A secure and sustainable energy future?

In a week of news on sustainability, and on a day of news on our future energy supply, I am reflecting on the British people's awareness of what we use energy for and their expectations of where it will come from in future.

Eric Pickles launched the Government's new National Planning Policy Framework this week, retaining its "presumption in favour of sustainable development".  While its intention is to empower local authorities to implement local plans, the new planning framework risks both commercial development of environmentally sensitive habitats and incoherent implementation of national infrastructure imperatives. The problem is that sustainable development means different things to different people and, when it lies in the hands of local planning departments, consistent interpretation seems unlikely.

The "Planet under Pressure" conference has also taken place in London this week and has today published its "State of the Planet Declaration" . While the passion and concern of the 3,000 delegates in London and the further 3,000 online participants is beyond question, I think the turgid and inaccessible language of this declaration is a missed opportunity to create widespread awareness of the challenges we face in maintaining a sustainable habitat for humanity and all life on earth.

The next piece of today's news is, to my mind, a good thing that could be better.  DECC has published provisional figures for Britain's greenhouse gas emissions in 2011, showing a welcome reduction on 2010 figures.  Home heating emitted 22% less carbon dioxide than the previous year - but just look at the weather we had in those two years!  December 2010 was the coldest December in recorded history, while 2011 started and ended with truly extraordinary warmth.  As DECC notes, the mean temperatures experienced here in the first and last quarters of 2011 were 2.2°C and 4.1°C, respectively,  warmer than the previous year.  This fall in domestic heating emissions is great but is no more sustainable than the weather.  As the Americans say, we have to invest in "winterizing" our homes, businesses and public buildings.

Emissions from electricity generation also fell from 2010, by around 6%. This is attributed both to lower demand (3% less than 2010) and to greater availability of our nuclear generating capacity: the consequence was a 17% fall in gas usage for power generation and an 11% rise in nuclear power.  Some interesting statistics are buried in the Tables (remember that these figures are provisional).  In 2011:

• Coal accounted for one-quarter of our electricity supply but two-thirds of our CO2 emissions from power stations.  
• Renewables generated more than 5% of our electricity supply.

CO2 emissions from transport (including domestic flights) were almost flat, falling by just 1.4% from 2010 and remaining within half a percent of 1990 levels.  A growing share of a diminishing pot.   

In this morning's latest headline, Eon and Npower's owner, RWE, announced their withdrawal from the UK nuclear new build consortium, Horizon.  Amid cheers from respected environmental organisations including WWF (an organisation I have supported since their inception over 40 years ago) and Friends of the Earth, who see nuclear power as an unmitigated environmental disaster, there should also be caution.  Our demand for electricity in this country will certainly grow in the coming decades, as population and consumption (the march of the gadgets) both increase and as heating and transport move from fossil fuel combustion to low carbon electricity.

But where will this low carbon electricity come from?  So many concerned nature lovers tell me of their abhorrence of wind turbines, which they see as despoiling this green and pleasant land.  Even offshore wind farms are described as an intrusion into coastal views that have been uninterrupted since the dawn of time.  What I need to know is where these custodians of our beautiful landscape imagine we will get our energy from in the coming decades - a period that will include the rest of my life and the best years of my children's lives.

Youth negotiators asked a critical question at the international climate change negotiations in Bonn in 2009:  "How old will you be in 2050?"  That's the date by which Britain has committed in law to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to 20% of 1990 levels.  The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has set a trajectory to meet this commitment, in our national carbon budgets.  This requires us to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2027 and effectively to decarbonise our electricity generation by 2030.  This is seen as achievable through a combination of renewables, nuclear power and carbon capture and storage (CCS).  Yet the National Trust and almost everyone who has a window with a view opposes further deployment of wind energy, energy and engineering companies are walking away from new nuclear construction and the Government remains unable to invest its promised £1 billion in a CCS demonstration project because no power generator believes it is affordable, achievable or that there will be sufficient return on investment.

It is for this reason that DECC's new Minister sneaked out his announcement, at midnight on Friday 16 March, that investors in new gas-fired power stations will be able to run them unabated - ie., without CCS - for the next 33 years!  The Committee on Climate Change wrote this week to Ed Davey asking him to reflect on the CCC's carbon budgets, in the light of DECC's granting of these "grandfather rights" to gas generators, and to set clear decarbonisation objectives in the current Energy Market Reform.

What is missing from this story of shortsighted squabbling and failure to act when we must?  Leadership, that's what.  If you manage to read that far, page 6 of today's State of the Planet Declaration includes the succinct phrases, "We must show leadership at all levels.  We must all play our parts".  In Annexe 2, Ban ki-Moon declares his intention to appoint a chief scientific advisor on global sustainability.  Let's hope he picks someone who is not only a scientific virtuoso but also a master communicator.  Without an eloquent and attention-grabbing figurehead to spell out the choices we must make, the squabbling will continue to cover our inaction and the public will continue to believe that their iPads, Sky boxes and microwaves run on pixie dust that won't hurt a fly.

Renewable Energy: Countdown to 2020

Thanks to the lovely people at the UK Youth Climate Coalition (UKYCC), I was able to attend the Energy Institute's conference yesterday, reviewing the prospects for a renewable energy revolution in the coming decade.  My thanks also to the organisers and sponsors for a very professional and informative event.

So what are the prospects?  On balance, the speakers expressed significant doubts as to whether we will achieve the UK's target of 15% renewable energy by 2020. They made clear what the obstacles are.  Broadly, these boil down to four key areas:

1. Complex and uncertain policies and regulatory environment.
2. Access to the National Grid.
3. Planning and Consent.
4. Lack of investment due to uncompetitive returns.

The first speaker was our Minster of State for Energy, Charles Hendry, MP.  He enthused about Britain's renewable energy prospects and promised comprehensive reform of the electricity industry, including a floor price for carbon emissions, emissions performance standards (EPS), upgraded grid "interconnects" between regions and a roadmap to meet our renewables targets, all within 6 months.  Under questioning, he was unflappable but made no commitments - particularly in response to my enquiry about the level of the EPS, which he said would be decided by consultation, at a level to encourage investment in new coal and gas.  Knowing that new unabated coal power stations will be a call to arms for climate change campaigners, I am deeply concerned about the Minister's response.

Subsequent speakers exposed the holes in the current financial and regulatory frameworks.  Gemma Grimes described this as "policy soup", making investment unattractive because of the risks and uncertainty of making acceptable returns.  Most disturbing, one eloquent speaker complained that, of all our government departments, it is the Treasury that simply doesn't "get" renewable energy and the need to decarbonise our economy.  Their incomprehension is perhaps the greatest risk to our country's low carbon future.   

The shining star of the conference was Alastair Dutton from the Crown Estate, promoting massive scaling up of our offshore wind power capacity.  They are now licensing 9 "zones" in British territorial waters, where collectives of partners with different strengths will be able to establish offshore wind farms that will triple our offshore wind capacity.

The Cassandra, surprisingly, was a large-scale investor, managing £500M of pension funds.  He told us plainly that the funds needed to meet our renewable energy targets will not be available.  

I asked the panel to comment on the sustainability of liquid biofuels, used in all our transport fuels but also planned as fuel for two new power stations being developed by W4B-UK.  We were privileged to have the CEO of the Renewable Fuels Agency, Nick Goodall, to shine a spotlight on bioliquids and their carbon reduction and sustainability credentials.  A real expert in getting the details across, Nick made clear that, due to the RTFO, transport is the only area of our 2020 renewables targets that we are on track to meet.  "But not at any price", he said.   His agency's target is for 80% of biofuel to be sourced against meaningful sustainability standards: the industry's current performance is a meagre 33%.  Of the 3 billion litres of biofuel that have been burnt in Britain's fuel tanks from 2008 to date, over 250 million litres were palm oil.  Nick told me afterwards that this is just 3% of the country's consumption of palm oil and he asked wryly when Greenpeace is going to go after lipstick.  

It seems to me that the palm oil industry has aligned itself with campaigners this year, in acknowledging that production methods are unsustainable and threatening tropical biodiversity.  Is this a tactic to buy them a little more time?  My fear is that, by the time the industry implements the sustainable production standards and traceable sourcing that it now claims to want, there won't be any remaining habitat for orang-utans and all the other species clinging to life in the threatened rainforests and peatlands of Borneo and Sumatra.

In conclusion, as noted by a lawyer specialising in renewable energy finance, the low carbon economy can only be delivered by government.  My feeling is that there is a critical role for citizens and campaigners to call for decisive leadership from our government to decarbonise Britain's economy - and to make their voices heard above the siren calls for less capital-intensive fossil fuel energy capacity (that's unabated coal and gas) and more attractive returns for investors looking for 12% annual growth (nice if you can get it).

Exploring an onshore wind farm

There was a lot of discussion last week about the merits of offshore renewables, following the launch of "The Offshore Valuation", the latest report from the Public Interest Research Centre.

I agree with their findings but not with some of the interpretations of this report in the press. For example, George Monbiot argued that this work shows that onshore wind is not worthwhile in comparison with offshore wind, wave and tidal power.

Last week, I took the train from King's Cross to Aberdeen to visit the Centrica's 20-turbine wind farm in the Glens of Foudland, near Huntly. The airports were closed that morning by volcanic ash so there wasn't a spare seat to be had on the train. The plus side was that the emissions per passenger-kilometre were absolutely minimal on this journey. Actually, I was pretty confident that, during April and May, Eyjafjallajokull was responsible for more carbon emissions reductions than the wind farm I was visiting - but that's not a popular sentiment amongst our erstwhile-airborne friends and colleagues. I have to confess that the return journey, with about 30% occupancy on the train, was a lot more comfortable.

The windfarm was commissioned in April 2005 and is ideally situated at an altitude of 330m on rocky hills set in a wide, windy valley. Because of this situation, it has achieved a consistently high load factor (ie., proportion of its theoretical peak output) throughout its 5 years of operation. It is now reaching the end of its manufacturer's warranty period so there were several engineers on site, checking each of the turbines for faults and preparing to change the gearbox oil (which, I was assured, is taken away for reconditioning and reuse). With the right build quality and the appropriate level of care, these turbines will continue to generate renewable energy from free fuel for a quarter of a century.

Wind turbines are very valuable assets and their components operate under extremely high stress - just imagine the weight of a turbine blade (which can now be up to 60 metres long) turning full circle every few seconds, bolted onto a steel shaft driving a generator through a huge gearbox on top of a hollow steel tube, in a highland gale.

Now picture the same construction glued onto another 100-metre pile driven into the seabed, battered by waves and corroded by salt spray. The maintenance challenges are much more extreme than for these onshore wind turbines but the access is unimaginably difficult and expensive. So, while I agree that the longterm prospects for renewable energy from Britain's offshore territories are superb, I am certain that we need to continue erecting onshore wind turbines in suitably windy locations across the country. Britain faces energy supplies issues from the middle of the current decade and we need to be working flat out to install do-able renewable energy technologies now, at the same time as we are developing next generation renewables for the future.

The other piece of the puzzle which was written up by Jamie Bull, one of the researchers for the PIRC report, but not developed within the report, is the return on energy invested in building and maintaining renewable energy assets. Along with tidal range schemes like the lagoons proposed as a alternative to the Severn barrage, wind turbines yield the greatest return on energy invested in their manufacture, installation and maintenance. They are about three times as efficient as solar electricity panels, for example. And that goes for both onshore and offshore wind installations. So let's keep putting more wind turbines in windy places, where the load factors will be as high as possible and where the ground won't be damaged (for example, installing wind turbines on peatland dries out the precious peat, causing large-scale methane and CO2 emissions) and let's get used to their visual impact. After all, we have covered the countryside with pylons and cables for distributing electricity - let's put up with these bigger pylons that actually make it, for free!

My thanks to British Gas, for covering the costs of my rail fare and accommodation for this visit, and to Matthew Walsh, the extremely knowledgeable and able manager in charge of the operation and maintenance of Centrica's wind farms. He's one of those unknown soldiers in the fight against climate change and I take my hat off to him.

Reducing oil consumption

Here are my thoughts on reducing our use of oil while we still have some left to play with!

New Scientist (4 July 2007, "Biorefineries: curing our addiction to oil") reports that over 70% of the oil we extract is used for transport fuel. Most of the remainder is burned for energy (and this without including natural gas, another fossil carbon) or used for roads, lubricants and waxes. Just 3.4% is used in the petrochemical industry, to synthesise all the materials we depend on in our everyday lives - e.g., plastics, cosmetics, paints and medicines. Wouldn't it make sense to cut down the 90-odd percent that is used for energy and save the oil for petrochemical manufacture? If we were to do this ahead of "peak oil" then the feedstocks that we need for the synthetic chemical industries could last for centuries.

It is comparatively easy to switch electricity generation over to renewables, including woodchip and pellet technologies used for industrial "cogeneration" or combined heat and power (CHP). Slough Trading Estate has been doing this for several years so your UK Mars Bars are made using sustainable energy. This type of biofuel makes sense and does not compete for agricultural resources with food supply. The biggest problem will be scaling up the supply of woody fuel - perhaps an argument for restoring some of Britain's native woodland cover that was displaced by farming?

It is much harder to make the switch to renewables for the transport fuel we all depend on because few other materials have the energy density of petrol or diesel. Plug-in hybrids could help, if recharged from renewable electricity, but hybrid cars today are really no more than green window-dressing to enhance the reputations of the world's largest car manufacturers, while they continue to flog Chelsea tractors, SUVs, pickups and luxury limos.

Whether it's ethanol from sugar cane ('gasohol' in Brazil) or biodiesel from oilseed crops, production of biofuels for transport displaces food production (witness the soaring price of bread). More importantly, to meet the current transport fuel demands of the developed world, biofuel would have to supplant food production entirely - and then some more!

There is an overwhelming need is to change the way we use transport - both personal and freight. That's a very tall order but nothing else comes close to providing a sustainable solution.

Energy efficiency, both domestic and industrial, offers huge prizes but is barely beginning to be tapped here in England because energy is still far too cheap. There is loads of advice available on improving our domestic energy and I will post the best links I can find to help with this. Retailers and manufacturers have much scope to cut their energy consumption but the economics will need to change before they pay more than lipservice to these opportunities. Massive hikes in the price of oil and gas would drive energy efficiency but this is not going to win elections anywhere in the world and so seems unlikely to happen before we reach peak oil.

Solar thermal power is already highly efficient - vacuum collector tubes can capture over 90% of the solar energy reaching them. Rooftops around the world should be covered in them already but - outside of Germany - they are not.

Solar electricity generation, in contrast, uses only up to 15% of the incident energy. There is plenty of room yet for technological innovation, both the physics of solar energy capture and the manufacturing processes used to produce photovoltaic panels in large quantities and at low cost.

Even nuclear fission is ultimately unsustainable because the uranium reserves are limited and the environmental and human costs of uranium mining are very high. If we could tame nuclear fusion as an energy source we would really be getting somewhere!