Hinkley in La La Land

 ‘The reactor at Hinkley, as well as being the first of its kind in the UK, will also be the last of its kind, and any future build will be a new design. I cannot believe that independent due diligence would give this project the green light as it stands. The decision has been strongly influenced by political opportunism and fear of loss of face.’ So said pro-nuclear stalwart Prof. Ian Fells, in the Times 19/9/16.

Concerns about annoying China, by spurning their offer of £6bn in inward investment in the project, were certainly there, but so were concerns about giving China more control over the UK energy system. However former energy minister Lord Howell said that, rather than worrying about whether China will be a good nuclear partner, we should worry about EDF: ‘The real risks are that EDF's financial affairs are wobbly, its supplier's affairs are wobbly, the design has never yet worked anywhere, it's a design that's unproven. And we are going to be really in unknown territory as we build this thing.’ www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/press-releases/public-support-hinkley-new-low-20160913 
www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/business-37320034 

There are of course protections in case of financial problems, including contract cut off deadlines, and under the renegotiated agreement, should it go bust, ‘the government will be able to prevent the sale of EDF’s controlling stake prior to the completion of construction’.

Moreover, the legal framework means the government can intervene in the sale of EDF's stake once (if!) Hinkley is operational. There’s still the Austrian legal objection to be heard and the results of the forging quality tests on Areva’s steel containment, but for now EDF is obviously happy. So its next EPR project, at Sizewell, may soon be up for consideration, along with the other UK projects- Wyfa and Olbury (Hitachi ABWR), Moorside (Westinghouse AP1000) & Bradwell (a Chinese reactor). We will be hearing more about that: www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-30/china-to-submit-homegrown-nuclear-reactor-design-for-u-k-review.

Meanwhile though, the Guardian’s nuclear evangelist George Monbiot, who opposed Hinkley as an expensive distraction, sang the praises of ‘small modular reactors that use nuclear waste as fuel’: the integral fast reactor variant ‘could supply all the UK’s energy needs for 500 years by consuming the nuclear waste stockpile.’www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/15/nuclear-power-no-hinkley-point-yes-atomic-energy

A bit fantastical- with many cost, safety and security unknowns and risks. Even the pro nuclear ETI said that SMRs wont be available, at best, until 2030: www.eti.co.uk/small-modular-reactors-could-be-operating-in-the-uk-by-2030-according-to-a-new-eti-report/ And for now, dazzled by the promise of jobs, the TUC and  GMB, along with the government, seem delighted to build conventional large plants, starting with Hinkley!

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/16/hinkley-point-good-enws-workers-economy-not-stop

I will be coming back to the union’s position in my next post, but it does seem very short sighted. Renewables can also create jobs and they are much faster to deploy, in weeks or months for PV and wind, not up to a decade, as with large nuclear projects. And, quite apart from the unique safety, security and waste management worries with nuclear, it’s expensive. Indeed, as even the government now admits, more expensive than some renewables.

In its three page ‘Value for Money’ assessment in relation to the Hinkley project, the government says its £92.50/MWh strike price is ‘above the comparable cost range of large-scale solar Photovoltaics (PV) (£65-92/MWh) and onshore wind (£49-90/MWh)’. However, it claims that ‘in order for large-scale solar and onshore wind to produce the same amount of electricity provided by HPC, there would be significant upgrades to the grid required (such as connection and planning costs) as well as increased costs to keep the system in balance’.

Well yes, balancing might add 10-15% to the cost, on the basis of CCC estimates by Imperial College: www.theccc.org.uk/publication/system-integration-costs-for-alternative-low-carbon-generation-technologies-policy-implications/  Moreover, grids and balancing have to be upgraded anyway since we plan to use more renewables, offshore wind especially, even with Hinkley on line. The government says that Hinkley comes out at ‘towards the bottom of the comparable cost range of offshore wind (£81-132/MWh)’ but that may now be dated- offshore projects are going ahead for 2020 at ~ £54/MWh off Denmark. Even with grid costs added that would still beat Hinkley, and who know what offshore wind costs will be by 2025 when Hinkley might start up- 20-30% cost falls have been predicted. http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2016/09/13/experts-anticipate-significant-continued-reductions-wind-energy-costs/

There could also be some extra unexpected nuclear costs. The large cost of dealing with nuclear waste and eventual plant decommissioning (put at £5.9-7.2bn) is meant to be covered by the CfD strike price, with contingency extras added in to the legal agreement. Insurance cost similarly. But who knows if these provisions will be sufficient- all previous clean up cost estimates have proved wrong: www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/30/hinkley-point-c-developers-face-72bn-cleanup-bill-at-end-of-nuclear-plants-

As for fossil fuel alternatives, the government says that Hinkley comes out at ‘towards the top of the comparable cost range of gas Combined Cycle Gas Turbines (CCGT) (£47-96/MWh)’ but ‘towards the bottom of the comparable cost range of first-of-a-kind commercial carbon capture and storage (£77-249/MWh) for delivery in 2025’. It has dumped CCS for now, but it is still keen on CCGT, presumably using shale gas, increased emissions not withstanding. However, perhaps a little deviously, it argues that Hinkley offers extra value by ‘avoiding the costs of replacing the gas fleet and avoiding the rising carbon costs of gas generation post-2050’ and also by unlocking the option of ‘further new nuclear’. But renewables could avoid all of that, arguably at lower cost. Certainly by 2050 and probably by the time Hinkley might run. Or any SMR’s: if, as it seems, the earliest for them is 2030,  by then renewables could be clearly dominant, if not before.                                               

That is clearly not how the government sees it. On Hinkley, it puts the total cost over its whole 35-year index-linked CfD at £11-21bn (2012 prices, discounted to 2012), although the NAO say there is likely to be a £30bn top up: www.nao.org.uk/report/nuclear-power-in-the-uk. But sticking with the governments lower figures, the NAO says: ‘Our most realistic projections mean that around £12 from energy bills will go towards supporting the plant in 2030’. Whereas, if Hinkley ‘is delayed by three years and offshore wind and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) are needed to fill the gap, it would lead to a £24 annual increase on household electricity bills on average from 2026 to 2030 (2012 prices). Similarly, if onshore wind and large- scale solar PV were to fill the gap, consumer bills would increase annually by £21. Gas plant coming on to fill the gap would see bills £6 cheaper per year, but this would undermine the UK’s ability to meet legally binding decarbonisation targets’. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148115303001  

Greenpeace said ‘The numbers speak for themselves. In the unlikely event Hinkley is working sometime in the second half of the next decade, renewable energy will be much cheaper, yet British consumers will still be forced to pay over the odds for nuclear power’. It’s hard not to agree. Though that doesn’t explain why the government is still pushing for it- something I will look at in my next post in this series.  

The government’s Value for Money analysis is at: www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/556917/3_-_Value_for_Money_Assessment.pdf

Growth and change: the debate continues

The environmental case for balanced, low or zero economic growth and a stable state economy is strong, in terms of reducing impacts from ever-expanding resource use. However, there are problems. Competitive pressures, one of the main drivers for growth, are not all bad.  The need to compete with rivals in the market place leads to technical innovation- so as to cut costs. In itself, cutting costs by reducing resource use and waste, and increasing efficiency and productivity, are good things, as long as that is achieved by technology improvement, not by increasing the level of exploitation of labour or the ecosystem.  But if its done just to expand sales and sustain profits in the face of others trying to do the same, regardless of real needs and planetary limits, then we are headed for social and eco-disaster. 

In a stable state economy, it would still make sense to improve the efficiency of resource use so that needs could be met while using less resources and minimizing impacts. In a Science as Culture journal paper looking back at the history of Alternative Technology (AT), Peter Harper talked of using efficiency increases ‘to reduce environmental and other impacts’ and sees this as ‘one working definition of AT, shared with steady-state or de-growth proposals for modern economies as a whole’. He contrasts this with the present situation in which he says ‘extra efficiency is invariably used to expand functionality in congenial but ultimately unnecessary directions.’ www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09505431.2016.1164406  

This may only be partly true- the main driver at present is surely to sustain and expand profits and market shares with improved ‘functionality’ only being a means to that end, and with real needs often not being considered.  Under a no-growth ecologically limited needs-based system, technological improvement could allow some increase in what is available for sustainable use, qualitatively and also possibly quantitatively, within the eco-defined limits. That would be a social and ecological decision, not an economic one, although, unless we want to impose some form of totally planned and constrained consumer society, with quota’s and rationing for everything consumed, there may well still be markets and price differentials to enable people to chose amongst qualitatively different products and services, within regulatory eco-limits and subject to fair trading labour protection rules. However, the main driver for innovation would not be commercial success, it would be environmental success and social needs and costs, broadly defined. If consumption is not to be micro-managed, that implies some overall limits, assessment processes and planning frameworks, operating locally, nationally and globally, on the supply side. We can see something like this happening in the emerging global agreements on carbon emissions, although they are fought at every step by those wishing to retain free global markets and unrestricted growth. Assuming this opposition could be overcome, could regulation be expanded effectively and equitably to cover everything? With the best will in the world, regulation can be very bureaucrats and potentially open to corruption…Can that be avoided? Is there an appetite for change?

 Optimists look to the rise of new or revived grass-roots political movements in the West and elsewhere, but the scale of the problem is daunting- going well beyond just eco-issues and with populist movements as likely to go to the right as to the progressive left, given how easy it is to promote simpleminded explanations of what the problems are. We live in troubled times. But that does mean that change is likely. Let’s hope we can make it for the good, with the Green movement playing a key role. That’s one thing that does need to grow. It helps to create a new climate, in all senses. And while there is so much more to do, we should remember just how far we’ve come e.g. in the energy policy area. Even if its still mainly about replacing old tech with new tech, it has cut emissions and the shift in what’s now seen as possible is dramatic: www.mng.org.uk/gh/scenarios.htm As is the shift by the bastions of the old economy, with the Economist saying ‘Britain should cancel its nuclear white elephant and spend the billions on making renewables work’. Next- can they, and the rest of us, look to a change in attitudes to growth and a move to a stable state economy? That debate is a live one: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271506217_Degrowth_A_Vocabulary_for_a_New_Era and  http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-4446.12181/full

A key element in the debate is the question of how much lifestyles will have to change Interestingly, in his Science as Culture paper, Peter Harper says that, ‘for entirely pragmatic reasons’ in its Zero Carbon Britain, the Centre of Alternative Technology ‘emphasise technical solutions, and try to avoid the need for lifestyle changes’. He goes on ‘There is no doubt that changes of customary practice will be essential, and that the recent historic period of rapid growth is over. Nevertheless the reports’ abandonment of lifestyle change as the key component is a considerable shift. This distances CAT from the ‘deep green’ parts of the environment movement, who usually cleave to the doctrine that Small is (always) Beautiful’. He adds ‘For some it is a betrayal of hard-fought ideals. For others it signifies a welcome return to the real world. Many at CAT would say it is imply a recognition that we are running out of time. Had the long slow cultural changes called for in the 1970s taken hold and become widespread, all could have been achieved with ‘alternative’ systems. But of course these changes have not spread, and as various global thresholds loom, the responses have to be more rapid, drastic, infrastructural and ‘one-size-fits-all’, and now ‘there is much more concern for whether new systems can be generalised and applied on a wider national scale’.

Harper may have overstated the scale of CAT’s shift: for example, Zero Carbon Britain did talk about the need for dietary change and a shift from land-intensive meat production to create more space more biomass, for energy use: http://zerocarbonbritain.com/en/ But it’s certainly true that many ‘deep greens’ see social change as much more important and appropriate than what some portray as just technology fixes. Whereas in his Science as Culture paper, Harper concluded that although small scale projects and social change were important, ‘it seems unavoidable that ‘high-tech’ must do the heavy lifting, at least in the short term. Thus two different forms of socio-technical transition need to run in parallel’. So it's not all low tech and small scale.  That also seemed to be the conclusion that emerged from the Radical Technology Revisited (RT 2.0) conference in Bristol in Sept- which looked at CAT’s Zero Carbon Britain scenario as one way forward. That certainly included a mix of technology scales. So, although just how much large scale high technology is needed remains unclear, we have moved away from ‘small is (automatically) beautiful’.  But then as was pointed out at RT 2.0, Schumacher didn’t ever say that only small was beautiful: it was a question of context.

Radical Technology 2.0

The 40-year on retrospective conference held in Bristol last Sept, looking at the ideas in the famed Undercurrents ‘Radical Technology’ book and their relevance now, was great fun. Not just a nostalgia fest. And not all about technology- though choices about that shape social choices, or is it vice versa? Certainly, as was clear at the conference, there’s a polarisation between what some call ‘ecomodernism’ and deep green thinking, with tech and society looking very different in each.

The vision offered by some eco-modernists involves centrally run intense technology, based on nuclear plus hydroponics/vertical farming- almost ‘space colonies’ on earth!  With the selling point being that these almost sealed cities can be high tech concentrated population centres, leaving the rest of the ecosystem more or less alone to revert to wilderness. All sorts of problems: a living urban consumerist hell, run by technocrats, with growth central. The other extreme is the very deep green wilderness view, with no growth and low impact tribal groups scattered around using low tech in bioregionally defined pockets. Sounds like Wales as George Monbiot would like it!  Lots of problems there too..it needs low population. 

Less extreme is a mix of smart high tech and decentralisation, but with stablised human activities distributed across the ecosystem, except in a few (large) protected areas, in the belief that we are part of the ecosystem and should remain so as long as we learn to live in it better. Lots of problems- can we balance populations and resources fairly? And limit growth?

RT2 explored some paired down versions of the above:

1 A ‘surprise free innovation’ global scenario in which clever new high tech deals with eco limits and problems and supports continued growth (for some!).

2. A low tech decentralist future, based on sharing and deeply green and humanitarian values. Something most would like, but which may be a long way off.

3. A rapid transition approach based on the best green tech, using CATs Zero Carbon Britain model.

There were no definitive conclusions at RT2, but the debate on the options was lively. No 1 inevitably was pretty unpopular, but might be where we are heading as things stand. For some 2 was lovely but unlikely, except perhaps in niches, although it might spread in time. 3 was maybe more technically credible, but still politically hard to achieve.

There was surprisingly little debate about the technologies themselves. Although some clearly felt that some of those in 1 were suspect, it seemed to be assumed that technology could deliver a viable, if a little quantitatively frugal, lifestyle in 2, and a coherent system in 3. Much less clear was the exact mix, the basic social structure and the scale of the systems it relied on. How much localization? How much high technology? Who decides?

The debate on the way forward seemed to focus mainly on consumption, with, in the energy area, the good news being that some energy consumers are now also energy producers, although these prosumers (and energy co-ops) will of course have to buy in PV kit manufactured somewhere- most probably in China in sweat shops! That opens up all sorts of issues about global trade and working conditions. But also automation. Some say that production can be done by automated plants- as US libertarians like Bookchin and the Goodmans once thought. It seems unlikely, but who knows.  A new work-free world! Though can personal services also be automated? Will we see bands of redundant aromatherapists storming the RT2 Bastille?

The focus on consumption does of course lead back into the debate on growth, a key issue at RT2, and also of course more widely – see my last post. Can it really be halted?

Which brings us back to the deep green view. Technology could help avoid some resource and impact limits, but, it is argued, given a finite planet with limited carrying capacity, no amount of technical fixing could deal with our eco-problems, or our social and political problems, if we remained in a growth-reliant economy based on continued and ever accelerating expansion of resource use. The Guardian came up with a similar view- renewables weren’t enough, big economic system changes were also needed: www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/jul/15/clean-energy-wont-save-us-economic-system-can  

So we are talking about a move to a steady-state global economy: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652615010471

However, as noted above, many RT2 enthusiasts still felt that new cleaner greener technologies could help make this possible -and livable. They could be part of the practical focus for local transitions, enabled by emerging grass roots groups and building up capacity for a more decentralised co-operative society. Radical stuff! Updates on the initiatives and ideas explored were promised: www.radicaltechnology.org

One of the proposed links forward was to the next conference, the 40 years on celebration of the Lucas workers alternative plan, held in Birmingham in November: http://lucasplan.org.uk. In looking for alternatives to job cuts and the dole, the pioneering mid-1970s Lucas Aerospace workers plan had been ahead of the curve, challenging established thinking about what could be produced and what was needed. It identified many social useful product ideas, including a range of alternative energy technologies that have now become mainstream, as we seek to avoid climate change: www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-47fc-The-Lucas-Plan,-then-and-now#.WDr4QFxB_2s

With the social and environmental issues now if anything being even more urgent, current political and economic priorities need to be challenged, and support for, and awareness of, greener approaches to technology is now wider than it was in the 1970s. So the conference asked, what can we learn from this celebrated grass-roots initiative?  Can we do more and better than they did? 

There were some expectations that perhaps were wrong and could not be fulfilled. With Trident in mind, the poster for the conference talked of ‘Jobs Not Bombs’, and depicted Lucas Aerospace as a ‘defence company’, whereas in reality, like British Aerospace now, it was active across the aerospace sector, in civil aviation as well as military systems.  That detail may not matter, but clearly it didn’t make bombs! But like all high tech engineering firms, in theory it could make almost anything. So why not wind turbines and solar systems? Actually it and its parent company Joseph Lucas, had tinkered with ideas like that- Lucas even built a battery electric car.  However, no market existed for that sort of thing at that time. The Lucas workers plan sought to create one, for example by attempting to engage Local Authority support and cash for the alternative heating systems it proposed and calling for government support for other public-sector led projects. That didn’t work - it was a time of cuts. Local Authorities are now if anything even more strapped for cash, but there are some good local projects, often featuring renewables centrally.

A range of local community and trade union groups certainly attended the Birmingham event and some interesting ideas for community transitions and industrial conversion were discussed. It was somewhat more focused than the Radical Technology 2 conference, with a different, more activist and politically committed audience, as you might expect.  There was an interesting debate in Birmingham about automation and its impact on jobs, and also about the role of alternative/radical technology- the main focus of RT2. However, the emphasis in Birmingham was more on political control: www.redpepper.org.uk/what-if-the-workers-were-in-control/ 

So what’s the bottom line? Clearly AT/RT has a place in the transition process, but just switching to new better technology, like renewable energy systems, does not automatically lead to a better society. There are several African and Latin America countries getting near 100% of their power from hydro (Norway too), but that doesn’t make them into utopias. Scotland, now getting over 50% of its power from renewables like wind, was maybe a more progressive country than England, but this technological commitment was a result of that political position, not its cause. Nevertheless, a practical technological focus can provide a tangible context for local action, campaigning and direct involvement via co-ops and conversion plans. It is about a real physical change in how things are done and, to an extent, who decides on how they are done. That seemed to be accepted at both of gatherings, in Birmingham and Bristol. So, although very different, they did come to some similar views, at least on the potential role of technology in social and political change.