The government has done so little to deliver on renewable energy that I doubt its good faith. But here is the remedy
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- Oliver Tickell
- guardian
- Saturday September 27 2008 09:12 BST
The government is committed to massive new nuclear build in Britain. We do not yet know the details of Gordon Brown’s nuclear plan, least of all how all the new nuclear power stations are to be paid for. But substantial public subsidy is definitely part of the deal, as described by David Lowry on Commentisfree and David Burke, writing in Prospect. After all, EDF would hardly have paid £12.5bn for British Energy if it did not have a clear promise of jam tomorrow.
But while the Brown nuclear plan (I am referring here to Gordon Brown, of course, not his brother Andrew, EDF Energy’s head of media relations) glides serenely ahead, where does this leave the UK’s renewable ambitions? Remember that the UK already has a policy to generate 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, and that this target will need to be doubled to around 40% for the UK to achieve its share of the new EU-wide target to source 20% of all energy from renewables by the same date.
So far, Brown has been far more active in trying to water down the UK’s EU renewable target than in finding ways to meet it, in spite of the enormous renewable resources of wind, wave and tide, which sweep our shores. But even if he succeeds in the latest ploy to knock 11% off the UK’s target by not counting the energy used in aviation, the UK still has a lot of renewable generation capacity to build – approaching 50,000MW of wind for a start.
And this creates a problem: nuclear power and intermittent renewables make a very poor match. Ministers and most nuclear advocates now insist that they have nothing against renewables – on the contrary, they adore them, and all they are advocating is a sensible mix of nuclear power and renewables to give the UK a wonderful new low-carbon electricity system. But the idea does not add up.
The wind turbines (onshore and increasingly offshore) that will have to produce most of our renewable electricity can only generate when and where the wind is blowing. The problems of over- and under-supply created by this intermittency can be minimised by spreading wind turbines over a broad geographical area, and by mixing them with other intermittent renewables, such as wave and solar PV. But as the renewable fraction increases, so the need to smooth out the intermittency in the electricity supply rises, and to do this with coal-fired power stations is to defeat our purpose.
Nuclear power has a similar but opposite problem. Once a nuclear power station is up and running, the best way to run it is to keep on producing electricity at a constant rate – until it develops some fault and cuts out altogether, that is. Add the two together, nuclear and intermittent renewables, and what do you get? You might imagine the two complement each other.
But the opposite is the case. Because nuclear is “always on”, it does nothing to smooth the supply curve from wind, or to better match total supply to demand, which is also highly variable. Indeed, the renewable supply profile fits consumer demand better than the nuclear straight-line output because the wind blows more during periods of peak electricity demand – that is mornings and evenings, and winter. By adding nuclear power into the mix, electricity supply actually fits demand worse, not better.
So, the more the government backs nuclear power, the more it is undermining the future of renewables in the UK’s energy supply. By backing the nuclear horse so strongly, it is revealing its probable real long-term aim: to use the ineffective and costly Renewables Obligation to fail to meet its targets (which it is guaranteed to do) and then claim that its nuclear power should count as “renewable” because it is low-carbon. Anyway, 2020 is several elections away, and whoever is in charge at the time can deal with the problem then.
But maybe I’m wrong and the government really does want renewables to have a major role. If so, here are five important things it ought to be doing to demonstrate its good intentions:
1. The natural companion to intermittent renewables is not nuclear but hydropower, which can be turned on and off to supply electricity when it is needed, and to store energy for when it is in surplus. So, we should seriously expand hydropower capacity in the UK, which currently stands at about 1,500MW, with a view to using it not for baseload generation but to balance gaps between supply and demand. The pumped storage facility at Dinorwig in Wales is already doing this on a huge scale, if for brief periods, with its ability to kick a colossal 1,320MW into the grid at 12 seconds’ notice. We need a large number of plants designed to perform a similar role, but over periods of hours and days, rather than minutes. Small-scale hydro could also have a big role in balancing the output from individual wind farms, perhaps sharing the same grid connections. The new 100MW station at Glendoe (Scotland’s first new large hydro plant in 50 years) is to be welcomed, but there is an even bigger role for small-scale hydro, which could produce a further 650MW.
2. We should also improve our connections to other European countries, as this will help to smooth the overall renewables supply curve, and so benefit all countries. Denmark, Germany, Spain and Portugal are far enough away from the UK for their wind farms to be out of sync with ours, so by linking them all together, wind power surges in one country can compensate for dips in others. There is also growing output from photovoltaic panels (PV) in Germany, Spain and Italy, which can further smooth the renewable supply curve. Also note that Denmark uses its connection to Norway, which gets 99% of its electricity from hydro, to dump surplus wind energy, and draw on the hydro when the wind drops. We should do the same. Concentrated solar power (CSP) from Spain, Portugal and North Africa will also make a huge contribution to renewable generation and supply stability. Like hydro (and unlike solar PV), CSP can store up energy (as heat) and use it to generate electricity when needed.
3. We also need to beef up our own UK grid to link the places our renewable power will be coming from far away from existing power stations – and using undergound power lines so as not to disfigure our upland landscapes. A new west coast interconnector would be an excellent way to link the many power sources along the UK’s western seaboard, and link to Ireland at the same time. The electricity distribution system also needs to be re-engineered to accommodate small- and medium-scale embedded generation, from local combined heat and power plants to solar PV tiles on domestic roofs. We also need to use price signals on the grid to make our demand responsive to supply, so that, for example, freezers stock up on cold when electricity is cheap, and coast along when the price is high.
4. Scrap the failed Renewables Obligation and replace it with a feed-in tarriffs system, or another system of fixed-price contracts to give renewable developers much needed security for long-term investment. This system would aim to deliver electricity quality – that is a smooth output matching demand – not just quantity. To do this, it would pay a premium for diversity of supply to bring in less productive locations, and less economic technologies such as wave power and solar PV. Note that the British Pelamis wave power technology has now been deployed in Portugal thanks to the far greater commitment to renewables of the Portuguese government.
5. Finally, the government should come clean about the deals it has made with EDF and other nuclear generators. It must be seen to hold firm to its promise not to subsidise nuclear power, either overtly or covertly, made in the 2006 Energy Review: “It will be for the private sector to initiate, fund, construct and operate new nuclear plants and to cover the full cost of decommissioning and their full share of long-term waste management costs.”
