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Speech from the Energy Industries Club |
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Written by Sir Bernard Ingham
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Tuesday, 12 December 2006 |
ENERGY POLICY MADE BY IDIOTS
I am very glad I have at last made it to address you. Last year I
turned up here at the Army and Navy Club on December 12 to discover
there was no Energy Industries Club lunch and later that I was only a
year out.
Bearing in mind the title of my talk, you may well think that an idiot is in charge of my diary. If so, you are looking at him.
I am somewhat surprised that you wish to hear me since I find I am not
the most popular animal on the energy policy trail – and certainly not
with the Government, HM Loyal Opposition (if that is what it is?), the
Liberal Democrats and, of course, the Greens.
Indeed, after a debate earlier this year a regulation woman
environmental campaigner – short cropped hair, rimless glasses, canvas
jacket, combat trousers, boots and rucksack – came up to me and said
she thought I would like to know that she had found me as obnoxious in
the flesh as on radio and TV.
I thanked her kindly and said she had made my day. I was obviously in full working order. Exit campaigner in blushing huff.
All this perhaps explains why the Daily Mirror has described me as an
“obnoxious rentaspleen” and the Independent newspaper “a mound of
poisoned suet”. The Independent, of course, lives permanently on the
edge of environmental collapse and reminds me of Job, the Old
Testament’s resident manic depressive.
The inspiration for the title of my talk came from a professor of electrical engineering who recently said:
“We need energy strategies based on sound engineering, NOT fantasies of
NGOs, environmentalists or policies promoted by trade organisations.
Otherwise energy policy will reflect the priorities of lunatics running
an asylum.
So let me trace the path of insanity that has brought us to
where we are today.
I suppose the first outbreak occurred during the privatisation process
when someone mislaid the old statutory obligation to supply – or, put
another way, to ensure our fuel and power supplies could cope with the
worst winter in 50 years.
No doubt this made the utilities being privatised more attractive to
investors. So far we have got away with it, thanks to a succession of
mild winters and, until recently, oil and gas flowing bounteously from
every North Sea orifice.
Then short-termism further attacked our security of supply. Ofgem, that
far-seeing regulator, responded to the Government’s desire to be loved
by the voters by squeezing wholesale electricity prices until the pips
squeaked.
They were cut by 40%, though, curiously, with little benefit to the
domestic consumer. This made the generation of electricity whether by
coal, oil, gas or nuclear unprofitable. British Energy, the nuclear
generator, which had no domestic consumers to milk, had to be rescued
on confiscatory terms, even though, with the rise in gas prices, it
soon became one of the higher yielding milch cows in Gordon Brown’s
extensive – and extending - mistal.
Ever since Ofgem’s intervention, the National Grid has been scratching
around every year for a margin of generating capacity to cover cold
weather. And since gas has generated up to 40% of our electricity, gas
supplies have become an important pointer to our viability in Arctic
conditions.
It has sometimes been touch and go but so far God has been on our side.
The problem for the future is whether any amount of divine
intervention, given the framework within which energy policy has to be
developed, will be enough to keep Britain going.
North Sea gas is past its peak and declining uncomfortably fast. There
is a scramble to import more gas and create more gas storage. The
size and quality of our electricity supply system is impaired and is
far less robust than it ought to be.
The international outlook, with Islam on the march and President Putin
inclined to behave like a brutish, baited bear at the slightest poke,
makes reliance on gas imports look decidedly dodgy, never mind the
price suppliers will charge for it. Yet the Prime Minister, unhappily
to be fair, sees us importing 80-90% of our energy requirements in the
form of gas within 15 years.
We are not reducing our carbon emissions – as we have undertaken to do
by treaty – but increasing them, undoing the good (in carbon terms)
done by the dash for gas out of coal.
We know – and have known for some time – that over the next 10-15 years
we shall lose about one third of our generating capacity through the
closure of ageing coal and nuclear power stations.
Until recently we proposed to fill that gap with renewable sources of
energy and energy conservation. But renewables supply only about four
per cent of our electricity – and most of that from large-scale hydro
that is virtually fully developed. And, whatever efforts are being made
to conserve energy, they are not moderating demand for electricity. It
rises relentlessly at 1-1.5% a year.
So, presumably when renewables and conservation were found not to work
as a gap-closer, we would turn to carbon-emitting gas, imported in
increasing quantities from unstable countries at unknown but probably
rising prices.
I don’t know about you, but this reminds me of flying on a wing and a
prayer, of foolish virgins and, yes, lunatics in charge of the asylum.
You may well wonder why we have got here. The answer is simple. It is
because you in the energy industries – and not least in the nuclear
industry – have allowed the lunatics to take over the asylum.
Over the last 25-30 years the ruthless, campaigning Greens have been
allowed to impose their prejudices on Britain and indeed the globe.
Their messianic determination to change the world – and cast it in
their view of what that world should be – has brainwashed the body
politic into near total submission.
This feat has been achieved without the slightest reference to facts or
to scientific justification, without any knowledge of the laws of
physics and, most certainly, without consulting any self-respecting
engineer.
As takeovers go, it has so far been a brilliant success.
Why, they have even got away with the direst predictions of global
warming and climate change when, until about 1980 and even later, they
were direly forecasting global cooling, not to say freezing. This
immense U-turn was accomplished even though most of the extra CO2 now
in the atmosphere had already been poured into it.
Why didn’t they in the 1970s identify CO2 as a warm blanket when they were forecasting global refrigeration?
The notion that there is now a consensus among scientists about
man-made global warming is pure fantasy. It simply does not exist –
and, even if it did, it would be worthless because science cannot
proceed by consensus but by proof.
Consensus, Margaret Thatcher used to say, is what you get when you can’t agree.
The extent to which this politically correct view of the world has
taken over is demonstrated by at least two attempts by agents of the
Royal Society, God save us, to stifle or even close down debate on
man-made global warming. You can be sure that when they start burning
books and trying to gag people there is something rotten in the state.
As Lord Nigel Lawson recently put it: “Today we are very conscious of
the threat we face from the supreme intolerance of Islamic
fundamentalism. It could not be a worse time to abandon our own
traditions of reason and tolerance and to embrace instead the
irrationality and intolerance of eco-fundamentalism where reasoned
question of its mantras is regarded as a form of blasphemy”.
Yet what is driving energy policy? Why, eco-fundamentalism. The
Conservatives say that renewables must be given their chance and
nuclear is “a last resort”. The Liberal Democrats are even more
fundamentalist because they won’t touch nuclear power with a bargepole
and will, no doubt, leave us powerless and bankrupt if they mean what
they say about drastically reducing CO2 emissions.
Three years ago, the Government was in the same camp. A sense of
responsibility – or perhaps legacy-watching – has now seen it reverse
its position. After sidelining nuclear, it now sees it playing a
significant role in electricity supply.
This is the first sign that reality is dawning after years of
Green-induced delusion. As such, we in SONE welcome it. But it does not
take us very far. All we have had so far is words and none of the
action which would recognise the urgency of the looming energy gap I
have outlined.
Nor, pending the White Paper expected next year, do we have an energy
policy. The Government’s energy review was still dominated by
environmental policy and pulled apart by the social objective of
eliminating fuel poverty.
Frankly, the prices required to encourage serious energy economy are
incompatible with the objective of eliminating so-called fuel poverty,
which is properly a problem for social policy.
We shall not have a rational energy policy until we make security of
supply at competitive cost its overriding objective. That is the only
policy that will serve rich and powerful and poor and weak alike, for
if energy supply fails the poor and weak will inevitably suffer most.
Common prudence also teaches that, whatever reservations we may have
about unproven man-made global warming, it would not be sensible, given
the rising CO2 content of the atmosphere, to put more into it if we can
avoid doing so economically.
But the operative word is “economically”. Given that global warming, if
it is a fact, is a global problem, it does not make sense for us to
bankrupt ourselves in vainly trying to reverse it, especially as we
might have better weather out of it.
So, if we are to break free of the idiots making energy policy, we have
to go for competitive security in as clean a way as we can economically
devise.
And therein lies the problem left by the lunatics. How can we do it?
Renewables are, at best, marginal and at best marginally economic.
Wind is most certainly not economic. It is mere subsidy farming. It is
costing us a bomb for unreliable, intermittent power that has a poor
return in CO2 avoidance and has already contributed to a
Continental failure of supply – or delayed recovery from that
failure - according to the interim report on a recent Euro-blackout.
Yet, as I speak, 14,000MW of wind power is already operating, under
construction, awaiting approval, planned or proposed in Scotland on top
of the current
generating capacity of 9,500MW and a maximum Scottish demand of
6,000MW. Nobody seems to realise in Edinburgh that the maximum export
capacity across the border to the bulk of consumers in the South is
2,200MW.
It is clear that when a lunatic dons a kilt he goes completely stark
staring bonkers – unless, of course, he expects the English to pay for
a brand new transmission network, having been daft enough to foot the
bill for their grossly expensive Parliament building in Edinburgh.
It is no consolation that they are pretty barmy, too, in Denmark where
80% of their wind power has to be dumped cheaply on to the Eurogrid
because wind power is generated at the wrong time.
And if wind doesn’t make sense, what other economic renewables do we
have? Waves and tides? Not in the foreseeable future, if ever. Solar?
What, in our climate? Pull the other leg. Geothermal? Not enough hot
rocks.
Bio-mass, bio-oil, bio-alcohol, bio-gas? I don’t think so. To keep a
1000MW power station going with bio-mass, we would need to grow and
maintain a forest the size of North Wales. Using bio-oil, we would need
a rapeseed field the size of the Highlands of Scotland. With
bio-alcohol, a sugar beet field the size of Devon or a cornfield the
size of Yorkshire. And to keep the same 1000MW power station going with
bio-gas, we would need 800m chickens with regular digestions on a
chicken farm a third the area of Dartmoor.
And we need not one 1000MW power station but 60-65 at maximum demand.
A nuclear power station could provide the same 1000MW on the equivalent of 10 soccer pitches.
Who said the lunatics were not in charge of the asylum?
Not me. After all, we have all sorts of eminent politicians and Sir
Jonathan Porritt’s unsustainable Sustainable Development Commission
wanting eventually to supplant the national grid with local – or
distributed – generation. It is plain it has never occurred to them to
seek engineering advice.
Had they done so they would have been asked why they want to go down
this route when it runs counter to the historical development of
national grids the world over; when the British national grid brought
vast economies of scale in capital investment and 25% in running costs;
when domestic micro-CHP would increase reliance on gas; and when
uncontrollable flows on and off local or national distribution networks
could blow any number of fuses; and so on.
The more politically correct of you may have winced when you read my
title. Well, now you know there is one born every minute in
Westminster.
Now, I am the first to recognise that nuclear is not the answer to all
our prayers and is only one of a number of elements in energy supply
that should rationally be employed.
There is a lot of coal still to be had economically, if only we could
economically remove the vast amount of CO2 it produces in generating
electricity – and keep it locked up.
So far, this is little more than a gleam in the eye, with a hint of madness in the gleam’s intensity.
We have not
• demonstrated we can capture all or most of the CO2 coming from our power stations
• shown we can transport it and dump it in the strata under the North Sea
• proved that the strata will lock it up for a long time
• provided anything more than a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the
impact of the cost on electricity prices; though those rough estimates
suggest that it could double the price of coal (and presumably gas)
generated electricity. This is not surprising when apparently a vast
fleet of ships will be required to ferry it out to North Sea dumping
grounds since a pipeline is not proposed.
We do, though, know it won’t make the slightest difference to wider
industrial, home or transport-produced CO2 – the bulk of CO2 emissions.
I think I have demonstrated that we cannot yet rely on clean coal technology.
So where do we stand if we can’t rely on renewables, energy
conservation and clean coal technology? The honest answer is that we
are in deep, deep trouble.
One firm, LogicaCMG, has put a potential price tag on it of £100bn
within 10 years in lost output and other consequences that would hit
the poorest hardest. Energy demand, it says, could outstrip supply by
5% by 2010 and by 23% by 2015 unless something is done.
I am in no position to agree or disagree. I just look at the expected
loss of 33% of our generating capacity in 10-15 years and how we mean
to close it and forecast economic and industrial trouble, social
deprivation and civil disorder.
This is what you get when the lunatics take over the asylum.
In practice, what I expect to happen, is that to appease the lunatic
Greens we shall go on industrialising our wildest countryside with wind
power stations to little purpose at exorbitant cost. We shall also pay
immense lip service to the potential of renewables because it sounds
good. Tokenism is vastly important in empty modern politics.
We might just cobble together an all embracing energy conservation
campaign – tackling power, industrial, domestic and transport use -
based on practical, costed advice with the support of fuel and power
suppliers. We don’t have anything resembling such a campaign at
present, which is curious, given the Government’s interventionist,
nanny-state mentality.
We shall burn coal with abandon until a Euro-directive aimed at acid
rain rather than CO2 emissions comes in. We shall import gas
frenetically from all corners of the globe, no matter its provenance,
no matter how much polonium210 we find in the West End, and no matter
its cost.
And, as is our way, we shall, if we are lucky, proceed in a leisurely,
tentative, unconvincing manner to start a new generation of nuclear
power stations that will not be built in time to meet the worst of the
shortfalls in electricity but, if pursued with increasing enthusiasm
the deeper disruption occurs, will progressively shield us from the
worst of the consequences produced by idiots.
We are not rid of them yet by a long chalk. They are inventing a whole raft of new reasons why we should not go nuclear.
I can merely tell you why we should go nuclear. Because:
• nuclear is safe; not a single death from a British radiation accident in 50 years’ electricity generation. Beat that.
• nuclear is reliable, controllable and economic – the cheapest
generating option with the rise in gas prices – with a long-term
60-year generating life. It follows it does not require a subsidy in
contrast to wind and other renewables.
• while the heavy up-front costs have to be overcome, nuclear has low and predictable running costs
• nuclear has no foreseeable shortage of fuel and the means vastly to
extend the efficient use of uranium through reprocessing and the
development of the fast reactor
• nuclear has neither decommissioning nor waste management problems
waiting solution, given 1) the nuclear industry has been managing its
wastes for 50 years and now only needs a longer-term depository; 2)
knows how to manage long-term wastes; and 3) new generation power
stations produce only a tenth of the waste or Magnox or AGR stations –
and they produced relatively little – and are designed with
decommissioning in mind. The only obstacle to dealing with nuclear
waste is political: a Green-induced reluctance among politicians to
designate a site.
• nuclear is clean – the cleanest form of electricity generation,
including wind, taking everything into account, according to the
Government’s very own ETSU.
• nuclear minimises the use of fossil fuels
• nuclear thus contributes to greater security of supply at competitive
cost and is clean – just what a rational energy policy requires
• nuclear also discharges a moral obligation on the developed nations
to maximise their use of high technology, especially when it is clean,
to help the developing world improve its lot
• nuclear power stations are growing in number world-wide and other
countries are not going to stop exploiting this resource, whatever we
do. So how are we going to compete?
In short, the Government, unlike other political parties, has shown
that it is at last trying to break out of the ridiculous straightjacket
into which we have allowed ourselves to be strapped by a combination of
the lunatic Greens and our own British passiveness.
I shall see deliverance from the ignorant, unreasoning prejudice of Nigel Lawson’s eco-fundamentalists when we get
• action, not words
• a new nuclear power building programme as part of a balanced and
diverse energy policy which includes a serious and objective approach
to energy efficiency and its conservation
• a determination to power our future, as my professor put it, on the
basis of expert engineering advice and not the fantasies of NGOs,
environmentalists and trade associations.
Meanwhile, I can think of much more condemnatory descriptions of those
who, given the state of knowledge I have outlined, allow us to continue
to run serious risks with the adequacy of our energy and more
especially our power supplies.
How about puerile – and culpable – irresponsibility?
Thank you.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 11 January 2007 )
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