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Submission to the 2006 energy Review |
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Written by P H Spare MSc CEng FIMechE FEI
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Friday, 24 February 2006 |
The key questions posed by the consultation document are:
1. What more could the Government do on the demand or supply side for
energy to ensure that the UK's long-term goal of reducing carbon
emissions is met?
Electricity is probably the most important man-made commodity in an industrialised society, for three reasons: 1 It brings flexible power to all citizens; 2 It cannot be stored in large quantities ; 3 There is no substitute for it. Oil is essential for transport, but to some extent its use can be circumvented. Gas is required for home heating; and like electricity, with only limited scope for substitution. In descending order of priority the pecking of importance is electricity, gas and oil.
Controlling the demand side of the energy equation is fraught with difficulties. All the evidence from the last half century shows that restrictions on demand/consumption are tolerated in a free society only to cope with a short term crisis ie war, strikes or blockades. Electricity and gas are not seen as luxury items, but as essentials that must be available continuously.
Although working people saw their lives improved by cheaper goods and transport through the industrial revolution, they could rarely take much advantage of its power source - the steam engine, because it could not be utilised at the domestic level. Electricity in contrast has proved a flexible power source. It has facilitated labour-saving appliances, deleted domestic drudgery, brought convenience, comfort and pleasure. It has brought dramatic improvements to the industrial nations and its use grows steadily as a proportion of all energy every year. Even well-meaning restrictions or controls will have adverse affects on peoples' lives. Restricting energy use is highly unpopular as it affects a very personal level of behaviour. Any government introducing draconian measures could face electoral catastrophe.
Clearly, to reduce carbon emissions, if energy use is not to be cut back substantially, hydrocarbons have to be replaced by hydro/renewables/ nuclear. In a democracy, this will be driven largely by favourable pricing. If real energy prices continue to increase in the short term, it is probable that total demand will reduce by a percent or two and future growth be held back a little. In the medium term (5 – 10 years) some form of carbon tax agreement could reduce fossil fuel use. Carbon emissions from electricity generation will increase as the Magnox and then the AGRs are retired. Chart 8 in the DTi consultation document explanation shows emissions from the energy sector reducing from 86 units to 78 units between 2005 and 2010. This prediction is absurd, given that the remaining magnox nuclear plants will be retiring over this period, causing an increase in the amount of coal used for electricity generation. Imports of electricity from France, Sweden and Norway should be considered as a way of redressing this loss. Opportunities for large new hydro schemes may need to be re-examined. There are lessons to be learned from Europe, the states with the largest nuclear capacity have the lowest CO2 output, as would be expected.
On the supply side, looking decades into the future, the government and regulators have to provide an environment that will encourage investment in reliable gas and electricity supplies. Nuclear plants can replace gas and coal in electricity supply from the middle of the next decade and renewables will make a small contribution. Much of the failure of the 2003 policy is attributable to excessive confidence being placed in some embryonic alternative technologies, whilst ignoring the advice of professional engineers who have worked in energy supply for decades.
It should be remembered that throughout most of the 20th century, the UK was mining and consuming about 100 million tons of coal per annum and the industry employed upwards of half a million men. Is it really credible that such a massive enterprise can be replaced by a scattering of wind turbines and solar panels?
2. With the UK becoming a net energy importer and with big investments to be made over the next twenty years in generating capacity and networks, what further steps, if any, should the Government take to develop our market framework for delivering reliable energy supplies? In particular, we invite views on the implications of increased dependence on gas imports.
Electricity is the lifeblood of an advanced industrial society. Its supply has to be provided with a security level of at least 99.98%. A network of large conventional systems is therefore essential to provide a secure, year-round base-load.
There must be more incentives and rewards for suppliers and generators that provide high security, reserve supplies or long-term storage. OFGEM appears to consider only short term horizons and this has compounded recent difficulties. The electricity sale/purchasing mechanism needs to include a component that reflects either generating capacity, the ability to provide long-term secure supplies or carbon avoidance. The CCL must be removed from nuclear generators. It worsens the CO2 position, nationally by vitiating the atmosphere for new nuclear generation.
Some 20 million households depend upon gas for heating, with no prospect of a replacement fuel for decades. There may be concerns about global warming, but in the UK, heating is needed for most houses for 150 - 200 days per year. Had natural gas not been wasted in such a profligate fashion for electricity production, gas supplies would have taken another 20 years to begin serious decline. Natural gas - the premium fuel - has been squandered in only a generation. We are facing a crisis that successive governments have been advised about but have chosen to ignore. Some extra storage will help the situation and the government must ensure that planning procedures for large electricity supply and gas storage facilities, (including LNG) are rigorous, but efficient. Large gas and LNG storage plants should rarely be permitted in residential areas.
If gas supplies are restricted by high prices, political interference or terrorist strikes, it may become necessary to supply domestic consumers preferentially. To protect vital electricity supplies it could then be necessary to permit some large coal and oil-fired plants to continue to operate beyond planned closure dates. This will increase greenhouse gas production, but may be a necessary step to protect the old and vulnerable from avoidable cold-related illnesses.
Many of the options proposed for reducing carbon emissions such as CHP and micro-generation will employ natural gas as fuel and out dependence upon gas will therefore be changed little. Small scale plants also have other drawbacks. They have shorter lives and relatively higher running costs than large plants. Of the renewable options, only waste incineration, landfill gas and large scale hydroelectric plants avoid gas imports and can approach the requisite level of output security. These three should be part of the Renewables Obligation.
Parallels to the energy situation can be seen elsewhere. Over the last two winters, the South East of the UK has seen very little rainfall, with conditions approaching a drought. It has been possible to sustain normal industrial and domestic life because politicians and engineers invested in a water storage and distribution system in the last century. City life would not be possible if we had to depend up the natural supply of rain and river water. In the same way, the sun cannot be relied upon to provide light, apart from the midsummer months. Modern life can function because engineers have developed systems to provide electric light. These lessons also apply when natural or renewable sources are proposed for the supply of electricity. They will never be controllable or predictable and will always have to be backed up by large-scale conventional plants. The evidence from Germany is very relevant. They have installed about 15,000 MW of wind plant, but have been able to shut only about 1000 MW of conventional plants because for long periods, wind power output falls to insignificant levels.
3. The Energy White Paper left open the option of nuclear new build. Are there particular considerations that should apply to nuclear as the Government re-examines the issues bearing on new build, including long-term liabilities and waste management? If so, what are these, and how should the Government address them?
As for any project requiring a decade of investment before there is any prospect of a return, investors in replacement nuclear plants have to be confident about future government energy policy at least a decade ahead.
A site licensee has to apply for permission to build a new nuclear plant. The design has to be submitted to the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate for approval. Any design that is offered for the UK will already have been approved for use in some other industrial state. A system must be established whereby the safety and approval procedures used in another country ie USA, Finland, Canada, France etc can be taken into consideration here, to shorten the planning period and reduce the total workload for the NII. The NII may need an increased budget to review several reactor designs that have been approved for construction overseas, in parallel.
The planning system must be capable of providing generic approval to a reactor design, with local factors being considered for each new plant. The first few new build opportunities will almost certainly involve existing sites where conditions are understood and qualified staff are available.
The imposition of taxes such as the Climate Change Levy on nuclear generators ( a technology that produces almost no greenhouse gases) needs to be reversed and investors must be given some guarantee that no similar irrational or arbitrary measures will permitted in future.
The electricity pricing regime must reflect the great benefit of reliable base load power from nuclear plants with negligible CO2 output. The electricity sale/purchasing mechanism needs to include some component that reflects either generating capacity or carbon avoidance.
The decommissioning and waste disposal costs of new light water or CANDU reactors will be less than 0.5% of lifetime income and will have little, if any influence on investment decisions. The investment climate will be encouraged if CORWM and the government make some progress in identifying the site for the final deep waste repository. Similarly, new investment will be encouraged if proposals to classify recovered plutonium and depleted uranium as a waste stream, rather than a potential energy source are abandoned.
4. Are there particular considerations that should apply to carbon abatement and other low-carbon technologies?
There are two issues. Carbon capture from large hydrocarbon plants is an enormous technical challenge. It will involve substantial development of novel technologies, massive investment in backend facilities and could increase electricity prices by 50 – 100%. It will also be necessary to develop transport and disposal arrangements for liquefied CO2, plus dedicated inspection and monitoring regimes to confirm that CO2 disposal is working.
Every opportunity should be taken to co-operate with other industrial nations on these issues. It is unlikely that carbon capture will ever be applied to transport or domestic users, so that for two thirds of the carbon sources, abatement will mean total replacement, with a very limited range of potential options.
Generally, low-carbon technologies, apart from hydroelectric and nuclear, involve novel small scale technologies that cannot be applied at the large industrial level, but must be multiplied to millions of users. With such schemes, there are long periods for manufacture and application, when potential gains are not realised because of obsolescence and a short working life. R&D efforts for such technologies will require government support for many decades.
Consider on example. The Energy Minister has declared that the Department of Trade and Industry has put £25 million into marine renewables R&D since 1999. There have been substantial programmes of wave power research for 35 years. The CEGB had a facility at Marchwood power station 30 years ago. Many universities have conducted testing over decades. The Osprey machine was tried, but sank off the North of Scotland after 2 days at the end of the 90's. Surely the fact that no other enterprising maritime nation has produced a full scale working wave power plant indicates that many of the problems are probably insuperable. The physical facts speak for themselves. The typical energy in a wave front around the British Isles is 30-90kW/ metre. Taking the average of 60 kW, with a conversion efficiency of 25%, requires a structure 40 miles long to replace a single large coal or nuclear plant. How much longer before the DTi admits that no wave plant will ever produce useful quantities of reliable power because they would be vulnerable to storms such as those in 1979, 1987 and 1953?
Even apparently sound schemes such as those burning firewood have enormous environmental implications when built to produce useful power. They need thousands of square km of monoculture crop and necessitate hundreds of thousands of vehicle journeys to transport the low-calorific value fuel to combustion plants.
The pursuit of some low carbon technologies may seem morally desirable but, for many years, their development has diverted investment away from reliable technologies that are required for the electrical supplies that secure our fundamental wellbeing. The consultation document states that the Renewables Obligation will cost about £1000M per annum from 2010. The majority of this will be squandered on small-scale, unreliable technologies that will never be capable of replacing conventional thermal plants. In most cases, they will be a supplementary layer of generation outwith the control of the grid control rooms. At best may reduce fossil fuel consumption by a few thousand tons per year. At worst, they will cause unnecessary perturbations to grid frequency and despoil majestic landscapes up and down the UK that have resisted the ravages of industry for several hundred years.
For this same level of expenditure, it would be possible to construct a fleet of four PWR or CANDU type reactors on sites such as Sizewell, Hunterston, Hinkley Point and Dungeness. With a combined generating capacity of about 5000 MW, such a fleet could replace about one quarter of the large coal plants. Unlike renewable plants that are prone to common-mode generation collapse, such a nuclear fleet would provide backup for one another and provide inexpensive, reliable, interference-free, base-load or load-following power for 50 years. They would moreover form the basis of a practical plan to meet the government's primary objective of reducing CO2 emissions to the level of France or Sweden.
5. What further steps should be taken towards meeting the Government's goals for ensuring that every home is adequately and affordably heated?
The role of the energy industry is to provide secure supplies. It is the role of the government to ensure that poverty in general is alleviated.
Comments are also invited on:
1. The long-term potential of energy efficiency measures in the transport, residential, business and public sectors, and how best to achieve that potential.
Progressive improvements in efficiency will release income that is then spent on new energy-consuming services. Efficiency causes increased, not reduced consumption. Over the last 100 years, engineers have brought great improvements in the efficiency of appliances. As this has reduced fuel consumption, the money saved has then been spent on other new appliances, travel or solid consumer goods – increasing total consumption and general prosperity. As the consultation document states, between 1990 and 2000, CO2 emissions from vehicles increased by 8% whilst average fuel consumption improved by 10%. As consumers saw vehicle mpg for a given engine size increase, they chose to buy cars with larger engines and get better performance for the same fuel cost.
2. Implications in the medium and long term for the transmission and distribution networks of significant new build in gas and electricity generation infrastructure.
This is inextricably linked with item 4 below. There are clear risks in becoming more dependent on gas imports, but in the next few years, new distribution and storage will be required to increase security since no new nuclear plants can be built within the period. Over the longer term, it will be necessary to replace natural gas by hydrogen or substitute natural gas.
Hydrogen used with fuel cells for vehicle propulsion will have to be provided from local low carbon energy via electrolysis/refuelling stations. The implications of using large scale electricity distribution for electrolysis plants for local hydrogen production need to be analysed. High voltage electrical distribution networks are established and well understood. It should be far less challenging than trying to construct a high pressure hydrogen system.
The problems and investments will be very substantial. If hydrogen replaces a substantial fraction of light vehicle fuels, the electricity generation and distribution systems will have to be increased to >100GW. This will require a very large fleet of carbon-free power stations, in addition to those needed to replace the retiring Magnox/AGRs and coal plants that cannot meet the EC combustion plant directive. If existing power station sites are re-equipped, the supergrid lines, transformers, protection and monitoring equipment can be reused.
Proposals that massive wind power installations could provide power for the UK have already met serious problems because the wind farms would be many hundreds or even a thousand miles from the power-hungry South East. The very serious cost, logistic and environmental implications of building an entirely new supergrid network from the North of Scotland to the North of England or English Midlands have been underestimated by the advocates of renewable electricity. Since the same power can be produced by new nuclear reactors on existing nuclear sites with much less costly upgrading, the case for such wind parks is further weakened.
3. Opportunities for more joint working with other countries on our energy policy goals.
Many countries share the same challenges with regard to energy availability and rising costs. Italy represents a model for gas dependence that the UK will approach in the next 20 years. Germany imports substantial quantities of gas. Apart from Norway and the UK, European Countries import all their fuel oil. Replacements for both oil and gas will be needed over the next few decades. The potential for the electricity/hydrogen combination to replace vehicle fuel needs to be investigated in much more detail. With regard to increased nuclear capacity, Sweden, France and Finland have far fewer problems with the acceptance than does the UK or Germany. EC agencies need to be more visible in energy issues.
4. Potential measures to help bring forward technologies to replace fossil fuels in transport and heat generation in the medium and long term.
There are two premium fuels whose loss or interruption will cause serious problems namely aviation fuel and natural gas. More railway and public service vehicle could be converted to use electricity, but more generating plant would have to be built.
We have become accustomed to the use of natural gas, but it replaced coal gas only 35 years ago. Coal was used for 150 years as a source of coal gas. There have been many experimental studies in the UK and abroad using coal as a feedstock for the production of substitute natural gas and liquid fuels. There is a substantial quantity of coal in the UK, enough for hundreds of years, even at double current production levels – mainly recoverable only via deep mining. It would be helpful if the use of coal for gas and liquid fuel production was re-examined. Such a study would have to look at the likely costs, quantities of coal and the number of facilities that would be needed for coal treatment.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 24 February 2006 )
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