The Sun newspaper recently ran an article claiming
that ‘Britain will face power cuts unless
the government steps up plans to build more nuclear energy plants’(1), a view reflected in a parallel Daily Mirror
article which talked of fears over ‘energy shortage and lights going out'
(2). This was in response to fact that the
Conservative government has been unable to get private sector financial support
for some of the new nuclear projects it wanted to see built, despite being able
to tap consumers bills for some of the large extra cost. Labour said it could do
better – in effect by using taxpayers money to partly fund new nuclear (3).
What seems to
have escaped them both is that electricity use has fallen significantly in the
UK in recent years- so we don’t need costly new nuclear plants. UK electricity
use is now back to 1994 levels, around 15% down, in part due to the success of
energy saving programmes and despite 18% economic growth over the period (4).
It is true
that, as we phase out coal use (all of it is planned to go by 2025), and as the
old nuclear plants close, we will need more energy inputs, but there is no
shortage of low cost green energy options. As the government Business and
Energy Secretary Greg Clark said ‘The cost of renewable technologies
such as offshore wind has fallen dramatically, to the point where they now
require very little public subsidy and will soon require none’ (5).
He could have
also mentioned on shore wind and PV solar, now both vying to be the lowest
costs energy sources of all, already able to deliver power at around half the
cost of the power that may eventually be
produced if the Hinkley nuclear project is completed, which might be sometime
around 2027. However, the government has opposed on shore wind and has pulled
support for PV solar. So we are left with new nuclear, offshore wind and some
large controversial biomass projects, including some using forestry-derived
wood pellets imported from the USA.
You don’t have
to be an energy expert to see that there are some problems. Offshore wind is
fine and there are some very large schemes going ahead. We already get 33% of
our power from renewable energy projects like this. We are likely to able to
meet at least half our electricity needs from renewables by 2030, and could,
given proper support, get to near 100% by 2050. However, the real problem is not electricity
use, but heat and transport energy. We have not done at all well there so far.
The governments
plan is to get us to switch from using North Sea gas for heating, to using
electricity to run domestic heat pumps- so out goes your old gas fired central
heating boiler unit and in comes an expensive new bit of kit. That, it is
proposed, will be mandatory for all new houses from 2025 (6). In parallel the
governments want to us to switch over to using electric vehicles. All of this
this means more electricity will be needed- a lot more (7). The UK gas grid handles about 4 four times
more energy than the power grid and vehicle fuel use is even large than that.
Shifting all of that over to electricity supplied by the grid will be hard- if
not impossible, even with a lot of new nuclear plants and a major grid
expansion programme.
There is an
alternative. If we went for a very large renewables programme, with onshore and
offshore wind and PV solar, scaled up to meet power demand most of the time, then,
since renewable outputs and demand vary, at times there would be surplus output
– when wind and solar was high but demand for power low. That surplus power could
be quite large and could be used to make carbon-free hydrogen gas by the electrolysis
of water. That green gas could be stored,
with some of it being used later to make electricity again, when there were
lulls in wind and solar availability, while some of it could be fed into the
gas main, instead of fossil gas, to supply heat. So we would keep the gas grid and
you could keep your boiler, although some adjustments would have to be made, as
happened when we switched from the old Town gas, made from coking coal, to
North Sea gas in the 1970s.
In urban areas
there would be a role for heat networks - district heating, fed by biomass or
green gas fired Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants, with large heat stores, these
also being topped up by solar heat, as is done in Denmark. CHP plants are flexible- they can vary the
ratio of heat to power out to match demand. That would help with balancing the
variable output from renewables. And
needless to say, energy waste would be squeezed out of the system- by improved
buildings and the more efficient use of energy.
On the
transport side, while electric cars have their appeal, if using green
electricity, we should really be thinking more of public transport, trains and
trams, and, for larger service and working vehicles (vans, trucks, tractors,
buses) biogas and hydrogen are arguably better fuels. In the system outlined
above, we would have green gas available for them, which could be toped up with
biogas made from domestic food, municipal and farm wastes. It’s harder to see a way forward for
aircraft, which currently use untaxed fossil fuels, but there’s a race on
between systems using battery power and those using biofuel/hydrogen. The later
can also be used for ships- some already use LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) instead of marine diesel.
The simple
message from all this is that we don’t need nuclear- renewables can do it all.
It is conceivable that nuclear could do some of it- using nuclear plants at
night, when power demand is low, to make hydrogen. However, quite apart from
all their other problems, nuclear plants are not suited to frequent rapid changes
in power output, so they would be no use in balancing variable renewables.
Whereas the system described above, based on direct and indirect forms of solar
energy, would do that well- all without the need for fossil fuel, or nuclear
power.
(1)www.thesun.co.uk/news/8654311/mps-fear-electricity-shortage
(2)www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/tory-energy-failures-raise-fears-14149517
(3) https://labour.org.uk/press/tory-energy-cancellations-risk-power-20-million-homes-rebecca-long-bailey/
(4)
www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-electricity-generation-2018-falls-to-lowest-since-1994
(5)
www.gov.uk/government/speeches/statement-on-suspension-of-work-on-thewylfa-newyddnuclear-project
(6) www.gov.uk/government/news/spring-statement-2019-what-you-need-to-know
(7) https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-energy-demand/uk-power-demand-to-soar-on-plans-to-end-gas-home-heating-research-idUKKCN1R0003
This was produced initially for the BANNG anti-nuclear group in Essex: www.banng.info
An edited version appeared in their Regional Life section
