analysis? Representing which constituencies? In terms of approach, I was much taken by this quote from Fredrich Engels,: "The analysis of nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms — these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of nature that have been made during the last four hundred years. But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constants, not as essentially variables, in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the preceding centuries."

An early green holistic thinker! We need more like that.

I wrote the above before Adam Curtis’ TV blitz "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" emerged. He seems to be another. We need to go beyond machine thinking and re-engage with challenging power- and that means looking beyond the current structures.

Germany shows the way

2011-05-07T09:40:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year things looked a little bleak in Germany. Two German nuclear plants were due to come back on-line thanks to a controversial new law extending Germany’s nuclear phase out deadline. Brunsbüttel had shut down in 2007 after a grid-trip, and Krümmel after a transformer fault. Under the previous national phase out schedule there was little incentive to bring them back online (only to operate for a few years) but the new law meant Brunsbüttel could operate until 2018 Krümmel until 2030.

However, in March, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the German government shut down all of Germany's oldest nuclear plants. That was perhaps surprising until you remember that an election was due. And the greens were looking very strong; there were massive demonstrations across the country after Fukushima with 250,000 people campaigning for a complete and rapid phase out.

In the event, the government still did badly in the election, loosing in key areas (the greens got 15% of the vote), and in April, Secretary of State for the Environment and Nuclear Safety, Jürgen Becker, told Reuters: “A decision has been taken to shut down eight plants before the end of this year and they definitely won’t be reactivated. And the remaining nine will be shut down by the end of the decade.”

This policy was then backed by the German Association of Energy and Water Industries, BDEW, which said that nuclear should be phased out by 2020 or at the latest by 2023. It called on the government to set everything in motion to speed up the transition toward a stable, ecologically responsible and affordable energy mix without nuclear energy. ‘The catastrophe at the Fukushima reactors marks a new era and the BDEW therefore calls for a swift and complete exit from using nuclear power.’

The association represents about 1,800 utilities, among them the operators of the country’s 17 nuclear reactors, which, when all were running, generated 26% of Gemany’s electricity. The two biggest operators, E.ON AG and RWE AG, opposed to the decision, but were outvoted.

Can they do it? German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen told der Spiegel that he was confident that it could be done given the rapid growth of renewables and the potential for energy saving, but ‘everyone will have to invest in the energy turnaround. The expansion of renewable energy, the power lines it requires and the storage facilities will cost money. That has to be clear. But after the investments are made, the returns will follow - I don't doubt that.’

He went on ‘ First we'll have to focus on retrofitting buildings. The €460 million ($653 million) currently budgeted for that program won't be enough. But every euro in government subsidies will trigger seven or eight euros in private investment, which also translates into tax revenues. Everyone can benefit in the long term, from citizens to the economy to the environment.’

In terms of renewables, there would be no need to cover Germany with wind farms as some critics had suggested ‘ We achieve the biggest capacities by replacing smaller wind turbines on land with more powerful ones and by generating wind energy in the North and Baltic Seas’.

He concluded ‘The events in Fukushima marked a turning point for all of us. Now we jointly support phasing out nuclear energy as quickly as possible and phasing in renewable energies’.

Germany already gets 17% of its power from renewables, and the potential for expansion is certainly there long term. In addition to backing a nuclear phase out, last years ‘Energiekonzept’ review, produced by the Federal Environment Ministry, BMU, looked to renewables supplying 35% of electricity by 2020, 50% by 2030, 65% by 2040, 80% by 2050. It also planned major increases in grid integration with the rest of the EU. It saw offshore wind as a major growth area- it wanted 25 GW in place by 2030. At present it has around 27GW in place but mostly on land, plus around 16GW of solar PV. In addition to a large hydro contribution, including pumped stage facilities, major new geothermal and biomass projects are on the way, with biogas seen as key new option, replacing imported Natural Gas. The review also called for primary energy consumption to be halved by 2050, and overall, the review aimed for a 40% by 2020 CO2 reduction target.

With nuclear to be removed by around 2020, the renewables expansion programme and energy saving initiatives will have to be accelerated. A draft of a new plan, reported on Dow Jones Newswires, said “After the catastrophe in Japan, we will accelerate the fundamental conversion of our energy supply already laid out in the [2010] energy concept" i.e the 'Energiekonzept' review. Among measures to boost renewable energy, the draft plan envisions a €5 billion programme to increase offshore wind power, financed by the Germany's KfW state development bank. The plan says legislation on renewable energy will be updated this year, while existing wind parks should be "repowered" by replacing old turbines with more efficient models. The draft plan also foresees the construction of new gas-fired power plants to balance out fluctuations in energy output from renewables. These should be built by companies currently providing less than 5% of Germany's electricity-generating capacity, the plan stipulates. That would exclude the country's major energy producers. The draft plan also demands an "offensive" to designate new areas for wind parks and plan the construction of "electricity highways" to bring renewable power from windy northern Germany to industrial areas in the south.

The Wall Street Journal said the report ‘marks a significant shift as Germany ceases to debate whether to phase out its reactors and focuses more on how quickly and at what cost’.

It won’t be easy. But, with the greens now playing an increasing role, the political will seems to be there to try.

There could still be some political problems though. The lead is being taken by Merkel’s CDU, still the dominant party. Might that be just temporary opportunism? Could we have the sort of ugly coalition between a conservative party and an allegedly progressive party that we have in the UK, with the later being sidelined? Fortunately the German Greens seem quite robust, whereas the German Liberals have almost been wiped out and Merkel does really seem to have changed position on nuclear: at the April Summit on the issue she said ‘I think we all want to move away from nuclear energy as quickly as possible and switch to renewables’. She might of course backslide after Fukushima is forgotten. But that won’t be easy – especially since support for nuclear, already very low in Germany, has now fallen from 10% to 5%, while support for renewables, already very high, continues to rise, with 86% now backing solar (as against 83% in January), and 80% wind energy (Jan: 72%).

A nuclear free Germany? Yes please!

*And also now, a nuclear free Italy: with opposition mounting, the government backtracked on its earlier attempt to push for a nuclear renaissance in Italy.

Nuclear Power- game over?

2011-04-06T04:00:00.000-07:00

After Fukushima, the case against nuclear power, already strong, looks a lot stronger. But some still say – what’s the alternative. There are now half a dozen detailed energy scenarios confirming that renewable energy could supply up to 100% of UK, EU and even global power needs by 2050, or maybe earlier, at reasonable costs. For the latest one, see

http://www.wwf.org.uk/research_centre/research_centre_results.cfm?uNewsID=456

Some however say, couldn’t we have both nuclear and renewables? Given the huge renewable potential, we don’t really need both, and in any case, nuclear power and renewables are, in many ways, incompatible: essentially inflexible, nuclear can’t back-up variable renewables without incurring economic and safety penalties. And if we had a large, fixed, nuclear capacity, then the output from wind farms, and from other variable renewables, will have to be curtailed and wasted regularly- e.g. when there is too much wind, or low overall energy demand over and above that supplied by nuclear. That alone suggests that it’s not something we should back. But there are also a host of other problems. Here is a small sample.

Undermining jobs

Some trade unions are backing nuclear in the expectation of new jobs. In 2008 John Hutton, the then Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform told the Unite union conference that a new nuclear programme could create up to 100,000 new skilled jobs. He did not mention that this was for a 32GW programme - twice what is now being discussed. Each twin reactor nuclear station was expected to create 9,000 construction and manufacturing jobs and 1,000 jobs to run the station.

NuClear News 26 noted that a scenario presented by the skills agency - Cogent - suggests that, if all goes according to plan, a 16GW programme with six twin unit stations (6 EPR reactors and 6 AP1000 reactors) would start to create jobs in 2012, but would be expected to employ a peak of only 14,000 workers around 2021 and then there will be around 5,000 permanent jobs once construction is completed around 2027 – a bit different from the 100,000 jobs originally promised.

NuClear News suggested that nuclear power was very poor at creating jobs – only around 75 jobs per Terawatt hour (TWh) at the most. It added that, all of the areas where reactors might be built as part of the 16GW programme could be promoting themselves as suitable for the offshore wind industry to expand creating up to 2,400 jobs per TWh. But if financial resources get diverted to nuclear, we will see less of these –and less jobs overall.

Dumbing us down

Birds living near the site of the Chernobyl nuclear accident have, on average, 5% smaller brains, according to international research led by a University of South Carolina scientist. 25 years after the Chernobyl disaster, low-dose radiation has proved to have significant effects on normal brain development, with smaller brain sizes believed to be linked to reduced cognitive ability.

Dr. Timothy Mousseau, a USC biology science professor said ‘These findings point to broad-scale neurological effects of chronic exposure to low-dose radiation. The fact that we see this pattern for a large portion of the bird community suggests a general phenomenon that may have significant long-term repercussions.’

Mousseau said these types of defects have been previously reported in humans and other organisms, but those were at higher contamination levels. The small brains were particularly evident in the youngest birds: ‘This suggests that many of the birds with smaller brains are not surviving to the next year, perhaps related to decreased cognitive abilities.’ i.e. they are not as capable at dealing with their environment as evidenced by their lower rates of survival.

More info: http://cricket.biol.sc.edu/chernobyl

and http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0016862

Could this subtle change apply to humans as well? And outside the Chernobyl zone? Some low-level emissions, although carefully monitored, are allowed at nuclear sites, and of course there are also occasional accidental excess releases and spills, as at Fukushima. It’s claimed by critics of current safety levels, that this contamination leads to exposures that are very different in kind and impact from that due to normal background radiation e.g. the ingestion of internal emitters, which, although weak, continue to irradiate organs/tissue from inside.

Spreading it around

The UK government has published a consultation about its plans to deal with 112 tonnes of plutonium (including 24 tonnes derived from fuel from other countries) currently stored at Sellafield and Dounreay, generated mostly from UK fuel reprocessing. Its preferred solution is to incorporate the material into Mixed Oxide (MOX) fuel, rather than to continue to store it, or encapsulate it into storage containers for a final waste repository, along with other nuclear wastes, at a site as yet unknown. The MOX would be sold to reactor users around the world, making it the cheapest ‘disposal’ option.

The existing MOX plant at Sellafield was castigated in diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks as a ‘white elephant’. They went on : ‘The Mox Plant is considered one of HMG’s most embarrassing failures in British industrial history, costing taxpayers £90 m p.a. The plant’s complex fuel recycling procedure, coupled with management and equipment problems, have plagued it for years.’ The MOX plant has only produced 15 tonnes in its 9 years of operation, compared with an original target of 560 tonnes over an expected 10 year operational life. Cue for a repeat!

MOX can be, and is, used in some plants around the world, including at Fukushima, but at present (though that may change) there are no plans for it to be used in existing UK plants or the proposed 8 new UK plants (if it was, it would need a subsidy). So any MOX we produced would be for export. Its shipment by sea presents a wonderful target for terrorists keen to get Pu for crude bombs.

But DECC sees it differently:

www.decc.gov.uk/en/ content/cms/news/pn11_011/pn11_011.aspx

Dumping it somewhere

At the time of the quake/ tsunami in Japan, there were 3,400 tons of spent fuel in seven storage pools at Fukushima, some of it still very active, plus 877 tons of active fuel in the cores of the reactors. That totals 4,277 tons of nuclear fuel at Fukushima- the storage pool above reactor 4 alone contained 135 tons of spent fuel. For comparison, the Chernobyl reactors had about 180 tons when the accident occurred in 1986 and about 6% of that was released into atmosphere. We don’t know yet what percentage was released in the air and sea at Fukushima- it’s still ongoing

Since we are to give up on reprocessing, the UKs plan for nuclear waste, such as it is, assumes that used nuclear fuel from the proposed new plants will stay in similar spent fuel stores at the 8 reactor sites for perhaps 60, maybe 100 years, while waiting for a high level waste repository to be built- at a site as yet to be determined. It’s said that this will be available by 2040. However that site has been earmarked for the existing ‘legacy’ waste, and won’t be available for spent fuel from the proposed new plants until 2130- long after the new plants have been closed down, with ‘interim storage’ continuing somewhere for 100 years or so. But it could be more, for example if a suitable site, and community willing to accept a long-term waste, can’t be found.

Could we dump it elsewhere? The European Commission recently produced a Nuclear Waste Directive, with geological disposal being seen as the way ahead. Two or more Member States can agree to share a final repository in one of them, but the EU is not allowed to export nuclear waste to countries outside the EU for final disposal. It seems that there had been offers from Russia to take it.

However it seems unlikely that anyone in the EU will want our waste- France is not much further ahead with selecting a site for final repository than we are. Sweden and Finland are a bit further ahead, but would they really take it? Why should they?

So we’re probably stuck with it- and for some time. In fact, for a very long time. Long after the worlds limited uranium (and thorium) resources are depleted, and any benefits there might be from nuclear power have been forgotten.

Fighting FiT

2011-03-01T05:31:00.000-08:00

Solar photovoltaics (PV) face some problems- with tariff levels being cut back and/or capacity caps imposed for to Feed In Tariffs (FiTs) in Spain, Germany, France and planned in the UK.

The basic problem is that the FiTs had stimulated to market strongly, which was what they were meant to do, so that demand for PV had boomed. But under the FiT system, that led to what some saw as excessive costs being loaded up on consumers, who pay for it via their bills. Spain had already imposed a cap and then Tariff cuts which in effect crashed the Spanish solar boom.

The French government talked about a ‘speculative bubble’ and imposed a three-month halt to new PV installations over 3 kW, while legislators worked on new tariffs for larger PV installations, which were expected to include rules providing caps on development and lowering feed-in tariffs for solar PV projects. The government also played the China card. ‘Most panels installed in France were made in China with a highly questionable carbon footprint,’ Environment Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet said, whereas the policy must “create jobs in France, not subsidise Chinese industry.’ Even so if current developments are completed, France could still reach its 2020 target of 5.4 GW of solar capacity by the end of 2011.

Meanwhile, after much bitter wrangling, the German solar industry agreed solar PV tariff reductions with the federal Government. PV had boomed with over 14GW being installed. In mid- 2010 industry lobby organization VIK, had claimed that the continued high growth of the German PV-market could result in most ratepayers having to pay an extra 3.5 eurocents/kWh in 2011 compared with the present 2.047 eurocents/kWh, and more later.

Figures like this were disputed, but the German solar industry association (BSW-Solar) eventually agreed to a compromise under which feed-in-tariffs will be reduced according to the amount of solar electricity installed annually, with a sliding scale of reductions based on capacity predictions. For example, if the calculated solar PV market capacity for 2011 year was over 3.5 GW, tariffs would be reduced by 3%; if the projected capacity was 7.5 GW, tariffs would be reduced by 15%. As previously planned, funding will also be cut by a further 9% at the turn of the year 2012. Renewable Energy Focus commented ‘This new step is seen as an earlier than planned reduction, following warnings against the artificial stimulation of the solar market.’

There will be a review of the EEG (the German Renewable Energy Sources Act) in 2012, which will presumably play a decisive role in the future of PV in Germany.

The savage cuts in the Feed In Tariff for PV in Spain were imposed by Royal Decree, and were said to be retroactive i.e retrospective for existing projects, although the government later denied this. Btu there were major protests by people whose jobs were threatened, with protestors from all over Spain wielding PV panels. One said ‘the Government is bowing to the pressures of major energy companies and is misleading citizens into believing that the tariff deficit is a problem created by renewables’.

The Spanish Association of Renewable Energy Producers said ‘it appears Parliament has given itself over to the electric utilities to do away with the solar PV sector in this country’. Congress approved the Decree by 175 to 12, but with many abstentions. There are likely to be a lot of legal disputes as thousands of PV array owners are hit.

The UK is to review its small ‘Clean Energy Cashback’ Feed In Tariff, with the budget saying support for PV was to be cut back in 2013, leading to a £40m saving in 2014/15 (10%), ‘unless higher than expected deployment requires an early review’. And if need be, access to the FiT might be limited for large solar farms on greenfield sites before the review. That review was originally planned for 2012. but has now been brought forward, since DECC said, there is ‘growing evidence that large scale solar farms could soak up money intended to help homes, communities and small businesses generate their own electricity’. So far around 40 MW of PV has been installed under the scheme out of about 77MW in all- tiny by comparison with Germany and Spain, but much more than before. However the new ‘fast track’ review of PV projects larger than 50kW looks like slowing things to a crawl.

DECC’s concern about solar farms is not shared by all. For example, Adrian Lea, manager of planning and regeneration at Cornwall council, insisted solar farms were a positive development: ‘It begs the question of what the purpose of a feed-in tariff is for. To me, the purpose [of the tariff] is to develop a solar PV industry, to bring forward renewable energy infrastructure within the UK, and to meet renewable energy targets. In terms of solar panels, I don't think you're going to do that on domestic roofs because the rate of installation, while highly commendable, is pants, quite frankly.’ But, if nothing else, it’s a good excuse for a review -and for cuts.

So what next? Given the global recession, extra costs to consumers were obviously politically difficult, even if in fact they were much smaller than other energy price hikes. But it does mean that the growth of PV, and the reduction in price that the FiT system would then yield, will be slowed. It’s a failure or nerve, at the very least. The FiTs are designed to gradually reduce prices, as they help build markets. But you have to stay the course.

The UK government is trying to limit the problem of short-term consumer costs in its proposed new Electricity Market Reforms by adopting a variant of the FiT which has a strong market element and possibly also contract auction/tenders to keep prices down. That’s not really a FiT at all- it’s more like the old Non Fossil Fuel Obligation, which saw many successful tenders but few actual projects, since companies often bid at unrealistically low prices. Hence the campaign for a real FiT – with fixed, although annually degressed, tariffs. And without nuclear included. The worry is that with nuclear included, there will be less for renewables. See: www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/27/wrong-policy-on-renewable-energy and http://realfeed-intariffs.blogspot.com

The message is that if we want a proper FiT, we will have to fight for it- and also to protect the existing one.

A new ideology?

2011-02-01T05:19:00.000-08:00

‘Renewable energy alone cannot decouple consumption from climate change; just because energy sources are called ‘renewable’ does not mean there is an infinite amount available that can be accessed sustainably. Demand for energy is a political issue. Our energy priority should be to satisfy human survival needs, not to keep a worldwide division of labour, which is based on profit, in place.’ Kolya Abramsky, editor of a 'Sparking a World- wide Energy Revolution' (AK Press) www.akpress.org

Well, that’s one powerful viewpoint, though hardly a new one -it’s basically the traditional Marxist analysis updated . Abramsky looks to grass roots action and collective and co-operative organisations as the way ahead, and that certainly would be welcome- there will be many battles ahead if we want to get a sustainable energy system adopted and done properly.

However, a little oddly, he also says that IRENA, the new Internationa renewable energy agency based in Abu Dhabi, could be a possible source of support for desperately needed technology transfer to help people in undeveloped countries create viable sustainable communities. We’ll maybe. But evidently it’s hard to shake off reliance on central agencies! Maybe we are all secret Stalinists really

What else is on offer in terms of new ideological frameworks- following up on my previous Blog ? While once it was Marx, Trotsky and Gramsci, social science/politics undergrads these days seem to be brought up on Harvard Professor John Rawls’ classic ‘Theory of Justice’, which cleverly does away with the need for ideology altogether by describing a rational, logical moral and ethical framework for action and policy making. There is much stress on ‘fairness’ and little recognition of the massive imbalances in power and wealth that shape the word as it is, and make it hard to move toward any reasonable degree of equity, fairness or justice. No harm in trying of course, as liberals through the ages have argued- even if currently the main target of the modern student generation seem to be the Liberals, who have it seems failed to be fair and just! By dumping the Lib Dem promises on grants- but also on nuclear power.

The political right meanwhile has an almost clear field of play- so much so that they can even afford to toy with neo-socialist ideas about market intervention and liberal ideas about wider ownership and community. Much of this may be token, when the reality is cut backs, job losses and pain for most, continued affluence for a minority, but it’s a Great Society illusion that seems to be what many people want to sign up to. Certainly in the energy field it’s leading to more (verbal) support for Feed-In Tarrifs and the like, and maybe some actual changes, as long as they don’t interfere too much with the mainstream economics of energy or plans for nuclear expansion.

Which leaves us, if we want really significant change, with the greens. It’s fairly easy to write a green manifesto- much as once with the Liberals, you can add in everything that sounds good, with little fear of having to live with it as an actual policy in power. It’s very value driven stuff- not just based on equality, fraternity, justice, but also on deep-green eco-centric views, along with radical views about lifestyle, community and culture. With a dash of new age spiritual thinking added in. That may make it hard for reds and greens to get on. But otherwise, that combination still seems to be the best bet for the future. We need decentralism to balance Stalinist tendencies, and grass roots workerism to balance overly fey abstraction. A proper coalition?

The end of ideology

2011-01-01T04:55:00.000-08:00

Time was when energy policy, and much else, was driven by political beliefs. But we have apparently moved into a period when political ideology is dead- replaced by a pragmatic centre left miss-mash. That apparently means that old entrenched ideas can be dumped and fresh new ones embraced- leading to a brave new world, ostensibly driven by ‘evidence’ and rationality. Occasionally there is some mention of ‘values’ as a guide to policy, but in the main the touchstone of reality is a general appeal to ‘modernisation’, with technology as the driver.

So in the energy field, under the new political settlement, high tech nuclear is celebrated- and any opposition seen as antiquated and reactionary, a throwback to when ideology ruled. Renewables too are generally welcomed now as ‘modern’, although often with less conviction. When problems emerge, there tends to a default process- back to nuclear. At best nuclear is offered as a stop-gap while problems with renewables are sorted. But also sometimes as the best long term option- maybe led by fusion.

Not everyone agrees with this new position. Some prefer a more solid foundation for policies than pragmatism and also fear that the rationality being used to buttress modernism is faulty. Indeed it is sometimes even argued that rational ‘technical’ analysis has its limits- we also need a moral and ethical input.

In the past, it is true, there have been strong rational arguments against nuclear power, based on objective technical and economic analysis. That still exists, and if anything, is stronger than ever- costs rise, safety and security issue proliferate, alternatives look increasingly better. But some of this is relative- e.g. it may be reasonable to pay more if it ensures energy reliability. However the case against nuclear is wider than that and may not be so easily subject to rationalist analysis - it’s about intangible and possibly absolute things like whether it is right to burden many future generations with active wastes to deal with.

In the past we expected politicians to reflect issues like this in the policies they chose. So, for all its faults, the old Labour party opposed nuclear not just on technical or economic grounds, but because it was not seen as right and didn’t fit with their values- which included concern for development- and employment -in other energy sectors. That was in essence an ideological viewpoint. You can argue that it was partly based on a political commitment to certain groups of workers - notable coal miners. And you may see that as partisan. But then that’s how politics works. If you don’t like one set of views you lobby for change or if that doesn’t work, try to elect another set of politicians with different views.

What we seem to have now is a set (maybe even three sets) with no views, just a vacuous commitment to an ill-defined belief in progress. Of course some cynics will say that much of this is actually just a smokescreen for reactionary policies- much as ever, ensuring that, for example, the rich get richer and the poor stay powerless. That may well be true. But it just adds strength for the case for return to more honestly ideologically based politics.

Nuclear power is only one issue, but it symbolises many others, as it did throughout the last half of the last century. Indeed it was striking how the often disparate movements and groups during that period- new leftists, greens, hippies, pacifists, feminists and more- shared a similar view: nuclear was at or near the centre of what they opposed, a grey, soulless, centralised, authoritarian, patriarchal, consumerist culture. That view has not gone away. 100,000 Germans took the streets last year (and twice!) in opposition to nuclear- even though its current political champion there is a woman, and we are now all happy (digital) consumers!

For some of us who have been through this before, it’s tiresome having to resist nuclear once again. It’s much more positive to fight for something- like renewables. But it seems it has to be done- pragmatically, nuclear and renewables may be able to co-exist when both relatively small. But that’s not the way things would go, if the nuclear lobby gets its way. Nuclear and renewables are technically incompatible on a large scale, and long term the expansion of nuclear seem to have major resource problems, while meanwhile undermining the rapid development of renewables. So there are rationalist arguments against, which might also be seen as underpinning moral and ethical arguments- e.g. it’s wrong to undermine the development of renewables, the only long-term energy source we have. But we are unlikely to get either argument heard without a new ideology to provide the framework.

Meanwhile though we are stuck with what we have. In its approach to energy, the UK coalition does seem to be trying to soften the ‘market dominance’ approach that has be adopted since Thatcher, and even move more towards strategic planning. It’s also tinkering with subsidies- though mainly to find a way to support nuclear. But companies (and shareholders) won’t accept inroads into profits, and the government won’t tap rich taxpayers and has to avoid loading up consumers with extra costs. So the room for manouevre is limited. All it can do is say ‘we are all in it together’, and hope no one notices that we aren’t.

Scotland gets braver

2010-12-01T13:28:00.000-08:00

While maintaining the SNP’s strong opposition to nuclear power, Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond has announced that Scotland's renewable electricity target for 2020 is being raised from 50% to 80% of electricity consumption, putting Scotland well in the lead in the EU.

Aided by a rapid expansion in wind power, it is already on course to exceed its interim target of 31% in 2011. And, according to the Scottish Government, much higher levels of renewables could be deployed by 2020 with little change to Scotlands current policy, planning or regulation framework. A separate study commissioned by industry body Scottish Renewables, reported similar conclusions- 123% was possible! And Scottish Green Party co-leader Patrick Harvie even called for setting a 100% renewable target, ‘perhaps even before 2020’!

Scotland already has 7GW of renewables installed, under construction or consented. And Salmond claimed that, given the scale of lease agreements now in place to develop offshore wind, wave and tidal projects over the next decade, ‘it is clear that we can well exceed the existing 50% target by 2020.’ He may be right, but 80% by 2020 is stunningly ambitious. Even CAT only looked to 2030 in their ‘Zero Carbon Britain’, and that was pushing it very hard. While visionary scenarios can inspire/ motivate people to try harder, they have to be at least in principle credible. But unless there is a crash, supercharged deployment/infrastructure development programme, beyond anything so far discussed, 2030 might be a bit more realistic.

The pay-off of course is not just reduced emissions, it’s also jobs. Scotland’s offshore wind industry could create 28,000 jobs by 2020, contributing £7.1 bn to the economy, according to a report commissioned by Scottish Renewables and Scottish Enterprise. Billed as the first comprehensive study of the potential impact of offshore wind on the Scottish economy, it suggests this new industry could create as many as 48,000 jobs - 28,000 directly, supported by a further 20,000 through related industries. But that assumes proper support by government- without that, it warns, not much will happen.

Scotland does seem to be trying though, with its own versions of support schemes that are much more ambitious than those so far introduced by the Whitehall government e.g. under the Renewalbes Obligation Scotland they offer 5ROCs/MWh for wave energy projects and 3ROCs/Mwh for tidal projects compared to the 2ROCs/MWh offered by the UK wide RO schemes. And it also has a direct grant support system for marine renewables, which has provided £13m for wave and tidal projects so far. In addition there’s a £10m ‘Saltire prize’ for marine renewables. There’s 1.6GW of wave and tidal now planed in the Pentland Firth area and companies from around the world are queuing up to demonstrate their projects at the European Marine Energy Centre on the Orkneys. Moreover, the Scottish government has now allocated £70m for port infrastructure upgrades to help develop its offshore wind industry, in effect dwarfing the £60m UK-wide allocation.

To push things on further , the Scottish Government has also outlined its plans for achieving ambitious targets for reducing emissions by 42% by 2020, after a draft order to set annual emissions targets for 2010-22 was laid in Parliament. The targets proposed in the draft order take account of advice from the Committee on Climate Change and the deliberations of a cross party working group over the summer. The annual targets for 2011- 2022 start at 0.5% for 2011 and end with 3% for 2022, peaking at 9.9% in 2013 - going further than those recommended by the Committee. Scottish climate change minister, Stewart Stevenson, said: ‘Scotland has the most ambitious climate change legislation anywhere in the world and these annual targets set a clear framework for achieving our 2020 target’.

It certainly bold stuff. The SNP clearly is more adventuristic than any Westminster outfit so far, with arguably both good and bad implications. It could overreach itself and unravel. But it seems much more interventionist- and less concerned about markets. Though some see it as just bolshy and rebellious. And that would never do!

The cuts- energy escapes

2010-11-01T07:39:00.000-07:00

The governments spending review brought fears of big cuts- and even of the demise of DECC! But in the end DECC survived and the energy sector generally got off very lightly.

Predictably the 40% of DECCs budget that goes to nuclear clean up work was left untouched, and DECC was just asked to reduce resource spending related to the remainder of its activities by 18% in real terms over the next for years, with capital spending actually being allowed to grow by 41% in real terms. Specific commitments included:

• Up to £1 billion of investment to create one of the world’s first commercial-scale carbon capture and storage demonstration plants- ‘strengthening the UK’s position as a world leader in cleaner fossil fuel technology’. That’s less than hoped and there is no mention of the levy arrangment that Labour managed to get on the statute books, for but is does indicated the fact that CCS is near the top of the political agenda

• £860m funding for the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) to be introduced in 2011-12. ‘This will drive a more-than-tenfold increase of renewable heat over the coming decade, shifting renewable heat from a fringe industry firmly into the mainstream. The Government will not be taking forward the previous administration’s plans of funding this scheme through an overly complex Renewable Heat levy’. But there will be a two month delayed start, until June 2010. There had been much concern that the RHI would be shelved – and its still not clear how it will work- who pays and how?

• £200m for low-carbon technologies including offshore wind and manufacturing infrastructure at port sites- so the £60m promised by Labour for ports will go ahead.

The Department will also refocus some if its spending:

• Revenue raised (~£1bn pa) from the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency Scheme will be used to support the public finances, rather than recycled to participants. Clever- a stealth tax on companies in effect!

• Feed-In Tariffs will be refocused on the most cost-effective technologies saving £40m in 2014-15. ‘The changes will be implemented at the first scheduled review of tariffs unless higher than expected deployment requires an early review’ (presumably of high cost PV solar).

In parallel the Dept of Business Innovation and Skills will, ‘lead the creation of a UK-wide Green Investment Bank that will be capitalised initially with a £1bn spending allocation with additional significant proceeds from the sale of Government-owned assets, to catalyse additional investment in green infrastructure’. That’s less that the £3-4bn thought to be needed and the £2bn initially proposed, but it’s a start.

So it’s not all bad news...

The ports money is definitely welcome and should help draw new investment from other sources e.g: Tag Energy Solutions has secured £20m to build an offshore wind turbine manufacturing plant at Haverton Hill, Billingham. It said 400 jobs would eventually be created once the factory had been completed. The plant will specialise in building foundations for offshore wind farms. Steel producer Corus earlier announced a similar plan. It said it is to build a £31.5m offshore foundation plant in Redcar, Teeside, which will produce monopiles for the foundations of offshore wind turbines. The company believes the facility will create around 220 jobs. In July, plans were also unveiled to build a £400m UK offshore development centre near Immingham. Developer Able UK said the site could eventually create 27,000 jobs and help build the numerous North Sea projects lined up for development.

And after the Spending Review announcement , Siemens and General Electric confirmed their plans to develop UK offshore wind turbine manufacturing facilities last year that it would make £60m available for improving UK port infrastructure. Siemens plan investments of £80 million wind turbine production facility, while General Electric (GE) aim to invest £100 million to develop offshore wind turbine manufacturing base in the UK, in a move is expected to create 1,900 jobs in the UK by 2020, both in terms of direct employment and through associated manufacturers of towers, blades, nacelles and other offshore wind technology. And Spanish wind energy firm Gamesa has announced plans to make the UK the centre of its worldwide offshore wind business and invest £133.7 million by 2014.

Losers

There were however some losers. The Government is to abolish or downgrade many quangos (non-departmental public bodies) including the Sustainable Development Commission, and the long established Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, along (less worryingly) with the Infrastructure Planning Commission. The full list of 200 or so includes British Nuclear Fuels, NESTA, the Design Council and crucially the Renewables Advisory Board, the Renewable Fuels Agency, and even the Regional Development Agencies- who have been strong in backing renewables locally. Still evidently under review (although not necessarily for abolition, just reorganisation) are the Environment Agency, the Carbon Trust, the Energy Saving Trust, and, perish the thought, the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

Some of this was just sabre (or rather axe) rattling, and some of the agencies were pretty defunct shells- e.g. most of the UKEAs work has been privatised, as has BNFLs. But some, like the SDC, RECP, RAB, and the (so far untouched) EST and Carbon Trust, might be seen as crucial to the proper development of a sustainable future- although some rationalisation could be merited.

And finally, the government ruled out public funding for the controversial Severn tidal barrage, which it says could cost £34bn. It also saw smaller barrages or lagoons as not viable.

The DECC/SWRD/WAG ‘Severn Tidal Power Feasibility Study: Conclusions and Summary Report’ does seem to finish off tidal range projects in the UK, at least for the moment. Although it did say that the results for other locations around the UK might be different, it is hard to see how they could do better than the Severn - the best site by far in terms of tidal range. Given that most environmental groups strongly opposed large barrages, the government decision not to provide support did not lead to complains from them about ‘ignoring green options’

The report says ‘the Cardiff-Weston barrage is the largest scheme considered by the study to be potentially feasible and has the lowest cost of energy of any of the schemes studied. As such it offers the best value for money, despite its high capital cost which the study estimated to be £34.3 billion including correction for optimism bias. However this option would also have the greatest impact on habitats and bird populations and the estuary ports.’

It went on ‘a lagoon across Bridgwater Bay (£17.7bn estimated capital cost) is also considered potentially feasible, as is the smaller Shoots barrage (£7bn). The Bridgwater Bay lagoon could produce a substantial energy yield and has lower environmental impacts than barrage options. It also offers the larger net gains in terms of employment’. By contrast ‘the Beachley Barrage and Welsh Grounds Lagoon are no longer considered to be feasible. The estimated costs of these options have risen substantially on investigation over the course of the study’ It added ‘combinations of smaller schemes do not offer cost or energy yield advantages over a single larger scheme between Cardiff and Weston’.

It noted that, in addition, the study funded further work on 3 proposals using innovative and immature technologies (the Severn Embryonic Technologies study). It said ‘Of these, a tidal bar and a spectral marine energy converter showed promise for future deployment within the Severn estuary - with potentially lower costs and environmental impacts than either lagoons or barrages. However these proposals are a long way from technical maturity and have much higher risks than the more conventional schemes the study has considered. Much more work would be required to develop them to the point where they could be properly assessed.’

So tidal range seems to been written out of the story for some while. Which leaves tidal current turbines - a much less invasive and rapidly developing approach. But it will interesting to see if the traditionalist large engineering companies and institutions who backed the large barrage can regroup: some are trying: see www.corlanhafren.co.uk.

Energy politics in Africa

2010-10-06T14:46:00.000-07:00

Most people in Africa are not on the power grid and most new investment in energy systems seems unlikely to change that much. Instead its just part of the expansion of global capitalism. That’s the main thesis of a radical new book ‘Electric capitalism: recolonization in Africa on the power grid’ David McDonald et al, www.hsrcpress.ac.za/

It provides plenty of examples to buttress its case- the most familiar perhaps being the giant 100GW hydro project planned for the Congo river and South Africa’s (now thankfully abandoned) nuclear ambitions- the planned expansion of nuclear capacity and the development of the Pebble Bed Modular reactor have been shelved .

Major grid-linked projects like this may help boost the economy and some the wealth created may trickle down, but it’s argued that decentral community scaled projects are often much more relevant. However, it’s claimed that at present efforts at deploying solar and other renewables are marginal at best- just small tokens.

The book provides not only detailed political analysis and case studies but also a laypersons guide to the energy options- large and small. It’s mainly focused on Southern Africa, which is where most of the industrialisation is going on, and where most research on alternative options has been done: for example see the excellent 2006 Earthlife Africa study by Banks and Shaffler which, the book says, claims that South. Africa could get up to 70% of its electricity from renewables by 2050, even assuming continuing growth in demand for energy:

www.earthlife.org.za/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/potential-of-re-in-sa-feb06.pdf

That included large hydro, which this book doesn’t support. A more recent Earthlife analysis suggested that over 50% from renewables was feasible (400TWh p.a by 2050), with for example the potential for on land wind being put at 50GW, the wave potential at 10GW, and the solar potential being enough in theory to supply the needs of the whole country. See:

www.earthlife.org.za/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/rebriefingpaperfinal5aug08.pdf

But this S. African focus means that the book doesn’t look at large scale Concentrating Solar Power and supergrid export issues in North Africa. That too could be seen as a neo-colonial exercise by EU companies, but it doesn’t have to be that way, although the large scale capital involved with CSP/supergrids and the role of the export markets for some of the power, may make it hard to control.

Even so, it’s clear that the conventional energy options are far less relevant than renewables for Africa- but progress will take money, and political commitment, not least to avoid exploitation.

Progress on the ground

There are some signs of progress, although so far the emphasis has mainly been on technology and the economic potential of renewables. ‘The solar radiation Africa receives could make this continent the Saudi-Arabia of the future’. That was a summary of the conclusions from the recent ‘Power Kick for Africa’ strategy workshop on renewable energy policies organised by the World Future Council Foundation, in cooperation with the Energy Commission of Ghana. It brought together representatives from utilities, regulators, industry and civil society from ten African countries who are determined to expand their cooperation under the umbrella of the African Renewable Energy Alliance (AREA).

http://area-network.ning.com/?xg_source=msg_mes_network

In addition, the Africa-EU Energy Partnership (AEEP) and the EU, together with the African Union , recently launched a 10 year Renewable Energy Cooperation Programme (RECP), and announced a planned contribution of €5 million to start the programme. It includes proposal for:

* Building 10,000 MW of new hydropower facilities;

* Building at least 5,000 MW of wind power;

* Building 500 MW of solar energy

*Tripling the capacity of other renewables

* Raising energy efficiency in Africa in all sectors.

Some of these targets mat be rather low, but slowly practical projects are getting going, with solar PV and micro-hydro already quite widely used across Africa, being joined by wind power, so far mainly in the North- for example Morocco’ s Power utility ONE is building a 200 MW wind farm outside Tarfaya while Egypt is planning a 1GW offshore wind farm in the Gulf of Suez, and 7.2GW of wind by 2020. In addition to several CSP projects in the North (Morocco has just commissioned 22 MW hybrid gas/CSP unit, and Egypt is nearing completion of a €250m 150MW hybrid unit near Cairo) and the various renewable energy projects in South Africa, there is also progress elsewhere.

For example, Kenya , which has an installed energy capacity of about 1.3GW, currently gets over 60% of it from hydro. However climate change has made this erratic. Renewable Energy World reported that ‘the Kenyan government has recently re-evaluated its power policies and is now encouraging the use of renewable energy for both industrial and domestic use. It is not only offering incentives to companies to invest in renewable energy production, but it is also leading the way in a planned $8 billion capital injection into renewable energy generation’.

It’s claimed that Kenya has the potential to install over 2GW of renewable electricity capacity over the next 3 years under the green energy initiative led by the government, including about 800 MW of wind, and 500MW of geothermal, along with biomass and municipal solid waste.

KenGen has set up a 5.1MW wind farm in Ngong on the southern outskirts of Nairobi, and plans to erect a second 10 MW wind farm in the area. The African Development Bank has pumped over $400m into what at 300MW is set to be Africas biggest wind farm in - to be built in the northern frontier district of Turkana. According to the Nairobi- based UN Environment Programme, Kenya has potential for up to 3GW of wind, especially in the north. And Geothermal is another interesting option. Keyna’s long term geothermal potential is put at 7GW.The government has allocated $137.5m in fiscal year 2010/ 2011 towards the development of geothermal.

So, in countries like Keyna, the technology is there and some funding is flowing. But how all this will pan out politically, there and elsewhere, remains to be seen. In the past much of the input came from companies like BP who launched PV solar deployment projects, but more recently have retired from the field. Money inevitably is a key issue and, with that, come problems of political control. Much as anywhere else.

Green Jobs

2010-09-01T05:41:00.000-07:00

Towards Decent Work in a Sustainable, Low-Carbon World
UN Environment Programme

‘Economic activity and employment depend in fundamental ways on avoiding continued resource depletion and safeguarding ecosystems and ecological services. If action on urgent environmental problems, especially countering climate change, is not taken, many jobs could be lost to resource depletion, biodiversity loss, increasing disasters, and other disruptions. On the other hand, environmental policies not only protect existing jobs against these threats, but also stimulate new businesses and job creation’. So says this new UNEP report.

It takes a look at all the options for new and continued but sustainable jobs, but notes that ‘With regard to both nuclear power and coal, continued heavy investments may draw critical resources (R&D, investment capital, as well as scientists, engineers, and technicians) away from the pursuit of alternatives such as renewable energy and greater energy efficiency’. And so it focusses mainly on renewables.

It says ‘Renewable energy sources are expanding rapidly. We estimate current employment at about 2.3 million jobs worldwide. Given incomplete data, this is in all likelihood a conservative figure. The wind power industry employs some 300,000 people, the solar PV sector an estimated 170,000, and the solar thermal industry more than 600,000, many of the latter in China.’ Overall China had nearly 1 million working in the sector, followed by the USA and about 450,000 and Germany at around 260,000, in 2006/7.

However it notes that ‘about half of all present renewables jobs are found in the biofuels industry’ and ‘there are rising doubts about the environmental benefits and economic impacts of at least some types of biofuels. In addition, the bulk of biofuels jobs are found at sugarcane and palm oil plantations, where wages are low, working conditions often extremely poor, and worker rights at least in some cases suppressed. Many of these jobs can hardly be described as good or decent employment’.

The report stresses the need for ‘ just transition’ that avoid problems like this and it is not too keen on market competition as a means of promoting rapid development of sustainable approaches. It also points to issues of training and skill development, noting that ‘in many OECD countries, deindustrialization and offshoring of manufacturing have created a situation where companies in the fledgling green economy are struggling to find workers with the skills needed’ and in the developing world there are even more problems of skill gaps. But it says ‘In just two or three decades the entire global economy will need to be well on the way to being low-carbon and sustainable. The historical circumstances therefore demand that bold measures be taken to both expand the green economy and grow green jobs at a much faster pace in the developed world, and to ensure that the same process begins in earnest in the developing countries’.

Overall then, despite the problems, it is hopeful. Longer term it concludes that ‘Renewable energy is poised for continued expansion, and may generate more than 8 million jobs in wind and solar alone over the next two decades. If most or all new buildings were constructed according to higher efficiency standards, it would revolutionize the construction industry. Many additional green jobs can be created through extensive weatherization and retrofitting of existing buildings.’ Perhaps less convincingly it claims that ‘Similar change is possible in agriculture—switching the bulk of the world’s farming to organic and sustainable methods’.

For the EU, it notes that the MITRE modelling exercise ‘found that under current policies, there would be about 950,000 direct and indirect full-time jobs by 2010 and 1.4 million by 2020. These are “net” numbers—taking into account potential job losses in conventional energy and relating to renewables support mechanisms, which may result in lower spending elsewhere in the economy. Under an “Advanced Renewable Strategy,” there could be 1.7 million net jobs by 2010 and 2.5 million by 2020. These results are actually quite conservative in the sense that they cover employment just within the smaller EU-15 (i.e., before expansion), and exclude jobs supported by renewables exports to other countries. About 60–70 percent of the jobs would be in renewables industries (primarily biofuels and biomass processing and wind power), the remainder in agriculture. An analysis by skill level indicates that skilled jobs account for about a third of net employment growth’.

See MITRE project site, http://mitre.energyprojects.net.

The UNEP report: www.unep.org/labour_environment/features/green_jobs-report.asp

The prospects for job growth do look good. In the UK the government has been talking of 70,000 jobs form the offshore wind energy programme by 2020 and perhaps 60,000 from wave and tidal programmes by 2030. We could do better than that. I’ve been working on a Campaign against Climate Change report on ‘Climate Jobs’, making that case. A revised version of their ‘1 million Climate Change jobs now!’ booklet should be out soon. See www.campaigncc.org/greenjobs

Green Cuts and Delays

2010-08-01T06:26:00.000-07:00

The ConDem cuts programme has begun to eat into the governments green pretensions. Of the £85m the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is contributing to the new governments £6.2bn savings programme, £34m will come from cuts in low carbon technology.

For starters, DECC announced in May that £3m would come from closing the Low Carbon Buildings Fund early. That has left a major funding gap for domestic scale solar and renewable heating projects, since the proposed new Renewable Heat Initiative is not due to start until next April- always assuming it does still go ahead.

Subsequently, DECC announced that the other savings will come from cancelling the final funding rounds of the Bio-Energy Capital Grants and Bio-Energy Infrastructure Schemes; a cut on funding for development of Deep Geothermal energy generation; reducing the scope of the Offshore Wind Capital Grants Scheme, early closing of the Energy Saving Trust technology trials; reducing the scope of the Central Governments Low Carbon Technology programme, and a reduction in the grant to the Carbon Trust.

In addition, it seems that the coalition have decided not to provide £1bn to part fund the formation of its proposed Green Investment Bank through the sale of assets such as the Channel Tunnel rail link, as had originally been proposed by Labour.

Next came the news that DEFRA is to scrap its funding for the Sustainable
Development Commission, and abolish the long running Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, in 2011. DEFRA says the Government now has ‘many such sources of expert, independent advice and challenges’.

The coalition has also decided to abolish the Regional Spatial Strategies (RSSs) planning framework- which set local plans in a regional context e..g. with regional renewable energy targets. This could well link up with a policy statement made by Lord Marland that ‘there should be no dramatic increase’ in current plans for around 14GW of on land wind power.

There have also been a whole host of delays. The revised National Policy Statement (NPS) on energy, including a final list of approved reactor sites for nuclear new build, is to be delayed until Spring 2011 at the earliest. That’s quite a delay- earlier it had been said that the NPSs would be finalised before the end of the current Parliamentary term. But on July 15th Energy and Climate Minister Charles Hendry said that the Government would be launching ‘a re-consultation in the autumn on the draft energy National Policy Statements following the consultation undertaken by the previous administration earlier this year, and in particular due to changes which have been made to the Appraisal of Sustainability for the Overarching Energy National Policy Statement’. He added ‘We intend to present the finalised statements to Parliament for ratification next Spring.’

He insisted that ‘plans for the first new nuclear power station to begin generating electricity by 2018 remain on course’ and said that ‘a detailed implementation plan for planning reform on major infrastructure- including transitional arrangements and a revised timetable - will be published later in the summer.’

He explained that ‘For large energy projects we need to give industry maximum certainty, so that if sound proposals come forward, they will not fall victim to unnecessary hold-ups. We have decided to take a further look at the Appraisal of Sustainability of our draft Energy Policy Statements to make sure that they are fit for purpose’.

In parallel, Energy Minister Greg Barker has indicated that the government was not yet in a position to make an announcement on the future of the Renewable Heat Incentive . He claimed the delay was due to government wanting to make sure it gets the RHI right ‘first time round’ and because it needs to ask questions about the scheme that he said Labour had ignored . The government has also missed its deadline for introducing ‘permitted development’ rights, which remove the need for planning applications, for micro-wind turbines and air source heat pumps. Barker blamed ‘logistical consequence of a new government’.

It’s not all bad news though. The Green Deal for households promised via new legislation in the Energy Security and Green Economy Bill, could be helpful. The plan to back biogas production via Anaerobic Digestion is sensible – it could be a lifeline to hard pressed farmers. The promise to back marine renewables more is also welcome- though there is still no news of the governments report of the Severn Tidal programme. It’s also good to see the last of the Infrastructure Planning Commission, although who knows what the new system will be like.

However, most of the 32’ actions’ outlined in the governments new Annual Statement of Energy are just promises, with a lot uncertainty surrounding them and the gaps between them e.g. we are still awaiting a proper definition of zero carbon houses. But we may have to wait some time for issues like this to be sorted : a new fleet of consultations taking us through to next year before anything much actually gets finally decided.

The only really clear thing is that nuclear still gets top billing- as long as it doesn’t cost anything. Or at least appears not to cost taxpayers anything. The reality is that money is finding its way to subsidise nuclear projects and support services- for example, the proposed £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters may be been withdrawn, but the £33m Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre is going ahead in Manchester , as is the linked Centre for Nuclear Energy Technology. In addition public funding continues for the Nuclear Decomissioning Agency, with notoriously NDA staff having had £5m in bonus payments recently.

Over in Germany they do things differently. There is now a plan impose a €2.3 bn p.a. ‘windfall tax’ on nuclear companies profits to meet decommissioning and waste repository costs. Not a bad idea.

CSP/Supergrid politics

2010-07-01T02:57:00.000-07:00

The €400billion Desertec ‘energy from the deserts’ initiative was launched last year as a feasibility study by a group of large German energy companies and banks keen to install large Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) arrays in desert areas and transmit some of the power back to the EU by undersea High Voltage Direct Current supergrids. But although the launch attracted a lot of media attention, it seems to have backfired slightly- some of the North African countries who would be the likely hosts to CSP projects felt they had not been sufficiently consulted, according to Bernhard Brand, writing in Sun and Wind Energy 5/20/10. He noted that, while the Desertec group was trying to widen its membership with, for example, the inclusion of some Moroccan and Algerian companies, industrial based initiatives were likely to come into conflict with regional political sensitivities. In which case, you might think that political initiatives would be more successful. However, he reported that the Union of the Meds parallel Solar Med project was somewhat ‘stuck in the sand’- of diplomatic and bureaucratic wranglings. He suggested that within the N African/Middle East context, the most likely movement will be from companies which are controlled by powerful (usually Royal) families.

Sun and Wind also carried an interview with the leading Egyptian renewable energy supporter Prof. Amin Mobarak and others who are involved with a Masters course run jointly by the Universities of Kassel and Cairo, aiming to help local people to get on top of the technical and political issues. One point that emerged was that the use of CSP for the desalination of water might be more important locally than electricity production. In addition, electricity demand was rising rapidly in the region, so there might not actually be that much spare for the EU! However, electricity prices were was often subsidised locally (e.g. in Egypt) for social policy reasons, and that would be hard to change. So, initially at least, the relatively high price of CSP power might mean that it could only realistically be sold abroad. It was also pointed out that wind power was much cheaper, and was seen as the most promising option for the moment- the Desertec group has indicated that it will include wind projects.

Desertec is not the only player however. Transgreen is a French led supergrid project being developed as part of the Mediterranean Union’s Solar Med programme, which includes proposals for installing 20 Gigawatts (GW) of renewables by 2020, using a mix of technologies: around 6GW of wind, 5.5GW of CSP and nearly 1GW of PV solar in North Africa and the Middle east. And to link it up the Mediterranean Union has proposed a 'Mediterranean Ring' - a grid system linking up countries around the Med, including power from CSP in North Africa/the Middle East being transmitted to the EU via HVDC links under the sea. That’s where Transgreen comes in. It might be seen as a rival to the German-led Desertec project, given that Transgreen’s aim is it seems to bring together power companies, network operators and high-tension equipment makers under the leadership of French energy giant EDF. But the idea seems to be that Transgreen will just deliver part of the energy generated by the Desertec CSP projects to the EU- and there is already some overlapping membership. A €5m study phase is underway.

The energy potential for CSP is huge- there is a lot of desert! And the technology exists and its economics and performance is improving. So CSP could become a large-scale reality. And EU commissioner recently said that the first power could arrive in the EU in 5 years. But, as can be seen, it could be that institutional and political issues will be the main problem for CSP, as the big EU companies line up to develop this vast new resource and local interests begin to negotiate terms for access and control. So it may take time to reach any scale: despite talk of $400bn, at present the Desertec initiative is only just a concept- not yet a formally funded project, although some independent CSP projects are already underway e.g. in Egypt, Jordon Algeria and Morocco, which could become part of it. A 470 Megawatt (MW) hybrid solar/ gas fired unit, with 22 MW of CSP, has just been started up in Morocco, Egypt is nearing completion of a €250m 150MW hybrid unit near Cairo, while the UAE has plans for 1000MW CSP unit.

A fully integrated CSP/supergrid scheme- there’s talk to 200 GW (200,000MW) or more eventually - could offer benefits to all in terms of a major source of green energy, plus, locally, fresh water, jobs and income, but it also opens up range of new- and old- geopolitical and development issues. Not least who gets the power, and at what cost, and who gets the profits.

For more on renewable energy policy and developments see www.natta-renew.org

Getting real on renewables

2010-06-01T12:48:00.000-07:00

Much is often made of how China is pushing ahead with nuclear power - that has been used to justify the UK doing the same. China currently gets about 2% of is electricity from nuclear, and it plans to double that to 4% by 2020. Given that China’s energy use is very large, that’s a massive expansion. But what’s rarely noted is that renewables are being expanded very much more rapidly. They produced nearly 8 times more electricity in 2009 than nuclear - 540TWh from of renewables, including large hydro but excluding small projects, as against 70TWh from nuclear. And there are ambitious plans for expansion, which will continue and possibly extend that imbalance. The 11th Five-year Plan of the Development of Renewable Energy stipulated that 15% of primary energy consumption should be supplied from non-fossil energy sources by 2020, with renewables expected to generate 12-13% of the total energy supply, and that may well be raised to a 20% non-fossil target.

So the real story is that China is going renewable, with a little side bet on nuclear. It has already installed 25 Gigawatts (GW) of wind power capacity, on a par with the one-time wind leader Germany, and it expects to have 150 GW of wind capacity in place by 2020. That’s about the same as the EU might expect to get at some point in the future from a massive and full expansion of the offshore wind resource in the North Sea . Large hydro is of course the big source currently in China (the 2009 hydro total was 197GW), but, in addition to wind on and offshore, it is pushing ahead with less environmentally problematic small hydro, with a 2020 target of 75GW. And it’s also now launched a wave power programme- with a proposal being mooted for 10GW of coastal installations.

The EU is often seen as being big on renewables, and the potential is clearly large- several recent studies have suggested that the EU could get 100% of its electricity from renewables by 2050 and maybe even 100% of its total energy. But progress is slow, and the reality is that China may become the global leader- although the USA is also in the race. The US now has 35GW of wind plant in place- hardly surprisingly, since wind is now the cheapest source on the grid in many states. It’s also now given the go ahead to its first offshore wind farm. Obama has said that ‘the country that harnesses the power of the clean, renewable energy will lead the 21st century’. The race is on, with at stake not only the climate, but also huge potential employment and economic gains.

For its part the UK is still floundering about. Labour’s 40GW offshore wind target will still presumably be retained by the new coalition, but if we are still left with just the Renewables Obligation /ROC system to support it, there is no certainty it will be achieved. Before the election, the Lib Dems called for an expanded Feed In Tariff, so did the Tories, who also talked of abandoning the RO. But the coalition agreement simply alludes to ‘the full establishment of feed-in tariff systems in electricity- as well as the maintenance of banded ROCs’. So the RO stays.

The coalition agreement also, notoriously, said that Lib Dem MP’s must abstain when it comes to a vote of nuclear power. It seems they have been all but neutered on this issue. That tragically leaves just the Green Party and the SNP to fight that corner. But at least there is a commitment to ‘increase the target for energy from renewable sources, subject to the advice of the Climate Change Committee’.

That’s a step beyond what Labour was proposing, although most of the other energy policy commitments were similar to those that had already been made by the Labour government- backing CCS, marine energy, biomass AD and a green investment fund.

In other areas there were obviously some environmental gains, notably the abandonment of the third Heathrow runway, but the stitch up on nuclear is a major step backwards. The coalition says that there will be no public subsidies for nuclear. That of course is exactly the same as Labours promise. But the coalition agreement also makes a commitment to the ‘provision of a floor price for carbon, as well as efforts to persuade the EU to move towards full auctioning of ETS permits’. That will mean that electricity prices might rise, making nuclear look more economic – in effect an indirect subsidy paid for by consumers, but with the taxpayer having to step in if the carbon price falls. True this could also help renewables, but, with nuclear being strongly favoured, we are likely see increasing competition for public and private resources, with the expansion of renewables suffering as a result.

For more: www.natta-renew.org

All change?

2010-05-01T06:39:00.000-07:00

The election is upon us. In terms of environmental politics, is there anything to choose between the reds and the blues – and the rest?

While of course there are many other key policy issues, their positions on renewables are significant. Both Labour and Tories profess strong support. As a litmus test of green orientation, a survey, carried out by ComRes for RenewableUK, the wind and marine energy trade body, found that only 7 per cent of the Tory candidates agreed strongly with the statement “expansion of onshore wind [farms] is essential if the UK is to deliver on its renewable energy targets”. The statement was strongly supported by 44 per cent of Labour candidates and 71 per cent of Liberal Democrat candidates. A total of 54 per cent of Conservative hopefuls, but no Labour candidates, disagreed with the statement. Among Liberal Democrats, 14 per cent disagreed.

Labour has a quite strong programme of renewable energy support- nowhere near enough of course and based still on competitive market principles via the lamentable Renewables Obligation/ROC trading system. Nevertheless it has managed to attract promises of inward investment from companies like Siemens, GE, and Mitsubishi, which should create several thousand new jobs soon in what could be an expanding offshore wind energy industry.

But Labour also has an increasing commitment to nuclear power, which somehow it says is going to expand without direct subsidies. There was talk of adjusting the carbon market to make nuclear economics look better, but maintaining a ‘floor price’ for carbon could require taxpayer back up- a subsidy. In practice though they don’t actually seem to mind too much about subsidies as long as they are very indirect- they offered an £80m loan to help a Sheffield steel company to link into the nuclear supply chain, and £20m for a ‘Nuclear Centre of Excellence’ along with ‘up to £15m’ for a ‘Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre’.

In the run up to the election, the Conservatives published a new energy policy statement- ‘Rebuilding Security’ which similarly backed renewables and nuclear. It’s not clear just how much they actually will support renewables- many Tories are part of the anti wind lobby. However they do seem keen on marine renewables. Britain ‘ruling the waves’ may figure somewhere here, even if in reality it will mainly be Scotland, and the SNP is big on that!

Like Labour, the Tories say they will not provide any direct cash for nuclear. Even so, they want nuclear to expand rapidly- and like Labour saw a floor price for carbon as one way ahead. Or perhaps a revision of Labours Climate Change Levy on large energy users - converting it to a new energy supplier tax. Depending on how it was done that might put electricity prices up by 18%.

In the pre-election ‘wash up’ Labour just managed to squeeze through another levy- to support Carbon Capture and Storage projects. That could also put electricity bills up. So will its new Feed In Tariff system for small renewable projects – DECC admits it will cost consumers £3.1 billion to 2020 for a 2% increase in renewables. Bills will rise even more if the Tories carry out their plan to replace Labours expensive Renewables Obligation with an expanded Feed In Tariff system for all new renewables. A FiT may well be the best way forward (it will be cheaper than the RO), but the commitment to it, and the other Levys, seems to indicate that stealth taxes are still all the rage on both sides of the old political divide! Not much to choose between them then overall.

However there are supposedly going to be new allegedly more open and efficient political processes shaping our energy and environmental future. Labour has introduced the Infrastructure Planning Commission to over large projects. But that seems far from being a move towards more democratic approach, leaving an open goal for the Tories, who launched a planning green paper ‘Open Source Planning’ with proposals for getting neighbourhoods involved in planning decisions in order to encourage sustainable development via a system with a basic national framework of planning priorities and policies, within which local people and local government can produce ‘their own distinctive local policies’. IPC as such would be abolished, though it seems something similar would be retained for some large projects- a Major Infrastructure Unit.

So, single issues like Heathrow apart (and that has to be put alongside the Tories liaison with climate change deniers in Europe), there doesn’t seem much to choose between them in the end in this area either.

So we are left with rhetoric about democracy, but not much sign of the actual thing –or many real choices. While the Tories talk vacuously of ‘people power’, David Miliband, in an article in SERA’s New Ground, said that the ‘language of social responsibility cannot deliver the substance of national action- it is simply not enough to implore greater responsibility from individuals for problems that need organised collective action’. Fair enough, but, although he accepted that ‘our conception of politics has too often been based on active government and not enough on active citizens’ he pointed to the idea of ‘personal, tradable carbon allowances’ to produce new greener consumer behaviours. So more social control from above…

What about the others? The Lib Dems, coming on strong, says £3.1 billion of public spending will be used to create 100,000 green jobs and help Britain take its first step towards being a zero-carbon nation by 2050, with a target of 40% of UK electricity to come from "clean, non-carbon emitting sources" by 2020, rising to 100% by 2050 . They would ‘will increase the feed-in tariff to provide a 10% return on investment. We have also set out an eco-cashback scheme for the first year of government that will allow people to apply for £400 if they opt for microgeneration’. And they will ‘block any new coal-fiired power stations unless they are accompanied by the highest levelof carbon capture and storage facilities’ and they ‘reject a new generation of nuclear power stations; based on the evidence nuclear is a far more expensive way of reducing carbon emissions than promoting energy conservation and renewable energy’. And they will ‘Abolish the Infrastructure Planning Commission and return decision making including housing targets, to local people. We will create a third-party right of appeal in cases where planning decisions against locally agreed plans’.

The Lib Dems are of course not alone in pushing green policies hard. So, naturally, does the Green Party, which like the Lib Dems - and the SNP- is strongly anti nuclear and aims to obtain around half of the UK's energy from renewable sources by 2020 and ensure that emissions from power generation are zero by 2030. The Greens promised a £44 billion investment programme, which would include £25 billion investment in renewable energy in order to reduce carbon emissions by 2020. "Our investment would mean that one million jobs could be created over the next five years." They presented themselves as ‘Leftwing plus’.

It’s going to be interesting to see how it all turns out. Some hope for a breakthrough from the Lib Dems and even the Greens, and perhaps also some of the other more radical grouping. That might leaven a hung parliament….even if it includes some UKIP and even BNP, both of whom seem to be in denial about climate change and measure to deal with it- except nuclear!

It is possible that something new and wonderful will emerge for the centre left/ centre right parliamentary stalemate that the UK seems to have reached, but extra-parliamentary campaigns seem increasingly more important- with the growing links between radical greens and trade union groups. The Climate Change Campaigns booklet ‘One Million Climate Change jobs now’, was good start, setting out some of the possibilities. There are certainly a lot of new political alliances being formed outside the old political system- at the grass roots. Whether they will bear fruit in terms of effective action remains to be seen.

Renewable energy and the supergrid

2010-04-03T05:27:00.000-07:00

Renewables are moving ahead rapidly around the world – despite the best efforts of those with vested interests in the old energy system. It no longer seems fanciful to talk of getting at least 50% of global energy from renewables source by 2050, or earlier: see http://www.energywatchgroup.org/Renewables.52+M5d637b1e38d.0.html.

The next phase will see some major changes as the developers gets to grips with some of the problems of renewables. One of these is that many of the sources are variable- the sun doesn’t shine all the time and the winds vary. One solution to that is to link up projects over a wide geographical area using long distance power transmission grids. It’s usually windy somewhere in Europe, so wind farms there can help balance shortfalls elsewhere, while hydro plant reservoirs can be used to store excess power from the wind and other renewable sources- pumping water up hill ready to be used for electricity generation when needed some where else on the grid net. The wider spread the geographical distribution, the more effective is the balancing of local variations.

Long distance transmission, using High Voltage Direct Current grids, can avoid the large power losses associated with standard AC grids- you might only get 2% losses over 1000 km instead of 10%. That means the grid could reach as far as North Africa- were there is a huge solar resource. Already there a plans and projects underway for giant Concentrating Solar Power (‘CSP’) mirror arrays, and in the decades ahead CSP solar could well rival wind power as a major source. Projects are already underway or planned in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan and elsewhere. See http://www.desertec.org

The renewable resource

For the moment however wind is the dominant renewable and the resource especially offshore, is vast. Perhaps 150 Giga Watts (GW) of generating capacity could be installed in the north sea and linked up to the supergrid. There is already 65 GW of wind capacity on land around the EU, and that too will grow. To put it in perspective the UK has around 75 GW of total generation capacity.

The EU is supporting a supergid programme initially focused on the North Sea and on offshore wind, but it is likely to grow across Europe. But focusing just on the EU may be suboptimal. The really big on-land wind resources are further east. For example Kazakhstan is estimated to have a wind potential of 210 GW as well as huge hydro and geothermal resources. Turkey similarly. And Turkmenistan also has a large wind resources. In addition, there are also major wind potentials in W. Siberia (350GW) Mauritania (105 GW), and Southern Morocco, (120 GW) . See http://www.iset.uni-kassel.de/abt/w3-w/projekte/ LowCostEuropElSup_revised_for_AKE_2006.pdf

It could be that in the decades ahead supergrid links will be made to link to some of these, as well as the CSP solar projects in the desert areas of North Africa and the Middle East. In which case a whole new energy geopolitics would emerge - no longer determined by oil and gas, which by then in any case will be seriously depleted.

Politics

Clearly the supergrid would take a major effort politically, not least in terms of getting way-leave across national boundaries and negotiating power management and system control arrangements. It would also open up some new geopolitical issues. The EU would still be partly reliant on imported energy, and there is the risk that EU companies would simply grab land for development.

Clearly there would have to be fair trade arrangements to avoid exploitation, and also protection for the EU against being cut off. But with a dedicated grid system linked to the EU, unlike with oil, which can be stored and shipped elsewhere, it is hard to see how there would be much opportunity for supply blackmail or major price speculation. Moreover, the EU would also presumably be trading in excess wind and hydro-power from the north, so it could be a two way, hopefully co-operative, arrangement.

There will of course be a need for negotiation over prices. That has already been an issue in relation to the export of excess power from Danish wind projects and the import, during low wind periods, of hydro power from Sweden and Norway. It is vital to capture the advantage of being able to balance variable renewable supplies across wide areas, and conventional competitive market trading may not reflect this. One way to avoid price conflicts might be to develop an EU-based Cross-Feed Tariff, possibly also providing extra support for a suppliers able to offer stored renewable power.

There is the risk that a supergrid programme, utilizing energy from remote sources, might provide EU countries with an excuse for not dealing with their emission problems and developing their own renewable sources. But the imports would only meet part of the EU's requirement for electricity, the bulk would still come from local/national renewable sources.

There are of course political issues flowing from the fact that one part of the EU’s current enthusiasm for such a system is because it could help enhance competition in a pan-EU energy market. This might undermine some of the regional market control enjoyed by the current main energy players. Some of the large utility companies and some countries do seem less than enthusiastic about the single energy market, and also the supergrid. An additional issue might be that the EC and national governments may well look to the large energy companies for at least some of the funding for such a programme, something that the companies may wish to avoid.

Conclusions

This review has focused so far on projects in and near the EU, but clearly the concepts have wider implications. It is interesting for example to see that the USA has plans for new grid systems to link up with renewables, with talk of an ‘Interstate Transmission Super Highway’. China too is building supergrid links to large but remote hydro projects.
With large inputs from wind, CSP and from other renewables like wave and tidal power linked in, we could see a move to major supergrids around the world, fed and balanced by a range of sources from a range locations. If we are to respond effectively to climate change and improve energy security, this looks like at least part of way ahead- as long as we can avoid exploitation of local populations. If a fair balance can be achieved the prize could be a new geopolitics- no longer would Middle East oil or Russian gas dominate EU energy policy. Instead some of the relatively poor countries on or near the periphery of the EU could benefit.

Forcing nuclear through

2010-03-01T09:45:00.000-08:00

According to the government's national policy statement (NPS) on nuclear power, it is planned to store the irradiated spent nuclear fuel discharged from the 10 proposed new UK plants at the reactor sites for perhaps 160 years. So communities hosting new reactors would get a nuclear waste store too- and for a long time. For several generations after a reactor stopped operating, the site would de facto become a radioactive waste disposal site. In these circumstances it is essential that our nuclear regulators require that these nuclear stores be safe and, for example, to be protected from terrorist attack to at least the same degree of robustness as demanded for the reactors.

So you would think that this issue would be at the top of the agenda for the new Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC) the government has set up to deal with large projects like nuclear plants - since it is what local people in particular will want to raise. Think again. Here is what the governments NPS says: "The Government is satisfied that effective arrangements will exist to manage and dispose of the waste that will be produced from new nuclear power stations. As a result the IPC need not consider this question." The draft Statement goes on to say that ‘Geological disposal will be preceded by safe and secure interim storage’.

So it’s sorted and the issue should not be raised with or by the IPC. Fortunately it’s only a draft NPS and this recommendation, and much else, has been widely challenged in the consultation responses. So hopefully it will revised. Then again the IPC may not survive- the Tories have pledged to abolish it, although it seems they will retain something similar for some large projects.

The IPC certainly isn’t popular- it’s seen as top-down, autocratic and designed to steam-roller through unpopular plans rapidly. CANE, Communities against Nuclear Expansion, said ‘At a time when public confidence in our political process is at an all time low, government have decided to take to themselves more power to override people's wishes’.

The NPS was also roundly attacked. FOE's executive director, Andy Atkins, said: ‘The government's draft national planning statements on energy are fundamentally flawed. The consultation was insufficient, the alternatives were inadequately explored, and the policies are poorly justified’.

The Nuclear Consultation Group of leading academics submitted evidence to a Select Committee looking at the NPS proposals, concluding that, overall, the nuclear NPS was ‘unfit for the purpose of providing a framework within which the IPC can take fair, balanced and measured decisions on the location of new nuclear power stations’. The NPS appeared to be ‘confusing, tendentious, vague and poorly integrated’ and ‘a highly elaborate exercise to achieve premature legitimation for a predetermined policy, namely, the rapid deployment of new nuclear power stations.’ www.nuclearconsult.com

The Sustainable Energy Partnership (SEP), which I brings together nearly all environmental and fuel poverty NGOs and relevant trade groups, including ACE, AECB, BWEA, CPRE, CHPA, FoE, Green Party, Greenpeace, Micropower Council, NEA, PV-UK, PRASEG, RSPB, REA, SERA, Solar Century, WWF-UK, commented: ‘It defies common sense to approve a massive [nuclear] building programme to achieve the long term objectives of energy policy without a proper assessment of the future long term need for electricity and with a flawed process of assessing the medium term capacity need. This is no way to run a strategy. It means either that the government has taken leave of its senses and behaved completely irrationally; or that there has been, for some time, a hidden agenda: that the government decided a long while ago to build more nuclear power stations, regardless of any evidence of need. Whichever of the above scenarios is correct means that the government's current consultation is a sham and that the policy itself is, to say the least, of questionable legality’.

SEP notes that, there’s no proof to back up the rather weak assertion in the NPS that ‘by 2050 the UK may need to produce more electricity than today’. In fact the 2008 Nuclear White Paper says that, given attention to energy efficiency, by 2050, total electricity demand could ‘remain at roughly today's levels despite the UK's GDP being three times larger than it is today’. What the NPS does, say SEP, is to assert that ‘under central assumptions there will be a need for approximately 60GW of new capacity by 2025’- and then quotes a Redpoint study as the source for this. But Redpoints study simply looked at how ‘a goal of achieving around 28%-29% of electricity from renewables by 2020’ might be achieved, not at how or whether we could generate enough electricity without nuclear to meet demand.

The government is evidently aware that the longer term rationale for nuclear is a little weak (to put it mildly) and has commissioned a review of energy policy issues and options up to 2050- with it seems a ‘2050 Roadmap’ to be published along with the next Budget. Maybe, looking that far ahead, they will have some idea where the waste will go long term!

Climate Conflicts

2010-02-01T07:14:00.000-08:00

The outcome of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 'COP 15' climate negotiations at Copenhagen in December was pretty thin, with no agreements on emission reduction targets. A very general ‘Copenhagen Accord’ was produced by the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa, none of whom currently face legally binding emissions reduction targets under the existing Kyoto Protocol. Some developing countries objected to it- including Venezuala. Certainly it has only weak links to the main focus of the UNFCCC negotiations on a post-Kyoto agreement- and UNFCCC members simply ‘noted’ the Accord. Some blamed the US for what is widely seen as a weak outcome - but China was also a target. But apologists for the unilateral ‘Accord’ said that at least it was something to show for all the COP 15 efforts. And that it was something of a triumph for Obama to get China on board. Others however saw the fault line being between those who wanted a continued Kyoto type legal targets approach (including the EU and some developing countries) and those, like the US and China, who wanted the freedom to develop their own national plans within a loose Accord. This conflict won’t go away. It will no doubt resurface at the intermediary meeting in Bonn in June, and at COP 16 in Mexico City in December.

Meanwhile, under the terms of the Accord, UNFCC member countries were asked to submit national plans for emission reductions via mitigation actions by the end of January. Crucially, it seems that a proposed exclusion of nuclear projects from national mitigation plans was removed from the texts. So, the use of nuclear energy could be included in the list of mitigation actions to be sent to the UNFCCC. That too could lead to conflict. But then the January deadline was abandoned, so the whole thing seems to have gone in to (presumably only temporary) free fall.

Conflict have already emerged in relation to France’s attempt to introduce a carbon tax. Announced last year, it was aimed to cover all transport/household fuel use, but not electricity, and has been seen as possible template for other national programmes . It would be phased in gradually, starting at around 17 €/tonne of CO2, adding about 4 cents per litre to the cost of petrol and a 5% rise to the price of household gas. But it would be 'tax neutral'- with the revenue from it being returned via tax concessions. It would apply to all homes and enterprises, but not to the heavy industries and power firms included in the EU-ETS.

The left felt the proposal would be ‘unjust’ and ‘inefficient’- a flat levy on fuel would hit low-income families, especially those in out-of-town areas who have no choice but to use cars, without helping clean alternatives. Segolene Royal said it would be better to ‘tax oil and energy companies based on the profits they make from fossil fuels’ and invest in electric cars.

The draft plan called for a levy of 32 €/tonne of CO2 emitted, rising to 100 €/tonne in 2030. That would add 0.077€ to the cost of one litre of unleaded fuel. Home heating costs would rise by 60-170 € p.a, depending on the type of building and method used. 50% of homes would see bills for transport and heating jump by ~ €300p.a. But to avoid a consumer backlash, the government said the levy would start at €17.

Former Socialist prime minister Michel Rocard, who headed the bipartisan panel that drafted the plans, admitted that ‘there is a real risk of social injustice.’ He added that the key issue facing the government was ‘how do we redistribute the money to people in a way that changes their behaviour, but without harming their overall spending power.’

Although painful, a 17 € tax wouldn't have much impact on consumer behaviour. Pascal Husting, the head of Greenpeace France, said excluding electricity and starting the tax at such a low rate meant ‘it would change absolutely nothing in terms of behaviour’ nor encourage energy saving or renewable energy. Over two thirds of the public were said to oppose the idea.

It was meant to start on 1st January, but has been blocked by a legal dispute.

Carbon taxes have their detractors: carbon emissions are hard to verify and quantify. Energy taxes are usually seen as easier, since energy is a familiar traded commodity which is easier to measure and value: as one quip has it, "if you want to keep a donkey healthy you don't regulate what comes out of it: you regulate what goes in".

But at what point should an energy tax be applied? If it is levied on all energy users, it can get very bureaucratic. It’s simpler to focus on just the energy generation companies and let them pass extra costs on to the rest, in their prices. In fact that would also work for a carbon tax since its easier to identify the fuels used /emissions produced by a few companies than by millions of energy consumers. But this ‘upstream’ approach means challenging the power companies head on, and some argue that individual consumer taxes have more of an educative value- making people more aware of their energy consumption.

One thing seems certain, we are going to pay more for energy in future. The only uncertainty is who we will pay, and how much. So far most of the energy companies have made very large profits from energy price rises. There is strong case for using taxes, including possibly a one-off windfall tax, to claw some of that back, for ‘hypotheticated’ re-investment in more efficient green energy technology. The private sector says that’s what it does with its profits, but in reality they often seem chary of taking risks with new technology. Could governments do better? Would a hypothecated tax, clearly devote to clean energy development, be more popular than tinkering with tax neutral systems to try to maintain consumer buying power?

Sources: Times, Guardian, BBC, AFP

Green protectionism?

2010-01-01T04:20:00.000-08:00

During the battle over the closure of its wind turbine blade manufacturing plant on the Isle of White, Vestas told the Guardian (7/8/09) that UK turbine manufacturers were at a disadvantage compared with those in countries that insist that their windfarms use locally made components. In China, for example, at least 80% of components used must be made locally. In Spain and Portugal, windfarm developers must show how many jobs they will create by sourcing supplies locally in order to get planning approval for their projects. Vestas said “There is a strong political will in most countries to favour local manufacturers.”

However there are also arguments against ‘local content’ rules. Essentially they are protectionist- which is seen by some as undesirable since it limits open markets. Ontario’s new Feed-In Tariff for PV solar projects, which provides 44.3-80.2 cents/kWh for PV solar depending on size, includes a requirement that grid-connected solar projects must involve a minimum amount of ‘local content’: small rooftop PV must have 40% local content as a combination of labour and equipment, larger systems 50%. And in two years time that will rise to 60 %. The aim is to boost local employment. This has caused a stir in Germany, where PV manufacturers say Canada is breaching its obligations to the World Trade Organization. Germany’s solar-industries association, BSW-Solar, has protested against what it calls Ontario’s ‘local protectionism.’ It says ‘The actions taken in Ontario directly contravene Canada’s international trade commitments and place foreign solar equipment makers at a serious competitive disadvantage’. Ontario officials however say that ‘the domestic content rules have been developed in a way that welcomes investment from outside Ontario, because only a portion of the costs are required to be spent in Ontario’. See: tinyurl.com/ykssy9y

But is protectionism so bad? Are free markets so wonderful? Purely economic protection might be seen a too parochial and partisan- just defending local interest- but if the net impact is to create more projects and reduce more emissions, then globally surely that is to be preferred? It all depends on whether you think that open market competition is progressive and efficient, or whether you believe that it’s simply about profits- strengthening the dominant players and weakening rivals.

The evidence from the renewable energy field seems pretty clear. Competitive systems like the UK Renewable Obligation (RO) have been far less successful at building renewables capacity than fixed price Feed-In Tariffs (FITs): Germany now has round 25 Gigawatts of wind capacity in place, whereas the UK only has achieved just over 4GW so far- with some of that being offshore and supported by capital grants. And perversely the RO has cost consumers more: the UK’s ROC system cost consumers 3.2 pence/kilowatt hour, whereas in 2006 the German Feed-In Tariff only cost consumers 2.6/p/kWh- despite Germany having a much bigger wind capacity in areas with generally much less wind than in the UK, and also supporting the installation of a lot more very expensive PV solar capacity.

There is also the question of renewables such as PV being very much cheaper to produce in developing countries, such as China, due to manufacturing costs being so low. This had undoubtedly led to greater uptake of PV in developed countries as many individual consumers have voted with their wallets and bought the cheapest ‘green’ technology available. But this ‘market’ freedom has environmental and human costs, such as a non-regulated wages, no health and safety culture and possible environmental pollution in the production cycle. The same might be said of some biofuels grown, for Western vehicles to use, in the developing world. That booming market has deepened some local environmental problems.

That is not to say competitive markets can’t play some role- for example they can sometimes provide incentives for innovation. But innovation has hardly been stifled under FITs: Germany has developed a lot of novel wind and PV technologies and built major new expanding industries, whereas that can hardy be said if the UK- while we still have a research base (just!), we have no major renewable energy technology manufacturing plants and have to import technology from countries like Germany. Maybe a bit of green protectionism wouldn’t be amiss, although really what would make more sense is a FIT for all renewables, not just the tiny one planned for small scale projects. Then the UK might take a lead and win some exports as well.

More Atoms for peace

2009-11-30T16:46:00.000-08:00

It’s good to have Obama and Brown pushing for the phase out of nuclear weapons. At least part of the driver for this is that the US and its allies can be seen to be honouring their part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), in the hope that other countries will sign up to it - or, since it will soon run out, its yet to be negotiated replacement. But there is more. Then, so the argument goes, the way will be clear for the spread of civil nuclear power around the world. That, it’s argued, helps reduce use of fossil fuels and thus reduces global geopolitical tension over oil and gas, while also helping with global climate change. So it’s all related globally and geopolitically - and NPT will save the planet.

The official view seems to be that the NPT has worked well- otherwise we would have many more weapons states. That’s hard to swallow given that India, Pakistan and Israel, all with nuclear weapons, are outside the NPT. The battles with Iran and N Korea over their adherence to the NPT has hardly been a good demonstration of its effectiveness- unless you like brinkmanship. If we are really to enter a brave new nuclear world with lots more countries going for civil nuclear power, but avoiding weapons production, it’s going to get even more hair raising. Hardly sounds like ‘atoms for peace’. With the added increased threat of diversion of technology and materials to terrorist groups, it sounds more like receipt for more global tension and confrontation.

A commitment instead to renewables could avoid all these problems. Egypt, Jordan and Algeria are amongst the countries who have indicated interest in going nuclear recently- yet all these are much better placed to develop their huge solar potential, e.g. via Concentrated Solar Power plants in desert areas. Following the success of pioneering projects in Spain, over 5GW of new CSP projects are already underway or planned in, amongst other paces, Algeria, Jordon, Morocco, Egypt and the UAE. Longer term the ‘Med Solar’ plan envisages up to 20GW of CSP in North Africa.

Meanwhile, GNEP, the ambitious Global Nuclear Energy Partnership programme backed by George W Bush, now seems to be in disarray. The aim was to provide sealed nuclear plants to developing countries, with the spent fuel being returned to the USA for reprocessing, to extract the plutonium that had been produced. This would then be used to fuel a new fleet of US breeder reactors. The theory was that this approach would be less prone to illegal diversion of weapons material- although it would involve installing plants around the world and shipping radioactive material regularly across the globe. GNEP had attracted support from 25 countries,

However, earlier this year Obama halted work on reprocessing techniques that were a key USA contribution to this programme, and the future of GNEP is now unclear. Instead the USA has signed up to IRENA, the new International Renewable Energy Research Agency, which is to be based in Abu Dhabi in the UAE. The UAE of course also has civil nuclear ambitions. So the rivalry between these two very different energy options continues.

There had been some concern that IRENA might also back nuclear. But there is already a powerful International Atomic Energy Agency based in Austria, which promotes nuclear around the world. And in August Helene Pelosse, IRENA’s new director general, commented ‘IRENA will not support nuclear energy programmes because it’s a long complicated process, it produces waste and is relatively risky. Renewable energy is a better alternative and a faster, less expensive alternative, especially with countries blessed with so much sun for solar plants’. Let’s hope that having a major new international agency based in a developing country will shift the balance.

Workers and the World Unite

2009-11-01T07:51:00.000-08:00

‘The world-wide crises starkly poses the need to construct new world-wide relations of production and exchange that are substantially more decentralized, participatory and egalitarian than the relations which currently exist, at the same time as being ecologically sensitive. The construction of a new energy system, based on a much higher proportion of renewable energy use than currently exists, is a fundamental part of this process’. So says Kolya Abramsky, editor of a new book entitled ‘Another Energy is Possible: Sparking a World-wide Energy Revolution’ (AK Press), who is also helping to organise a major international conference as a follow up.

He notes that ‘The expansion of the renewable energy is, seemingly, taking a paradoxical form. On the one hand the sector has until now developed incredibly slowly, non-linearly and in comparatively few places in the world. On the other hand, resource scarcity, climate change, surplus finance capital, and militarized conflict in oil rich regions are all material pressures pushing towards a rapid global expansion. The urgency of “peak oil”, and especially climate change, are ushering in a new scenario. The end of “the fossil fuels era” may be postponed, but it cannot be prevented. In all probability it cannot even be postponed for much longer. A transition beyond petrol is no longer an ideological choice. It is increasingly a necessity imposed by material constraints. Already demand for renewable energy infrastructure far outstrips supply. The renewable energy sector seems set to become a new global growth sector’.

And he concludes ‘It is no longer a question of whether a transition will occur, but rather what form it will take. Which technologies will it include and on whose terms and priorities? Who will pay the costs and who will reap the benefits? Who can harness the necessary global flows of capital, raw materials, knowledge and labor? Rather than being a technical inevitability, transition will be the result of an uncertain and lengthy process of collective struggle’.

I think he’s right- these are crucial questions. But he also right that, as he puts it, ‘the transition process is actually a process of great uncertainty’, with their being ‘diverging strategic choices and perspectives as to the best way of bringing about social and technological change, and the extent to which this can take place within existing power structures, or whether it requires a more confrontational approach towards these power structures and the construction of new social relations’.

This can lead to conflicts between, for example environmentalists, many of whom are opposed outright to coal and nuclear energy, and worker organizations in these sectors who are predominantly in favour of worker led efforts to clean up these sectors. There was, for example, the recent infamous episode during the battle over the Kingsnorth coal plant when, rather insensitively re working the ‘Coal not Dole’ slogan from the 1984 Miners Strike, Greenpeace used the slogan ‘Put Coal on the Dole,’ with one riposte from the left being ‘where are the French Secret service when your need them?’, harking back to when the French Secret service blew up Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior boat.

We have to do better than this. The fight over jobs at Vestas on the Isle of White brought trade union and green groups together, and that’s the way ahead. But there are some major issues looming. Can fossil fuels be cleaned up, or will that simply delay the process of switching over to renewables. Can nuclear power be seen off, even though it’s supported by many unions? Can we get global agreement on cutting emissions without undermining the aspirations of those still living at or even below subsistence level? How can the costs and benefits of going green be fairly distributed? How do we create a movement to ensure that when renewables are adopted it is done right?

It can certainly be done poorly. For example, Germany is often cited as a wonderful example of how many jobs can be created in renewable energy (250,000 so far) but many of these are in the east, where low wages and poor conditions are common- in non union companies. Meanwhile the biofuels boom risks creating many terrible jobs in the developing world, and if left to global capitalism, undermining food production.

We don’t want renewables at any price. The old counter culture view of the 1960/70s was that we wanted an alternative technology AND an alternative society. That remains true. This wont happen automatically- it has to be fought for.

The UK’s Trade Union Congress has called for a ‘just transition to a greener economy’. The TUC report 'A Green and Fair Future', says that ‘support for environmental policies are conditional on a fair distribution of the costs and benefits of those policies across the economy, and on the creation of opportunities for active engagement by those affected in determining the future wellbeing of themselves and their families’.

That’s a good starting position. But it is defensive. We need to be more proactive and create a better future, locally and globally.

Nuclear expansion? Not in my name!

2009-10-01T05:03:00.000-07:00

The public debate and the government consultations in 2006 and 2007 on nuclear power were framed in the context of a replacement programme for existing reactors scheduled to close. On this basis it has been suggested that there was if not a clear consensus then at least a majority in favour.

However, subsequently the government began to talk about going beyond replacement. For example, in May 2008 Prime Minister Gordon Brown commented ‘I think we are pretty clear that we will have to do more than simply replace existing nuclear capability in Britain’ while Secretary of State John Hutton said, that, although it was up to the private sector developers, he would be ‘very disappointed’ if the proportion of electricity generated by nuclear did not rise ‘significantly above the current level'. In Aug 2009, Malcolm Wicks MP, the PM’s Special Representative on International Energy, produced a report calling for a UK nuclear contribution of 35-40% ‘beyond 2030’. Currently the UK gets 13% of its electricity from nuclear sources.

The government has also indicated that it saw a major role for exporting UK nuclear technology and expertise. Gordon Brown has indicated that he believes the world needs 1,000 extra nuclear power stations and has argued that Africa could build nuclear power plants to meet growing demands for energy. In 2009 a new UK Nuclear Centre of Excellence was announced to ‘promote wider access to civil nuclear power across the world’, with an initial budget of £20m, along with ‘up to £15m’ for a Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre.

I cannot support any of the above policies or views. As a lifelong Labour movement activist and long standing Labour party member, I have struggled to live with various New Labour policies to which I have been opposed with increasing difficulty, not least in relation to the Iraq invasion. The new policies on nuclear will I believe lead to major long-term global security problems, in terms of the proliferation of nuclear weapons making capacity and the potential for nuclear terrorism. The policies on nuclear could also undermine energy security and environmental sustainability, since money, manpower and other resources will be diverted away from renewables and energy efficiency, which I see as the only long term options for a sustainable energy future, nationally and globally.

I have made these points regularly in various forums, including SERA, of which I was a founding member. But the commitment to an expanded nuclear programme seems set in stone and indeed is deepening. When Business/Energy Secretary, John Hutton said that he was ‘determined to press all the buttons to get nuclear built in this country at the earliest opportunity’ and that approach now seems to be even more prevalent with, in effect, the government trying to talk the prospects of nuclear up, so that companies like EDF might be able to raise finance more easily.

A new Policy Statement on Nuclear is due soon. I doubt if it will go much beyond what the government has already said- that it welcomes the 12GW or so of proposal that have come so far from the private sector. In fact the various contenders, EDF, E.ON etc, have ‘reserved’ a total of 23.6GW of grid links for new nuclear capacity with National Grid. That’s about the same as the wind power capacity we are aiming to have by 2020. But as EDF have pointed out, there are operational and economic reasons why a major expansion of nuclear would be incompatible with a major expansion of renewable electricity generation.

The Labour leadership, and I fear many party members, cannot see the lunacy of this approach, which could I undermine our attempts to deal with climate change.

I therefore, reluctantly, decided to resign from the Labour party, not least since I find it impossible to canvas on its behalf. A letter to the Guardian to this effect (9/9/09) attracted a lot of support form others who welcomed my principled stance. My conviction that I was right was further reinforced by Ed Miliband’s comment at the TUC later in Sept. that "'Nuclear power no thanks' today means 'climate change no doubt' tomorrow”. That’s almost on par with John Hutton’s comment to last years Labour Party Conference (22/9/08), where he was reported to have said : ‘No coal and no nuclear equals no lights, no power, no future’. And at this years Party Conference Gordon Brown also backed nuclear as a key innovation.

Given that SERA has become ever more closely identified with New Labour, to which it has become formally affiliated, and has seen fit to have pro-nuclear David Miliband as its president, despite SERA’s long held anti-nuclear policy, I have, with even more regret, also resigned from SERA.

I have long thought that what is now still called 'SERA' should by relabeled 'The Labour Environment Campaign' (its current sub title), so that a separate body called SERA could continue independently to promote the radical red and green policies it used to back. But that clearly is not going to happen, so sadly after many years of activism, I am moving on. I have to say I find the approach of groups like Workers Climate Action and the Climate Change Campaign Trade Union Group much more in keeping with SERA’s original grass roots approach.

These changes in affiliation will coincide with my retirement from the Open University after 38 years trying to relay rational and sustainable approaches to technology and energy policy to a wide audience. But I wont be going quietly into the night! For example, as well as working with trade union groups, and in addition to continuing with this and other blogs, I’ll be continuing to produce Renew, the bimonthly newsletter on renewable energy development and policies, on an independent basis: see http://www.natta-renew.org

David Elliott,
(Emeritus) Professor of Technology Policy,
The Open University

Fighting for wind against markets

2009-09-02T14:59:00.000-07:00

The workers occupation of the Vesta wind turbine plant on the Isle of White, threatened with closure with the potential loss of over 600 jobs there and in and an ancillary unit in Southampton, attracted massive support from green groups and trade unions- and, buttressed by the governments new Renewable Energy Strategy, there were calls for the plant to be nationalised. It was seen as a key struggle for green future- uniting ‘reds’ and ‘greens’.

As Green MEP Caroline Lucas put it in the Guardian (24/7): ‘In microcosm, the situation in the Isle of Wight demonstrates the extent to which ministers have ignored calls to promote the renewables industry- squandering opportunity after opportunity to create or protect jobs in fledgling green industries, as well as to meet the UK's greenhouse gas reduction targets’. But not everyone was so keen. The Independent pointed out that the plant made blades for the US market ‘which are unsuitable for UK wind farms’, adding that ‘Vestas is considering setting up a research and development facility in the area to help develop and test products suitable for the UK offshore market. If this is the case, it is easy to see why rash moves by the Government now could ultimately prove counterproductive’.

And the European Wind Energy Association told euobserver.com: ‘The solution is not nationalisation or bail-outs. The wind energy sector itself is much better at producing wind turbines than the government. It's a question of roles. The sector's role is to manufacture wind turbines and the government's role is to create a framework that attracts investment and regulation to ensure targets are met. I don't think we should mix up these roles.’

Vestas, the world's biggest wind energy firm, made pre-tax profits of €803 m last year, up from €579 m in 2007 and saw a quarterly sales rise of 59%, up to €1.1 billion, with its UK division also producing rising multi-million pound profits each year. But, it told euobsever.com that: ‘Due to the credit crunch, soft currency and lack of political action in the UK, we have had to cut down capacity.... Downing Street is doing a lot to support green jobs, but in the countryside there is a lot of opposition. We are being stalled locally. Hardly anything is happening onshore. The offshore market cannot justify us converting the facility to make products for the UK. The market is not big enough. We need onshore too.’

The British Wind Energy Association also backed the company, telling euobserver that ‘the market and the sector's becoming very, very competitive. A number of new entrants are coming from India and China, and it could be that the company needs to cut its costs, producing more cheaply and efficiently. This is to be expected - they have a clear obligation to shareholders to maximise profits.’ But talking later on to NewEnergy Focus, the BWEA put a slightly different spin on it: ‘There is now a direct correlation between nimbyism and the curtailment of the economic benefits of wind power. A positive factor of this unfortunate crisis is that the public are now aware of the fact that the opposition to wind farms is affecting the economic opportunities available to this country.’

That was certainly the line being adopted by the company and the government- it’s not our fault, it’s the NIMBY’s , although the company, like the BWEA, also suggested that its was the planning system that needed improvement: ‘The local planning process for the construction of new onshore wind power plants in the UK remains an obstacle to the development of a more favourable market for onshore wind power.’ (Edie.net) A Guardian editorial went further and suggested that what was really the problem was that, for a range of reasons, Vestas did not believe that the UK governments plans for wind and would really materialise on the scale hoped for.

The announcement of a grant of £6m for Vestas for R&D work on offshore wind technology, part of a new £1bn fund for offshore wind to be organised over the next 3 years by European Investment Bank (EIB) and 3 UK Banks, did not seem to alter the situation much - it was on-land wind that was the issue for the existing plant. Sadly the sit-in workers were evicted –and then 425 workers were sacked, but with 40 being offered jobs in the new R&D centre. Vestas said ‘this commercial decision was absolutely necessary to secure Vestas' competitiveness and create a regional balance between production and the demand for wind turbines.’

What are the lessons from all this? Well, BWEA Chair, Adam Bruce, told ClickGreen.org.uk, ‘the situation at Vestas is a tragedy for the employees, their families and the wider island community, but it does not represent a failure of wind energy, nor the market for wind energy in the UK. If anything, it shows that the
supply market for onshore turbines is very competitive’.

We might draw different conclusions about market failure and the wonders of market competition. And about how to respond. Bob Crow, General Secretary of the RMT union commented that the Vestas workers had ‘done more for the future of green energy and green jobs in the UK in 2 weeks than the government has done in 12 years’. Perhaps a bit overstated, but highlighting the need for reds and greens to work together.

For euobservers full analysis see http://euobserver.com/9/28493

Carbon Bubble bursting?

2009-08-01T15:50:00.000-07:00

The EU Emission Trading System is in a mess. The first round was widely accepted to be a disaster- free allocation of carbon credits meant that many companies could stay under the emission caps easily and sell off surplus credits, which in turn meant the value of the credits sank to almost nothing. The second round, from 2008, had been a bit better- until the recession hit. With energy demand falling, once again caps were easy to meet and some companies decided to off-load credits before their value collapsed again, thus making sure that happened! Their value fell to €8.2/tonne carbon, from €31the previous year.

Negotiations for the next round, from 2012, have been stymied by economically hard pressed countries like Poland claiming that they couldn't afford to buy credits- so that there had to be some free allocations again.

The end result of all this is that not many emissions have been reduced by the ETS so far, but some companies- and market traders- have done well financially. It’s a familiar story from other sectors - that's how markets behave, unless very carefully regulated. Now this particular bubble looks like it may burst.

In a way this is odd. Presssure for reducing emission is bound to grow, so the market for carbon credits should also grow - if it’s properly set up. Certainly governments in the EU have looked to the EU ETS as a way to provide income for stimulating new energy technologies- including nuclear power and renewables. And the EU ETS was meant to be a prototype for a global carbon trading system as proposed at the Kyoto Conference in 1997.

While that was a hope for the longer term, the Kyoto conference introduced the Clean Development Mechanism to support projects in the developing world. Sadly that too has been less than wonderful. As several reports (e.g. from WWF) have suggested, despite the process of application being agonisingly slow, some projects have allegedly been supported that were not 'additional' to what would have happened any way. And some bore very little relation to the original aims of radical CO2 reductions- most were low-grade process efficiency or substitution projects, done often for purely economic reasons; few involved renewables, which really needed the extra support.

In the end, this is what you might expect when you try to enlist market forces to deliver environmental gains. Without a lot of regulation, markets simply reward to rich and undermine the poor. And the carbon market doesn’t provide a stable enough economic context for investors to rely on – so we don’t get much new green energy technology. In desperation, there have been calls for government to underwrite the floor price of the EU ETS carbon credits- essentially asking the taxpayers to subsidise the market! Whether this would make potential investors in green energy less risk adverse is unclear. The carbon price level needed for that would probably very high- certainly much more than has ever been achieved so far. We’re talking €100 /tonne or more. A guaranteed floor price might stabilise the variations to some extent and possibly help push the overall level up, but not that far. More likely it would be the carbon markets’ various financial advisor who would to benefit- and although they evidently have suffered from the recession, there are perhaps more deserving cases for state aid!

Connect and Compete

2009-07-01T04:15:00.000-07:00

Competitive markets, liberalisation and privatisation were touted as being the way to cut prices, stimulate innovation and improve services. In the energy sector the reality has proved to be very different. The privatisation of the UK’s nationalised electricity sector meant the replacement of the Central Electricity Generating Board by National Power and Powergen and the creation of a dozen or so new regional electricity supply companies- from the old regional boards. That was meant lead to competition in a new liberalised market context. But reconcentration rapidly occurred, plus vertical and horizontal buy-outs. The UK power sector is now dominated by oversees companies- Germany’s E.ON and RWE, and the French EDF.

Despite continued resistance (e.g. France has dragged it feet on the privatisation of EDF) the European Commission is still adamant that competition is the way ahead, and it is desperate to create a fully competitive single EU energy market. That is one reason why it has backed the pan- EU ‘Supergrid’ idea, linking up markets and generators via a High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) grid network across the EU. However, the big EU utilities seem less keen. In addition to improving the overall efficiency of energy production and use across the EU, the Supergrid could make it possible to balance the variable inputs from smaller-scale/distributed renewables like wind farms around the EU. But it may also threaten the market power of some of the large utilities- most of who are much more keen on large scale centralised nuclear.

David Andrews, the co-ordinator of the Claverton Energy Group, a network of UK energy practitioners, says that ‘Many commentators believe that the Supergrid, whilst good for energy consumers, is not necessarily good for the big utilities, since it will make many of their existing power stations obsolete, mean fewer new power stations have to be constructed, and lead to less sales of power station fuels by again selecting the most efficient stations this time at a transnational level’. He concluded ‘It is for this reason that it is believed by many commentators that the Supergrid cannot be merely left to market forces’.

There seems little chance of EU taking on a major role in actually setting up a supergrid - as a shared public asset. It’s more likely just to offer grants to the private sector and then seek to regulate the new market. Some smaller specialist companies do seem interested- e.g. the pioneering Irish Airtricty, and the newly established Mainstream Renewables, along with Norwegian transmission company Imera Power. With 150 million euoro’s on offer from the EU for a North Sea Supergrid linking up offshore wind farms, that’s not surprising.

There has also been interest shown in another supergrid type project- the installation of focussed solar thermal ‘Concentrating Solar Power’ plants in North Africa, linked back to the EU by undersea HVDC power grids. It’s an ambitious idea- 400 billion euros for 100GW of CSP capacity. But with one possibility being the availability a new lucrative EU ‘Feed In Tariff’ for imported solar power, Deutsche Bank, insurer Munich Re, Siemens and utility giants RWE and E.ON. seem to be keen to explore it. So it could be that the big companies will get involved with some Supergrid type projects- if a new market emerges and profit is available. In which case, it will be vital for the EU to regulate how it’s done- to ensue that its done right. For example, what would be the terms of trade offered to the North African countries hosting the projects?

Of course, for the big utilities, the attraction of the supergrid may not just be for linking in to desert solar and North Sea wind: they may also see it an answer to the problem of finding a market for the excess power that would be produced at low demand periods by a large new EU nuclear programme. If it’s a private grid, what’s to stop them?

These issues are all pending- it will be a while before the supergrid gets going. But a small example of how things can go without a wider longer-term perspective is already emerging in relation to the current series of the UK’s off shore wind farms. Most of these project are now being sited several miles off the coast, linked to land via sea-bed marine cables. There are various ways in which these could be arranged. So far however it seems to be a case of each offshore project having their own parallel (and very expensive) links back to shore. In some cases that seems likely to involve duplication of effort, with links to rival projects running close to each other, in parallel. It would arguably be more rational and cheaper overall to have a network of offshore links, with possibly a single link back to shore for each region, offering a common service for each project to use. That is even more the case as we go further out to sea with more wind farms, and would be vital if we also build links across the North Sea to the continent- as part of the EU supergrid concept.

However, in a submission in March 2009 (FBEN 29) to the new Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, E.ON commented: ‘A super grid connecting offshore wind farms to adjacent countries is an exciting proposal, but it is unclear whether this is the most cost effective route for connecting new offshore wind. Timely delivery of the supergrid will be an issue. For example, round three offshore windfarms should not be delayed because the connection of a zone is dependent upon a wider interconnection project’.

Ofgem, the energy regulator, has also noted that the advantages with the parallel ‘point to point’ radial approach is that it ‘allows generators to proceed individually and avoid delays due to third parties’, but it has said that it’s also happy with the more integrated network approach. Ofgem nevertheless got a pretty rough ride on this issue at last years BWEA wind conference - it was argued that the proposed grid regime would not encourage joined up networks, and that change was needed to ensure collaborative development and a strategic approach. Do we really need a host of separate lines just to protect competition in the short term?

That was certainly an issue for Green MEP Claude Turmes, who was the European Parliament's lead negotiator for the Renewable Energy Directive. Speaking at the UK Renewable Energy Associations annual conference recently, he claimed that the competitive tender process favoured by Ofgem was delaying grid connections for offshore wind projects: ‘The UK approach, imposed by Ofgem, for competitive bids for chunks of 40 km cables for offshore, is not very productive, to put it mildly. You have to get rid of Ofgem's over-liberalised idea, by which you can have competition on grid installation.’

It’s the same old story- competition often undermines progress, and buttresses the power of the powerful, while weak regulation does little to alter the situation.

Nuclear going (for) broke?

2009-06-01T03:19:00.000-07:00

The official line is that nuclear power, based on new technology like the European Pressurised-water Reactor (EPR), can be an economic energy option and does not need subsidies. However, this is beginning to look a little frayed given that the first two EPRs, being built in Finland and France, are both behind schedule and over budget.

Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, now over three years behind schedule, was originally budgeted at €3bn, but is now expected to cost at least €4.5bn. The follow-up French EPR at Flamanville is around nine months behind schedule, with the cost of power now being expected to be around 20% more than planned- around 55 euros a megawatt hour, instead of the 46 euros announced when the project was launched in May 2006.

Meanwhile, South African power company Eskom has decided not to press ahead with a planned nuclear build programme, with an EPR being one option, saying the costs were too high .

In the UK, most of the running is being made by the French company EDF ,who have talked of building possibly 4 new plants here. In July 10 2006 Vincent de Rivaz, chief executive of the UK subsidiary of EDF, told the Times “Nuclear does not require any form of subsidy. We are investors in waiting but we are not waiting for subsidy,” a view he confirmed in a talk to the Parliamentary Group on Energy on 4th March 2008. The government has said similar things- it would not provide subsidies. But on May 26 2009 Vincent de Rivaz told the Financial Times that a "level playing field" had to be created that would allow the nuclear industry to compete with other low-emissions electricity sources such as wind power. He said "We have a final investment decision to make in 2011 and, for that decision to give the go-ahead, the conditions need to be right," adding that "We will not deliver decarbonised electricity without the right signal from carbon prices."

He suggested that the government needed to put a floor under the price of carbon permits in the EU's emissions trading scheme. That could mean that, if the price of carbon drops, as is has done recently ( it fell to €8.2, from €31 last summer), the taxpayer would have to step in. Although that would only be an indirect subsidy (raising the cost of fossil rivals), the FT interpreted EDFs new line as meaning ‘New nuclear power stations will not be built in Britain unless the government provides financial support for the industry’.

Unsurprisingly anti- nuclear groups were horrified. Communities Against Nuclear Expansion (CANE), based in Suffolk, called on the government to resist requests for greater subsidies and to stick by their policy of only allowing new nuclear power stations to be built if the full cost of generation, including decommissioning and a fair share of the cost of waste disposal, is borne by the industry. It noted that ‘In spite of this policy, the government has already agreed to subsidise the industry by covering their liability in the case of a serious accident and by its policy of taking over responsibility for nuclear waste fifty years after it is transferred to the government, even though the waste will need to be managed for several thousand years. In addition the government has agreed to bribe communities by giving incentives to house long-term nuclear waste storage facilities said to be in the region of £3 to £6 billion. This violates a long-standing principle in the UK that the polluter should pay for the results of his activities. The British public have been asked to pay for the clearing up the mess made by the last generation of nuclear power, at a cost of untold billions of pounds. Now we are being asked to pay for the industry to create even more.”

However they may yet get stopped in their tracks- or at least slowed down. A group of leading UK academics, members of the Nuclear Consultation Group (NCG) have challenged the legitimacy of the nuclear ‘justification’ process- a currently underway preliminary review process that is required by the EU as a high-level assessment to ensure the benefits of new-build nuclear stations outweigh potential detriments. The academics have written to the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) calling for a public inquiry to open this process up- an option that is allowed in the arrangements. The Government guidance states that ‘where the Justifying Authority considers that any application is of sufficient importance and wide public interest, they may cause a public hearing or other inquiry to be held. It is expected that inquiries under the regulations would only be held in relation to major or contentious classes or types of practice.’

Well that seems to be exactly what the new nuclear programme, with new types of plant, adds up to. And as the NCG note ‘Justification is regarded as a conclusive process thereby precluding further debate on substantive issues at the planning stage’, so it’s the last chance to have any real say. But, in the end, it comes down to a decision by the Secretary of State, Ed Miliband, who as Justifying Authority, acts as both judge and jury. And it’s doubtful if he, or the government, will want to open it all up to public debate again, unless forced to.

More billions for fusion?

2009-05-04T10:42:00.000-07:00

More billions for Fusion?

Climate change worries many of us, but in the back of many peoples mind is the belief that technology will come to the rescue. One of the big hopes is nuclear fusion- not messy uranium fission, with all its problems, but allegedly clean and hopefully prolific hydrogen based nuclear fusion. However, it’s a long time coming – and it’s costing a lot. $20 billion so far globally and more soon.

In response to a Parliamentary question in April, it was reported that the Government provided support for nuclear fusion research in the UK through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council with an allocation of £26 million for 2007-8.
In addition it was noted that ‘The UK does not fund international fusion research directly, though it contributes to the Euratom European fusion research programme through its payments to the EU budget’. The main focus for that programme is the ITER project, now being planned at Cadarache in Southern France. The estimated cost of ITER has risen from £9 billion to, reportedly, around £18 billion. It’s a joint EU, Russia, US, China, Japan and S. Korea project toward which it seems the UK is contributing around £20m p.a.

For comparison, in response to a Parliamentary question on 25 March, it was reported that government expenditure on research and development for all the renewable energy sources in 2007-8 was £ 15.92 million via the Research Councils and £ 7.53m via the Technology Strategy Board. In addition it was noted that the Research Councils are providing funding of £13.88m over the period 2004-09 for the UK Energy Research Centre (which undertakes a range of research relating to renewable energy) and energy is included in the work of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (which has some £15.8m funding from the Research Councils over 2000-08).

At most then, in total renewable are getting around £28m p.a. at present. That is pretty much the same as it was decades ago, even ignoring inflation since then. For example, according to DTI statistics, Departmental funding for renewables was £24.8m in 1991-92, £25.6m in 1992-93 and £25.2m in 1993-94, all in ‘money of the day’ terms, though it fell off thereafter, as the then Conservative government imposed public sector spending cuts.

Why fusion?

Fusion is clearly getting favourable treatment compared to renewables- which after all include a wide range of technologies, a dozen or more very different systems, not just one. Does this make sense? The claim is that it offers, as the EURATOM web site says, ‘an almost limitless supply of clean energy’.

The prospects for fusion are actually rather mixed. The physics may be sorted, up to a point. The UK’s JET experiment at Culham managed to generate 16MW briefly. But the engineering is going to be complicated. How do you generate electricity from a radioactive plasma at 200 million degrees C? The answer it seems is by absorbing the neutron flux in a surrounding blanket that then gets hot, and has pipes running through to extract the heat, which is then used it to boil water and raise steam –as with traditional power plants. Not very 21st century…

As yet, few people would hazard a guess as to the economics of such systems. The ITER web site (www.iter.org) says ‘it is not yet possible to say whether nuclear fusion based on magnetic confinement will produce a competitive energy source’.

But at least there won’t be any fission products to deal with. However, the neutron flux will activate materials in the fusion reactor which will interfere with its operation, and will have to be stripped out regularly- so there will still be a radioactive waste storage problem, albeit a lesser one. The materials will only have to be kept secure for a hundred years or so, rather than thousands of years as with some fission products.

The risk of leaks and catastrophic accidents is said to be lower than with fission. Fusion reactions are difficult to sustain, so in any disturbance to normal operation the reaction would be likely to shut itself down very rapidly. But it is conceivable that some of the radioactive materials might escape, if for example the superhot high energy 'plasma' beam accidentally came into contact with and punctured the reactor containment.

The main concern is the radioactive tritium that would be in the core of the reactor: Tritium, which is also used in nuclear weapons, is an isotope of hydrogen, and, if accidentally released, could be easily dispersed in the environment as tritiated water, with potentially disastrous effects. To put it simply, it could reach parts of the body which other isotopes couldn’t.

Finally what about the fuel source? The basic fuels in the most likely configuration to be adopted would be deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, which is found in water, and tritium, another isotope of hydrogen, which can be manufactured from Lithium. Water is plentiful but lithium reserves are not that extensive, at least on this planet. Even so, it is claimed that they might provide sufficient tritium for perhaps 1000 years, depending on the rate of use. It also presumably depends on the competing use in Li Ion batteries in consumer electronics and possibly soon, on a much larger scale, in electric vehicles.

That could be a problem for the future, but there is a long way to go before we need worry about fuel scarcity. The ITER project is small (500 Megawatt rated) and won’t start operating until 2018, and, even assuming all goes well, it’s only a step toward a commercial pilot plant. And that at best is decades away.

Too little, too late

The UK Atomic Energy Authority say that fusion ‘has the potential to supply 20% of the world’s electricity by the year 2100.’ That’s not a misprint – 20%, if all goes well, in 90 years time. Renewables already supply that now globally, including hydro, and the new renewables like wind, solar, tidal and wave power, are moving ahead rapidly. Wind power capacity is at 120,000 Megawatts globally now and expanding at around 30% per annum. Given planning permission, wind farms can be quick to install, in a matter of months, compared to years or even decades for fission projects. Solar thermal is at 120,000 Megawatts (th) and also expanding rapidly, with Concentrated Solar being the next big thing, along with PV solar, which is even quicker to deploy- we’re talking weeks if not days. Then come wave and tidal- a huge as yet mainly untapped resource. By 2020 the European Commission wants to have 20% of the EU total energy, not just electricity, coming from renewable, and there are scenarios with renewables supplying 50% of global energy by 2050, and perhaps earlier.

By contrast, fusion seems likely to be a long-shot high-tech gamble with a surprisingly small payoff: we need to start responding to the climate problem now, not in 90 years time. Renewables, along with energy efficiency, already offer us at least part of the solution. So why then are we spending so much taxpayers money on fusion? It might eventually be useful for powering space craft. But on Earth? Wouldn’t it make more sense to speed the development and deployment of full range of renewable technologies, and make use of the free energy we get from the fusion reactor we already have- the sun.

Market power undermines the future

2009-04-03T07:12:00.000-07:00

The Crisis - What’s gone wrong?

Global economics are in disarray, and even market enthusiasts like Lord Browne are now saying something must be done. The energy market, like other markets, has become increasing competitive as regulatory mechanisms have been relaxed over the years. In response, the big energy companies have either tried to develop monopolies (e.g. EDF, E.ON), or more recently, to back away from what they see as risky investment in things like renewables (e.g Shell, BP). So the UK renewables programme has been hit.

In response the government has tried to reduce the risk by imposing a draconian new planning system - so that opposition to new projects (renewables, but also of course nuclear) can be squashed. The energy minister has added moral persuasion as an extra pressure- being opposed to wind is ‘antisocial’. This stream roller approach is likely to create a lot of resentment and will possibly make the situation worse.

The government has also continued with the Renewables Obligation, which provides over the odds support for the most competitive projects e.g all on-land wind projects, regardless of their efficiency, still get 1ROC/MWh, which wates a lot of money that could be spent on other projects.

What they could have done is adopt a Feed In Tariff (FIT) across the board - that, with a system of price degression as used in Germany, would have matched funding to projects and reduced risks for all projects, including for new areas of renewable development, like wave and tidal power. Instead all we’ve got is a promise of a FIT just for small projects (under 5MW), and not until next Spring.

It’s not clear if this makes too much sense. Grant aid has been suggested as a better approach for small community projects, although not along the centralised lines adopted in the disastrous now abandoned Low Carbon Building Programme. A more decentralised approach could be more effective- perhaps via local part-private, part-public Energy Service companies (ESCO’s), who can develop projects based on local knowledge within a loosely competitive market framework.

At the national and international level the governments focus is on reducing risk in terms of ‘security of supply’. This seems to be interpreted very narrowly- as mainly concerning gas and oil supplies. A more creative approach would be to look to the opportunities that could be opened up by a pan-EU supergrid, linking in new renewables resources from around and outside the EU- as opposed to trying to rely on diminishing and polluting oil and gas reserves in politically unstable or dubious middle eastern areas.

There is some EU enthusiasm for the supergrid idea, but in terms of new energy options, the UK and French governments, and the big German and French power companies, seem more interested in nuclear power, possibly since they think this will allow them to maintain (respectively) their political and market control. Evidently they see the idea of opening up markets to North African solar (CSP in Morocco Algeria, Tunisia etc), or wind power from the near east (Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan etc have huge potential wind resources), as more problematic. Odd that, since they seem quite happy to rely increasingly on these areas for oil and gas. But maybe they think these resources can be more easily controlled. And certainly these conventional fossil sources fit more comfortable with current technological and market arrangements- short term and climate threatening though they may be.

Nuclear vs. wind

2009-03-08T21:46:00.000-07:00

How to make nuclear power even more risky- and kill off wind power

Nuclear plants can’t easily vary their output and are usually run flat out 24/7, which, given that they are very capital intensive, also helps their economics. However this means they can’t be used to back-up variable renewables like wind. Moreover, if we have a lot of nuclear capacity, as is now planned, there would be less room for electricity generated from wind farms , at least during low energy demand periods. For example the UK’s baseload, the low level of energy generation capacity required at night and at other low demand periods, is 20GW, and there is talk of nuclear being expanded to provide much if not all of this. At present it’s only at about10GW. And yet there are also proposals for 25GW of wind power. In the absence of significant storage capacity or export potential, much of this would therefore be in excess of requirements. We only have about 2GW of pumped storage capacity and a 2 GW in cross channel grid links.

In its 2008 consultation document on its renewable energy strategy, the UK government admitted that the UK nuclear fleet was ‘designed to run continuously and is not well suited to short-term response to shifts in the supply-demand balance, for safety as well as economic reasons’. So it says ‘when wind speeds are high and demand is low, for example during the summer or overnight... the system may not be able to absorb all of the output of both wind and nuclear generating plants’

However, they say that ‘nuclear plants can be designed to run flexibly and this has been shown to operate effectively in practice by the experience of the Flamanville 3 plant in France. We therefore believe that the expectation of a greater penetration of intermittent generation is not in itself a barrier to the deployment of new nuclear capacity’.

Unfortunately, they seem to have it wrong. Flamanville 3 hasn’t actually been built yet. Indeed construction work on it was recently stopped when the nuclear inspectorate found faults in the concrete mix being used. Leaving this hiccup
aside, it is true that some of France’s existing plants can and do load follow- the Pressurised Water reactors they use are more capable of that than the UK’s gas cooled reactors. We could presumably build similarly variable plants in the UK.

Sinclair Knight Merz (SKM) consultants, in a report to BERR, agreed. Although they admit that ‘increased amounts of nuclear plant in a system with high penetration of wind would invariably result in higher curtailment,’ they suggest that wind curtailment can be limited by using variable nuclear plants. They report claims that the Flamanville plant should be able to run down to 25% of output. However they add that, while the potential for flexible operation ‘are considerable, it does not necessarily mean that it will be regularly operated in such mode, as other considerations such as life reduction and safety may discourage full use of this capability’

Basically reactors don’t like being cycled through large temperature ranges regularly and running up and down to full power also creates short-lived radioactive by-products which can disrupt efficient operation. These operational problems may well be worsened by the fact that the new reactor designs now being developed seek to increase the fuel burn up ratios- in order to improve the economics of the plants.

However, in addition to the fact that the spent fuel will be much more radioactive since more fission products will be produced, this approach may also involve safety problems related to plant operation - existing fuel cladding materials may not maintain their integrity over the longer period, especially in emergency shut down situations.

New reactor technology is clearly being developed which may make it possible to run nuclear plants in ways which make them more compatible with variable renewables like wind. But this introduces new risks. The issue that arises then is whether we should be relying on potentially risky adjustments nuclear technology to avoid wasting wind energy? As wind expands and other variable renewables are added to the mix, including wave and tidal power, the need to curtail nuclear, so as to make way, will grow. Unless that is, we decide to keep nuclear running at full power and dump increasing amounts of renewable power at low demand times. Or invest in energy storage which is an expensive option.

This crazy competition between sensible sustainable energy options and the dead end option of nuclear power is what we’ve come to expect from the capitalist system, which is obsessed with shoring up the large companies that it has created. Most of the running in the UK will be made by the French company EDF, which now owns British Energy and will presumably build French EPR reactors here. But not take the waste they produce! Just the profits. While seeing off wind power…. and introducing extra risks. Business as usual it seems.

My Green Techie blogs

2009-02-18T10:50:00.000-08:00

What I thought I would do when invited to submit regular items was to try to inject a bit of factual info on the issues I know about- energy and climate policy - drawing out the wider political points. It's usually though the same political point- we have a government wedded to market competition as the arbiter of value and that is stalling efforts to steer us towards dealing with climate change. And we don't have the power to resist or change this situation- at the moment. Information is power of sorts though, so I will persist. Surviving climate change isn't 'single issue' politics (it's a prerequisite for any sort of politics or society) but the issues that are involved link to the wider left agenda- who controls the way we develop industrially, economically and socially.

Don't get fooled again

2009-02-18T10:45:00.000-08:00

Tidal Choices

Don’t get fooled again

We need tidal power- but not this way

There are two basic approaches to harvesting tidal energy. Barrages across a tidal estuary can be used to trap high tides, with the head of water then being let out through hydro turbines. This is how the 240MW barrage on the Rance estuary in France works and it is the basis of the proposed 8.6GW Severn Tidal Barrage. By contrast, with tidal current turbines, the energy in the horizontal tidal flows is harvested - in effect they are underwater wind mills. Proponents of the latter argue that, as small free-standing structures with relatively slowly rotating blades, they should have much less environmental impact than tidal range barrages, which block off entire estuaries, and they can be installed on a piecemeal, modular basis. The same is true for wave energy systems.

Unsurprisingly the Severn Barrage is strongly opposed by most environmental group, who see it as a major ecological threat. Moreover a study produced for WWF/ RSPB et al , claimed that its electricity would cost around two times more than that from most other renewable projects.

There are also some key technical issue. A large single barrage on the Severn would only deliver power for a couple of hours twice in every (roughly) twenty four hour tidal cycle, and given that the lunar cycle shifts continually, this power output would not often be matched well to peak power demands. As a result, at least in the absence of major energy storage facilities, although it could generate 4.6 % of the UK’s electricity on average over a year, not all of it could be used. A study by the generally pro-barrage Sustainable Development Commission, concluded that, by the time it was built, the Severn Barrage would only displace about 0.92 % of UK emission from gas fired plants- not much for the estimated £15billion capital cost.

By contrast it has been argued that a distributed network of several smaller tidal barrages or lagoons and /or large numbers of tidal current projects, located at different points around the coast, would be much more efficient and flexible, since the arrival time of the tides is delayed by several hours at each point.

However there is much industry support for the large 8.6GW Severn Barrage, since it uses known (hydro) technology. Moreover, it also has strong political support. It would clearly be a very visible commitment for a government keen to be seen to be supporting renewables.

The government has launched a new study of tidal energy options for the Severn Estuary, looking at large tidal barrages across the estuary and large tidal lagoons- bounded reservoirs. One of the issues is how such schemes might be funded, with some form of public support being a possibility.

However, apart from a 1.3 GW ‘tidal fence’ concept, with tidal current turbines mounted in a non-invasive permeable causeway, tidal current turbine projects are not included in the study- and even tidal fence has been dropped from an interim shortlist. Tidal current projects are evidently seen as being best developed by private finance within the context of the Renewables Obligation, with some initial extra support via Marine Renewables Deployment Fund. But as noted in an earlier Blog, that’s not happening yet- none of the dozens of projects being developed in the UK have proved to be eligible for the funding. Meanwhile the Severn Tidal Review won’t even report finally, after further rounds of consultation, until 2010. It’s all so painfully slow…

2009-02-05T11:03:00.000-08:00

Marine Renewables: missing out again?

2009-02-05T10:51:00.000-08:00

The UK has a large marine energy resource - wave energy and free-standing tidal current turbine projects might supply 20% of UK electricity, and possibly much more.

In 2001 the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, commented bitterly that ‘given the UK's abundant natural wave and tidal resource, it is extremely regrettable and surprising that the development of wave and tidal energy technologies has received so little support from the Government’.

Since then some funding has been made available- for example some small grants from research councils and the Carbon Trust and the governments £42m Marine Renewables Deployment Fund. However, although there are many dozens of wave and tidal current turbine projects underway around the country, none so far has been eligible for support from the MRDF- which requires them to have three months operation at commercial scale in the sea.

So what’s gone wrong? Basically it’s the familiar story- a government fixation on ‘leaving it up to the market’. As the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology put it ‘Government policy is to avoid

‘picking winners’, instead letting the market converge on the best approaches’. So the research teams are meant to push ahead, with a few small grants, and then private sector investors and companies should deciding which projects are worthy for follow up - using the MRDF to reduce their risks, backed up by the Renewables Obligation, which will offer revenue support for commercial projects.

But we’re stalled at the start. In a review in 2007, the governments Renewable Advisory Board commented that ‘the MRDF is fundamentally a sound scheme. It, in itself, is not a failure, but the R&D process has failed to supply the technologies that the MRDF was established to support’.

It’s not for lack of enthusiasm. Indeed it is getting hard to find a UK University that does not have a wave or tidal hardware or assessment project underway. There are also many new start-up companies, some of them spun out of University groups.

The pioneers were Wavegen, with their 500kW Limpet device built into a rocky outcrop of the shore of the Isle of Islay in Scotland. And subsequently there have been some other successes- notably the SeaGen tidal current turbine, a 1.2MW version of which has been installed in Strangford Narrows in Northern Ireland, and the Pelamis ‘wave snake’ device, with a 2.3 MW project being installed in Portugal. Some ambitious projects have also been proposed. For example there are plans for an 8MW tidal farm off the west coast of the UK, using Lunar energy’s sea-bed mounted ‘ducted rotor’ system. But most of the rest are still at the prototype and testing stage.

Interestingly though, the Scottish Executive is proving to be more effective with its Marine support programme, having allocated £13m in direct granted aid to nine wave and tidal current projects. This reflects its enthusiasm for renewables generally- Scotland already gets 20% of its electricity form renewables and has the very ambitious target of getting 50% by 2020.

The UK is still in the lead technologically in both areas, but new marine technologies are emerging in other EU countries and in the US, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere, with S Korea having a major commitment in this area. As a result, there are concerns that the UK’s lead in wave and tidal power may be lost- already several overseas developers have proposed projects in the UK using their own technology. It would be tragic if the UK, with its long history of marine and offshore engineering excellence, and its very large marine energy potential, does not the take the challenge seriously.