Japan's alternative plan

Japan used to obtain around 26% of its electricity from its 54 nuclear plants. After Fukushima in March 2011, with opposition to nuclear widespread, all its nuclear power reactors were shutdown in sequence for safety checks, reviews and upgrades. Local prefectures, who in theory have the last say, resisted moves to restart them. So by May 2012 Japan had become nuclear free. But with the summer air-conditioning load looming, there were pressures to restart two of Kansai Electrical Power Co’s plants in the Western Fukui area, despite the very strong national opposition- thousands of people took to the streets in protest. Prime minister Yoshihiko Noda said ‘We should restart the Ohi No. 3 and No. 4 reactors in order to protect the people's livelihoods. Japanese society cannot survive if we stop all nuclear reactors or keep them halted.’

He insisted that new safety measures would ensure the two reactors would not leak radiation if an earthquake or tsunami as severe as at Fukushima should strike them. However, while some of the main measures to secure cooling functions and prevent meltdowns as in Fukushima had been installed, more than a third of the necessary upgrades on the list were still incomplete- the full upgrades may take up to three years.

Nevertheless local governor Issei Nishikawa  evidently indicated approval for a restart: the Fukui region has the largest nuclear plant concentration in the country (13 reactors) and is heavily dependent on them for energy and employment. According a report in WISE/ NIRN’s Nuclear Monitor 751, there had been intense lobbying of political leaders by Kansai Electric Power Co (Kepco) and threats by major corporate supporters to relocate outside the region were cited by the Union of Kansai Governments as reasons for caving in. Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto admitted defeat but said he had done all he could. Kepco evidently put a lot of pressure on companies in the region, telling them that without the Oi reactors, they would face rolling blackouts. Those firms, in turn, pressured local politicians, saying that if there were blackouts they would have to relocate outside the region.

Noda said the startup was not intended just for the summer, rejecting calls for limited operation by Osaka city and other nearby towns: ‘the livelihoods and daily lives of the Japanese people cannot be sustained if reactors are only restarted for the summer.’ He said he planned to start up more reactors whenever their safety was confirmed. At the same time, he confirmed that the government would be producing a national energy plan, although it was delayed from June to August.  Presumably he wanted the initial start up in place to prepare the political climate for a less anti nuclear plan. And, despite a lot of protest, he got his way- the go ahead for the two Ohi plants to start up came in late June and they reached full power in July.

So the nuclear-free honeymoon period is over. It would certainly have been hard for Japan to run without some extra input.  Even with its full nuclear compliment, it was highly dependent on energy imports; it imported around 80% of its energy mostly coal and oil  (and of course uranium). But it had made good progress in cutting demand through emergency energy saving efforts, and given time renewables could be ramped up to take over most electricity and heat supply.  Certainly it is trying to develop an alternative approach, based on energy efficiency and a major commitment to renewables, including a new quite generous Feed-In Tariff for PV solar, a 1GW off shore wind programme and more support for other marine renewables- offshore projects obviously make sense in a country where land is at a premium. 

In August a consultation report emerged, based on the three options that the government had put forward - zero nuclear, 15% nuclear or 20-25% nuclear, with renewables taking up most the slack, at 30-35%.  Early indications were that most of the public backed the zero nuclear option.  And in Sep, the government announced that it was aiming to get to zero nuclear ‘in the 2030s’. Given that Japan was originally planning  to expand nuclear from its pre Fukushima 26% to 45% of total electricity, that’s a  big shift- but at what a huge financial and social cost, not least to the thousands of evacuees still unable to return home.

Their plight was revealed in a survey by the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Committee for the Japanese Diet found.  Over 10,000 local resident responded, some very bitterly. The survey found that delays in passing on information meant that awareness of the accident was initially very low amongst residents. Some residents did not realise they were being evacuated from their homes because of a nuclear accident and might not be able to return for a long time. Many reported fleeing in just the clothes they had on, without taking time to gather valuables, medical records or even to lock their homes, with some thinking they were being evacuated because of the risk of a further tsunami. Evacuation orders were issued firstly for a zone close to the plant, the next day the evacuation zone was increased to 10 km, then 20 km, and finally the government requested voluntary evacuation for residents 20-30 km from the plant. Some ended up having to move several (4-6+) times, some into areas which turned out to be more contaminated. Many respondents referred to TV reports that there were no immediate health risks. So now evacuees didn’t trust the media or assurances that they could return.   Residents said they had often been assured of the safety of nuclear power, and thought that an accident could never occur. Now they know better.

But life goes on. Japanese company Softbank Mobile’s Sharp Pantone 5 107SH smart phone has a gamma radiation monitor app.   Lets hope it’s not need in future. The interim ‘zero nuclear in /by the 2030s’ position is a little  vague- that could  mean up to 2039! And it’s far enough away to allow for backsliding…

The full Fukushima story is covered in a book I’ve produced as part of  Palgrave Macmillan’s new Pivot e-book initiative.  Out at the end of October:  ‘Fukushima: impacts and implications’.

A brave new EU-MENA supergrid

 

The Desertec Industrial Initiative, based in Germany, is all about ambitious plans for linking renewable energy projects across the EU, Middle East and North Africa (EU-MENA) region via a supergrid, to their mutual advantage. It says it can be done by 2050 and in a new report lays out what it might mean.  What is very striking about their analysis are the assumptions about the huge growth in energy demand in the ME and NA regions, and the scale of the renewable resources that is available there, much more  than  in the EU. 

They say that Turkey and Egypt will have the largest population and highest power demand in the MENA region in 2050 but also that, due to high per capita consumption, Saudi Arabia will be of a similar size in terms of power demand. ‘These three countries, together with Jordan and Syria, make up about a third of total EUMENA demand – as much as the four largest EU economies Germany, France, the UK and Italy together’.

They go on  ‘Due to the high demand in the Middle East and Egypt, most of the desert power produced there will be consumed locally’ and ,  since ‘unlike most of the major economies in the center of Europe, the region enjoys good solar and wind conditions’ they will not need imports.  However  ‘given their relatively small populations and abundant renewables resources, the Maghreb and Libya export large quantities of power to Europe’. They will be what Desertec calls ‘super producers’ while most of the rest are importers –countries with large demand but relatively few renewable resources. e.g. Germany, Italy, France and Turkey.  But there are some in between, i.e. countries with reasonable renewable resources, who will  need balancing top-ups. Examples quoted are Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Spain, the UK and Denmark.

The Desertec 2050 report argues that the ‘balancer’ countries  ‘build just as much renewables capacity as is economic to cover most of their domestic load. Covering the remaining minor share of the load with domestic renewables becomes less economical, since curtailment of excess energy would occur. Consequently, these countries import power when needed and export it when their production exceeds domestic demand. They thereby avoid building the final segment of domestic renewables, which would make the sustainable power system more expensive due to high curtailment’.

Not everyone will agree with that analysis, or therefore the need for some EU countries to import perhaps 20% of their power from the south, while still using some gas, as  Desertec sees  importers as doing . ‘Since gas, and thereby carbon emissions, are allocated under a common cap to where they are needed most, the countries with limited renewables can use more gas than in an isolated system.’

This sounds dangerously like special pleading by Germany to be allowed to continue to use gas!   However,  the Desertec  report says that  it will all balance out equitably: ‘While super producers, balancers and importers profit from system integration in a different way, they all benefit from being part of a large sustainable power system. At the same time, their complementary roles lead to a situation of mutual reliance, in which no one country is dependent on another but instead each country is reliant on the system as a whole’.

Well maybe, but I can see plenty of potential for conflict, and certainly a need for a lot of detailed negotiations. It could make the current battles over the euro and national debts look easy! It certainly does open up a new geopolitical perspective, based on sharing renewable energy resources to mutual gain.

In reality though this wont be cooperative sharing, but  would be driven by market forces and the  interests of the  big investors in what after all will be a huge project.  Can it be set up to avoid market power becoming monopolised?   Should competition be restrained or increased? Could the supergrid be run as common service? 

There are plenty of political issues to get sorted before it’s too late; unless that is you think the whole idea should be opposed.  Certainly some environmentalists do not like large scale centralised systems- and would prefer the emphasis to be on the local scale. However, the big and the small are not really in conflict technologically- they could in fact be mutually reinforcing, enabling variable local supplies to feed into and be balanced by wider grid links. In essence it’s like the internet- a grid system serving a range of  decentral nodes.   But there could be conflicts over funding- big projects may attract big money to the detriment of small projects. That would be tragic since we need to develop renewables fully at both scales.

What happens next? Most likely the supergrid will emerge piecemeal, with a few links here and there, between the UK and the continent and within the EU (see my earlier Blog) and possibly across the Med, with no central plan or agreement.   A bit like how national electricity supply systems in the UK and elsewhere first emerged. That could be chaotic and wasteful. But where is the central authority to impose rational plan?  Not the EU/EC surely!     www.dii-eumena.com/desert-power-2050/

Fukushima revisited

 It’s around year and a half since the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster started. But it’s still not over. The reactor core meltdowns may have been contained, although they are still active and temperatures have fluctuated, suggesting continued risks of further fuel melts and emissions.  Perhaps more worryingly, a tank containing spent fuel is still precariously balanced on top of the wreck of Reactor 4, and some fear that if another earthquake hit the site it could fall and spill its lethal contents- 1500 fuel rods. That could result in much more radioactive material being released than from any previous nuclear accident.  The open waste tank has been propped up and a cover put over it, but it will take some time before the rods can be removed.  It will also be some while before the melted fuel in the cores can be removed, and the mess from the explosions can be cleaned up- vast areas of NE Japan have to be decontaminated

So maybe it’s not a bad time to take a look at what happened at Fukushima and its implications. That’s what I tried to do in a new book, to be published soon as part of Palgrave Macmillan’s new Pivot e- book initiative.

Japan has been hit by nuclear disasters before. The US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WWII, forcing its surrender, seem to have been part of the reason why Japan as a society redefined itself as a non-military state, still devoted to winning, but this time through civil technology.  It did well in many areas of technology, although its choice of nuclear technology seems not to have turned out to be wise. Perhaps now it will reconfigure itself as a non-nuclear, renewable energy focused society – and win that way. In May, Naoto Kan, the former Prime Minister, told a parliamentary committee that the bulk of the blame for the disaster lay with the nuclear lobby, which he said had acted like the nation's out-of-control military during the Second World War, with "a grip on actual political power".

There certainly is a continuing incentive to make changes. The economic impact of Fukushima has been very serious. The disaster clean up cost – put at around $250 billion, forced the Japanese government to bail out and take over TEPCO, the plant operator, and, with public fears mounting, it has also carried out safety tests on all the other all the plants. That meant that by May all Japan nuclear plants had been shut down- although two have now been restarted, despite massive 170,000 strong protests. 

The full social and health impacts of the Fukushima  accident are as yet unknown. While no radiation related deaths have yet been reported, longer-term effects are possible. In May TEPCO almost quadrupled its initial estimates of total Iodine-131 releases from Fukushima- from 130 Peta Bq to 511PBq. Iodine-131's half-life is 8 days, so it is so not worrying as the releases of  Caesium 137, which has a 30 year half life. TEPCOs estimates for releases of Caesium 137 were raised from 6.1 to 13.6 PBq .

An  interim UN-World Health Organisation study says that in the most affected areas of Fukushima prefecture, thyroid doses from iodine-131 were estimated as between 10 and 100 mSv apart from one area which was lower, at 1 to 10 mSv, and one that was higher for infants at 100-200 mSv. In the rest of Fukushima, adults received 1 to 10 mSv to their thyroids while children and infants received 10 to 100 mSv, the study estimated. For comparison, it said young people in the vicinity of the Chernobyl accident received on average doses of 300 to 1400 mSv to their thyroids.

However comparisons with Chernobyl do not go down well in Japan, which is desperately trying to re-establish normalacy.  Not least since Japan was a candidate for hosting the 2020 Olympics. While by then the radiation issue may not be seen as so significant, the International Olympic Organising Committee have indicated concerns about the energy situation in Japan. They are not alone. Whereas Germany already had a established plan for nuclear phase out and expansion of renewables, which it accelerated after Fukushima, renewables had been marginalised in Japan. Now it is desperately trying to catch up. For example, it is backing some large offshore wind farms using floating wind turbine technology.

While it remains to be seen whether policies will change elsewhere, with the UK, USA, China, India and Russia still pressing ahead with nuclear to various extents, it is clear that, as I review in my new book, Fukushima, like Chernobyl before it, has led to major changes in attitudes around the world, and for Japan and several other key countries, including German, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium, a fundamental shift in policy. Bahrain, Kuwait, Malaysia, Taiwan and the Philippines have also backed off from nuclear. Following the elections in 2012, nuclear power is also now being challenged in France, increasingly on economic grounds, this leading to potential knock-on impacts for the UK programme, with investment in its proposed nuclear projects looking increasingly risky.

I suspect that it can only get worse.

Radiation issues:

Doses: www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_WHO_on_Fukushima_doses_2405121.html

Impacts:   http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2012/ee/c2ee22019a which talks of there possibly being 100s or maybe 1000s of radiation-related deaths  around the world  ultimately, due to Fukushima, most though in Japan.

Supergrid: the UK makes a start

 

National Grid and Scottish Power Transmission have awarded a £1bn contract for first ever sub sea electricity link between Scotland and England. The 2,200MW High Voltage Direct Current  link will be a vital reinforcement- bringing energy from renewable sources in Scotland to the south and helping to meet 2020 renewable targets. It will run 420km between Hunterston in Ayrshire to the Wirral- the longest link of this capacity in the world. It should be fully operational by 2016.

There are already about 3 GW of interconnector links to France and the Netherlands, but nine more are either in construction, planning or subject to feasibility studies. The next to open, in autumn 2012, will be a link between the Republic of Ireland and Wales. Then there is a 1 GW Kent-Belgium link, planned for 2018 and maybe a 1.4 GW link to Norway, 900km, by 2019. Another would link England to Alderney, where very strong tides could produce large amounts of electricity, and then on to France.

Energy Minister Charles Hendry has also been negotiating with Iceland over the possibility of connecting the UK to its abundant geothermal energy, via a 1000 km plus undersea High Voltage Direct Current supergrid.. That may be some way off, but, with the other projects, a ‘supergrid’  network may be gradually taking shape- and it can link up to, and help balance, offshore wind farms in the North Sea. By 2020 there could be 18GW of offshore wind capacity in place, with more to follow. They will all need grid links.

Supergrid interconnectors are costly. The Britain-Netherland 240km link, which opened in 2011, cost £500m. But we have the best wind, wave and tidal resource in Europe, so we should be able to produces large amount of excess electricity and sell it abroad. More than offsetting the cost of the interconnector  and more than offsetting the need to occasionally have to import balancing power when UK wind is low.

The supergrid would eventually be EU wide, linking to the large hydro capacity in Norway and elsewhere, with the reservoirs acting as  stores for excess wind derived power,  and it may even possibly extended it to the large yet to be developed solar resource in North Africa. www.desertec.org/ This wide geographical spread should ensure that power would be available even when the whole of Northern Europe is temporarily becalmed.  

Similar ideas have emerged elsewhere. The Japan Renewable Energy Foundation   and the Desertec Foundation have teamed to promote an Asian Supergrid that would connect the national grids of Japan, Korea, China, Mongolia and Russia. This could open up opportunities for renewable energy development in which the power produced could be moved to where it is needed most. So Japan, with fewer areas in which to build renewable projects, could benefit from wind power produced in placed like Inner Mongolia, where potential capacity far exceeds demand. There a have also been proposals for a major Concentrated Solar Power project in  the Gobi desert, which straddles China and Mongolia. Excess electricity (around 1GW) from the Gobitec project would be exported to urban centers in China, Japan, and South Korea via a new network of nearly 4,000 km of high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines. .http://www.gobitec.org/ 

There can obviously be problems with mega projects like this, as I have explored in a recent paper: .  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2012.04.001

Some have argued that it’s foolish to try to go  remote sources, and concentrate, and then transmit over long distances, energy that is naturally distributed everywhere.   It’s also argued that it  could degenerate into a neo-colonial resource grab, with poor areas being exploited by rich energy hungry countries, who might then not develop their own renewables  sources.  That clearly has to be resisted: the host country should have priority   access and only excess power exported.  And we have to avoid imported supergrid power being seen as alternative to locally produced power. We need all the types of renewable energy development, at all scales, for a sustainable future. But as far as the planet is concerned, it doesn’t matter where the energy projects are built as long as they avoid emissions, and in energy and carbon terms, it makes sense to go to where the resources are best. So we need to face up to the political problems and start to think outside of national boxes.  

EMR uncertainties

 

The Electricity Market Reforms (EMR) are a key to the governments energy plans, but have still to be consolidated in legislation. There was media speculation about delays due to the complex proposals for ‘Contracts for a Difference’ (CfD) that are meant to  provide support for nuclear, renewables and CCS. It seems that, in order to get the new contract auction market process operating,   DECC  would have  to set an  initial ‘strike price’.  That’s an interventionist approach and not something DECC is keen on. DECCs energy markets director general Simon Virley said "We want to move to market-based systems and tendering as soon as we can, which means we need to have more than one player in any one market. And we need to have technologies at a sufficient state of maturity to be able to bid into those auctions."

However, Dr David Toke from Birmingham University calculated that the strike price  would have to be set at  around £150/MWh to make new nuclear viable,  more than  offshore wind now gets. See his May 5th entry:  http://realfeed-intariffs.blogspot.co.uk/ Even that might not be enough to entice potential investors into nuclear: it may be a 50 year old technology, but the proposed  new plants (EPR and AP1000)  are as yet unproven and, as  the first EPR construction projects  in France and Finland have ilustrated, costs can escalate alarmingly. Credit rating agencies have already down-graded some companies considering investment  in new nuclear - it’s seen as increasingly risky. 

Centrica and Gulf Suez are looking decidedly wobbly on their proposed involvement as result. E.ON and RWE took the hint and pulled out of the Horizon project- which was focused on reactors at Oldbury and Anglesey. RWE said “The global economic crisis has meant that capital for major projects is at a premium and nuclear power projects are particularly large scale, with very long lead times and payback periods. Even more tellingly, E.ON said : ‘We have come to the conclusion that investments in renewable energies, decentralised generation and energy efficiency are more attractive – both for us and for our British customers.’

With DECC evidently still hoping that new backers will be found (perhaps from China)  to replace E.ON and RWE, but  EDF, the main surviving nuclear backer,  pressing for a speedy resolution, you can see why getting the EMR sorted  is very sensitive-  many see the  main aim of the  EMR as being to  provide support for nuclear.  Meanwhile Greenpeace's senior energy campaigner, Joss Garman, urged ministers to resist any calls for a delay to the legislation so that renewable energy projects could get proper backing. "With a desperate need to leverage investment into securing clean, affordable energy supplies, and with families and businesses feeling the squeeze because of gas-fuelled energy bill hikes, it's astonishing the government seems to be de-prioritising its energy market reforms. Ministers must stop dithering and take decisive action to reduce our risky and expensive over-dependence on gas, and to get both energy bills and pollution levels under control."

Gaynor Hartnell, REAs chief executive however felt that if there was a delay and revamp of the EMA, it would give the government the opportunity ‘to reconsider its plans for renewables and gives them the priority they deserve. They can deliver early CO2 savings in the transition to a low-carbon economy and their build out should create 400,000 jobs by 2020.’

In the event, the EMR bill was tabled for debate in the next parliamentary session. But who knows what will actually emerge as that unfolds? It does seem odd to tie the fate of renewables to that of nuclear (and indeed CCS). Some say that, rather than the CfD pretending to be a Feed In Tariff, a separate premium price Feed In-Tariff for renewables, with proper price degression, would be best as the replacement for the RO. As for nuclear, let it sink or swim, unaided, while for CCS, well the debate continues. Not everyone thinks it’s worth the effort- it’s expensive and technically a  long shot. And who would want to insure against the risk of accidental CO2 release over thousands of years?

Lots of unknowns. And to add to them , as it stands, the EMR issue and the fate of the competing technologies will remain uncertain for some while-  with 2014 as the earliest CfD start date.  DECC has issued draft proposals but they contained little new just the news that the CfD contracts would be made with National Grid not, as some investors had hoped, the government.  So there would be no government guarantees.

Following the elections in 2012, nuclear power is now being challenged in France, increasingly on economic grounds, this leading to potential knock-on impacts for the UKs already diminished  EDF-led nuclear programme. Will the UK really be able to go against the tide and be the only country in the EU with a major nuclear expansion programme?

Greening the WFTU

There are plenty of global eco-manifestos from greens of various sorts. Here is a recent  one- for May Day-  from global reds: from the ‘General Principles of the World Federation of Trade Unions for the global environmental problems’:

‘It is common knowledge that over the last fifty years the environment, both in planetary and regional level, is receiving increasing pressure from the way the productive forces develop in the conditions of the imperialist new order. The consequences of these pressure are more and more intense for the working class, the farmers, the poor and middle strata of the city, in other words, the majority of the planet’s inhabitants, whether they belong in the developed or the developing countries. Their root cause is none other than the very nature of the exploitative system. On the one hand, the number of workers who participate in the production of wealth is increasing. On the other hand, the number of exploiters who accumulate in their hands the means of production and appropriate the wealth is decreasing, which as they procure to increase their wealth just for themselves.

The relentless hunt for super profits by transnational monopolies causes enormous disasters to the planet, condemns the one third of the planet to starve and live (if they survive) in miserable conditions. Lack of protection against natural disasters, global warming, reduction of the protective ozone shield, depletion of natural recourses, forest destruction, desertification, genetically modified organisms, nuclear and toxic waste, dangerous nutritional dependence on transnational monopolies, air pollution, destruction of ecosystems and pollution of the natural reserves, lack of access to clear water and also military invasions and civil conflicts incitement, are only a few of the results of the imperialist new order. And it could not be otherwise, since for capital and its political exponents, the environment, the planet (in general the “Mother Earth”, as the native people of Latin America called it), is nothing else than an abstraction, a source for looting of the finite natural resources of the planet [and] the natural space in which they carry on their uncontrollable (as it seems) activities and discard their waste’.

It adds ‘Amidst the sharpening of the capitalist crisis, the catastrophic activity of capital against the environment is increasing as well, and planetary problems sharpen because: the inter-imperialist contrasts become stronger, in search for new markers or redistribution of those already existing [and] the accumulated earnings of capital seek to find exits, new fields to invest in, leading towards further commercialization of a growing range of activities and of more public social goods and resources’. But ‘Imperialism, capital, monopolies and the governments that serve them do not play without an opponent. They have against them the working class, the poor and the middle farmers, the self-employed, the small business owners, the working intelligentsia in the developed and developing countries, the vital interests of which are identical with the need for a harmonious cohabitation between people and nature.’

The WFTU considers ‘the socialist way of production an important tool in our hands,’ enabling us to ‘understand a completely different man–nature relationship, as well as the tools to materialize it.’ They look to a planned economy based on the belief that the ‘long-term combined satisfaction of the people’s needs are the only stable basis for a harmonic man and environment symbiosis, for their common progress and development’.   Sharpen you dialectical skills on that!
www.wftucentral.org/wp-content/wftu_congress-documents_for-the-global-environmental-problems_2011_en_esp_fr.pdf

Most on the left will no doubt agree with Kolya Abramsky who, in a recent paper, argued that common or collective ownership and control of relevant productive capacity, including land, raw materials, energy resources and infrastructure, as well as knowledge and technologies is a key issue. However, the issue goes well beyond UK concerns with Clause 4 and the like. He says  ‘taking collective control over means of production in core countries is necessary, but not sufficient. The problem is these means of production should not really exist, in the form that they currently do, or in the places that they currently do, in the first place. As generators of wealth within capitalist relations, they are, essentially, the accumulated stolen wealth and labour of generations of workers (waged and unwaged) in the core countries and, especially, workers and communities in the southern countries.

He adds ‘ In order to address this, and to break the uneven technological development, especially in relation to production of means of production, a highly targeted non-commercial technology transfer of renewable energy technologies based on reparations is necessary. However, collective control of production in north is necessary in order to give a serious material basis for the reparations and technology transfer, since this process would require huge transfers of material wealth and it makes no sense to even conceive of this being possible to implement within a market based on private accumulation.’

From 'Beyond Copenhagen: Common Ownership, Reparations, Degrowth and Renewable Energy Technology Transfer', Kolya Abramsky. See his book  ‘Sparking a World- wide Energy Revolution’ (AK Press)  www.akpress.org
And also www.oekosozialismus.net/The+Crises+of+Capitalism.+Saral+Sarkar.+2011.pdf

AT@40: what was said

AT @40 Conference in London in March marked 40 years since the first big ‘Alternative Technology’ (AT) conference at UCL in 1972. That had led to a complaint by one participant that “I came here to talk about windmills not politics.” The AT@40 gathering at the AA was also mostly about politics, but with older and maybe wiser participants.

The oldies certainly laid out the stall again well, with Peter Harper (who invented the term ‘AT’) taking us through the way the idea had emerged in an amazing conceptual tour, effectively a prequel, and Godfrey Boyle (who did much to promote AT over the years) looking at how it then developed and where it was going: it was getting bigger but we ought to stick with the subsiduarity principle. I also got my oar in, but then readers will be familiar with my views! Perhaps more refreshing was the paper by (relative newbie!) Stephen Peake, putting it all in a macro context. Was AT all about hard core decentralism? Is that where we are really headed? If not, is it where we can and should go?

There were some interesting papers circulated at the meeting and talk of producing a book based on it. But as a taster, the paper from Catherine Forrester noted that when the AT idea was looked at by the Lucas Aerospace workers, who were developing a plan for alternative socially useful work, they were unwilling to think about producing what one described as ‘gimmicks for individual architect built houses’ or ‘playthings for the middle class’. And she also notes that were unimpressed by the rhetoric of parts of the AT movement: ‘They just repeat the clichés of condemnation of an advanced technological society. In effect, they give us the choice of going off to the mountains [or] onto the dole queue’.

Maybe a bit aggressive- the AT movement did try to develop community-scaled projects. And as Forrester concludes, ‘both projects were expressions of the same phenomenon of groups presenting a radical socio-technical critique and attempting to create prefigurative spaces in which alternative social forms could exist through an alternative technology. They exhibited a deeply political understanding of current and potential technology, in marked contrast to the purely technical nature of the ‘alternative technology’ we recognize today. The term has shifted from describing a technology that will enable an alternative society, to a technology which provides an alternative means to enable current social structures to be maintained.’

Fast forwarding back to AT@40, David Dickson gave an interesting account of how he came to write the seminal book ‘Alternative Technology’ all those years ago. Its original title was ‘the Politics of technical change’, but ‘AT’ had become a buzz word so the publisher wanted it to be to main title! He had been, and still was, a bit ambivalent about the term ‘AT’. His analysis reflected the then current view on the left that the nature of existing science and technology was shaped by existing and historical power relations, and needed to be challenged. Faith in science had certainly been dented- it seemed to offer increasing threats- but there were still promises. The emerging ‘social constructionist’ view implicitly implied that there could and should be alternative scientific and technological practices, leading to new outcomes. But was AT an (or the) example? It was still too early to say, he thought- that would be up to historians to decide!

AT@40 wasn’t all about (old) ideas, or just an autopsy of AT. It still lives! It was good to have practical engineering inputs from Derek Taylor on how wind energy had emerged and was still was developing, and from Peter Fraenkel who reported on the various AT projects he had pioneered from the 1970s onwards, leading up (in scale) to the hyper successful 1.2MW SeaGen marine current turbine. While oldies like this were still clearly at it, Trystan Lea provided a good input on some new ICT directions now emerging that should ensure that ideas can spread and be used effectively- Open Source Sustainable Technology. See http://openenergymonitor.org

There were many other fascinating inputs and some interesting discussions amongst the 50 or so people attending. How did we deal with the current success of alternative energy ('going straight’ Peter Raine ex-CAT); what was the role of local initiatives and community groups (Adrian Smith, by video, and John LeCorney, www.syec.co.uk) and local councils (Martin Fodor from Bristol); ending up where we started by asking, does it all add up to a challenge to how technology is developed (Matt Paskins from Imperial College - relaying ideas from Catherine Forrester, who sadly couldn’t be there). Micheal Sealey gave an interesting historical account of the multi-faceted activities of one 70's pioneer, Kit Pedler, sadly no longer with us.

However, the survivors and the new adherents to the cause, still look like they have more to offer, so AT@40 definately wasn’t a wake. Even for Renew the AT journal I edit! Although as Tam Dougan, its co-ordinator, noted, it was ending pdf distribution, in its soon to be revamped web guise, it will still try to relay what happens next!

The above is from Renew 197, forthcoming: www.natta-renew.org.
There will be a fuller review in Renew 198