Solar World

Climate Change and the Green Energy Revolution

David Elliott

• Publisher: Green Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857843586
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Renewable Power Resources
• Index: Technology & Engineering

No technology is entirely benign. Renewable energy technologies may have far less impacts than the global impact of fossil fuels, but they do have local impacts. How do we trade off local and global impacts? In this Briefing, Dave Elliott establishes the basic sustainable energy options and their potential problems in the short, medium and long term, dealing with the counter-arguments. This means looking at changes in the way we live and behave. Is it possible to userenewable sources to sustain economic growth indefinitely?

Chapter 1

Introduction

Sustainable energy

Renewable energy has moved from being seen as a marginal, quirky, concern to being centre stage. For example, Denmark now generates around 18% of its electricity from wind turbines and the European Union as a whole aims to generate 22% of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2010.¹ And around the world, the case for a switch to using the winds, waves, tides, direct solar and biological sources of energy, gets stronger every day—as the impending problems of climate change, due to the use of fossil fuels, become clearer. Not only do advocates of sustainable energy claim that the development of renewable energy will help us avoid environmental and resource scarcity problems, they also sometimes claim that this switch could be relatively easy. Indeed, some suggest that it will be a case of ‘win-win’. Far from imposing costs, the change over to sustainable approaches to energy, and indeed to all parts of the economic system, will open up opportunities for new jobs and economic expansion.

For example, speaking at a CBI-Greenpeace Business Conference in October 2000, Stephen Byers, then UK Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, suggested that the UK could and should embark on what he called a ‘Green Industrial Revolution’. He described a ‘win-win’ vision of prosperity through environmental modernisation. ‘We can not continue to pollute the environment and consume resources in the way we have over the last two hundred years. We all know that is unsustainable. We therefore need demanding, long term objectives and goals to improve our productive use of resources, and to cut waste and pollution. That is not a threat to business, to growth, to prosperity. It is the key to our future prosperity.’

Prime Minister Tony Blair underlined this commitment in March 2001, arguing that the UK’s investment in renewable energy technology was ‘a major down-payment on our future, and will help open up huge commercial opportunities for Britain’.

In this Briefing I want to look at whether we really can hope to experience ‘all gain and no pain’, as some suggest, or whether coming to terms with the industrial and consumer system we have created will require, at the very least, some difficult trade-offs between social and environmental objectives.

Given the space available, rather than taking on the whole industrial system, I will focus just on the energy sector and energy use. That is not an inappropriate restriction, since the current pattern of energy use underpins most of our environmental problems, most notably climate change.

Improving the efficiency with which we use energy is one of the key options for limiting the impact of climate change. The potential for energy saving is huge, and I will be looking at some examples. There is certainly a lot that can be done using fairly simple and cheap technical adjustments to the way we use energy. However, even if we avoid wasting so much energy, and begin to cut back on the seemingly inexorable rise in demand for energy, there will still be a need for cleaner energy supplies, and my main emphasis will be on renewable energy sources—the vital new ingredient to a sustainable future.

Box 1: Energy Units: a few terms and statistics you may find useful

kW = kilowatt (1000 watts) A typical one bar electric fire has a rated power of 1kW. Run for one hour it would consume 1 kilowatt hour (kWh) of energy

MW =megawatt (1000kW) Modern wind turbines are rated at 1-2 MW

GW = gigawatt (1000MW) Large coal or nuclear plants are around 1GW

The UK consumes about 350,000,000,000kWh of electricity per annum, or 350 Terawatts (‘TW’). That’s about a third of the UK’s total energy consumption—the rest is used in the form of heat (mostly from gas) and transport (mostly from petrol).

The UK’s overall energy consumption has been increasing at about 1-2% per annum, with the transport sector taking the lead.

Why we need to change

The climate change problem can be stated quite simply. At one time, one of the key energy issues was how long fossil fuel reserves would last. That is still a major issue, but it has been overtaken by the realisation that we may not be able to burn off whatever reserves are left without damaging the climate system. It took hundreds of millions of years for the carbon dioxide that was once in the primeval atmosphere to be converted into fossil materials underground. But we have burnt off a good part of it over a hundred years or so of ever-increasing economic activity—mostly in power stations and vehicles. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are now higher than they have ever been in recorded history—even history recorded in the ice cores going back hundreds of thousands of years. The parallel rise in average planetary temperature seems to be the inevitable result, and the impact of this continuing process on life on earth could be huge.²

It’s not just a matter of a global warming. A 5 or 6°C rise over the next century would begin to melt the icecaps and that, coupled with the thermal expansion of the seas, would probably lead to sea level rise of half a meter or more, inundating many key food-growing and urban areas of the word. The weather system would become more erratic, with an increase in major storms and floods, and, at other times, droughts. Some more pessimistic projections suggest that global warming could kill off the rainforests, so that their stored carbon dioxide would trigger a runaway greenhouse effect, with methane from the seas accelerating it further. As a result there could be temperature rises of up to 20°C.

None of this is necessary. We can use the climate and weather system to generate energy without producing the emissions that damage the climate system. The natural energy flows in the winds, waves, river currents and tides, the solar-driven biological energy in biomass and the use of direct solar heat and light can provide for all our needs, if we can devise the necessary energy conversion technologies and use energy efficiently. That is the vision offered by advocates of the sustainable energy path.

In general terms there is no doubt that it would be possible to rely just on renewable sources, without using any coal, oil, gas or nuclear fuels. The sun delivers more energy per square metre of the planet than we could ever need—the resultant natural energy flows represent a very large, non-finite, resource base, with the solar radiation input alone amounting to around 90,000 Terawatts (TW). For comparison, our total global energy consumption, measured on a continuous equivalent power basis, is only around 13 TW.³ Of course, not all of the 90,000 TW solar input can be successfully captured and used. Most of the flows are diffuse, some are intermittent, and the efficiency of conversion technologies has to be taken into account, as does the location of the source. But even so there is plenty there, if we can devise the technologies.

Fortunately we have been doing that—too slowly maybe, but steadily. There is a long way to go, given that at present fossil fuels supply around 76% of the worlds energy (see Box 2). However, we can now just about see how we could, in principle, move to a sustainable energy system based on the use of renewable energy, coupled with careful attention to the efficient use of energy. Technically it is possible. The big issue is whether we can and will do it, and do it in time to avoid a climate change disaster. An ancillary issue is whether a commitment to renewables and energy efficiency can allow us to avoid the risks of using nuclear power—which is offering itself as another non-fossil option. Let’s deal with that first.

Box 2: Energy around the World

Global primary energy consumption in 2000, by source:

Hydro	2.3%
Nuclear	6.6%
Oil	34.6%
Biomass	11.3%
Gas	21.4.8%
Coal	21.6%
New renewables	2.1%

See the World Energy Councils web site for regular updates: http://www.worldenergy.org.

Obviously the pattern of energy use for each individual country differs. For example, Norway and Brazil obtain more than half their electricity from hydro, France more than 70% from nuclear power, whereas in some developing countries there is very little use of electricity from any source. The UK gets around 25% of its electricity from nuclear power plants, nearly 30% from coal-fired plants and over 40% from gas-fired plants. Hydro and new renewables produce around 3% of the UK’s electricity.

Electricity is not the only type of energy used. For example, in the UK it represents only about 20% of total energy use. In addition to being used to generate electricity, gas is used for heating (representing about 30% of total UK energy used), and oil is used for transport fuels (about 40% of total energy). Coal and other types of solid and liquid fuel, for heating and industrial use, make up the rest.

In overall terms, the industrialised countries, with about 20% of the world population, use about 60% of the world’s energy. That translates into an even larger imbalance in per capita terms—the richest billion people use 5 times more energy than the poorest 2 billion. However, some parts of the developing world are beginning to catch up in terms of total national energy consumed per annum. Certainly, in terms of overall energy use globally, the general trend is upward, by around 1-2% extra each year.

The end of nuclear power

It is true that nuclear plants do not directly generate any carbon dioxide gas. But they have a range of other environmental drawbacks. Most environmentalists see the nuclear option as a non-starter, given that it has proved to be expensive and potentially dangerous, and as yet there is no agreed way of storing very long-lived radioactive wastes that are produced. It also opens up a range of weapons proliferation and security risks. I am not going to rehearse all the reasons why nuclear power cannot be relied on to help deal with climate change. I have laid out my views extensively elsewhere.⁴ Suffice it to say that, quite apart from the excessive costs, safety and security risks, it seems foolish to try to solve one major environmental problem, climate change, by introducing another, radioactive pollution.

After years of massive funding support, nuclear power only provides around 6.6% of the world’s energy, and most European countries have no plans for new nuclear plants and are phasing out their existing plants. In its 2003 White Paper on Energy, the UK government concluded that ‘its current economics make it an unattractive option and there are also important issues of nuclear waste to be resolved.’ It therefore did not contain proposals for building new nuclear plants and focused instead on renewable energy and energy efficiency.⁵

Of course the ex-Soviet states still have nuclear programmes, as do Japan, India and China; and they, and some other Asian countries, would like to expand this option. However, overall the expansion of nuclear power globally seems to be stalled. In the USA, which has not ordered a new nuclear plant since the Three Mile Island partial core meltdown accident in 1979, many of the existing plants are now reaching the end of their useful life and are not being replaced, although, of late, President Bush seems to be trying to breathe life back into the programme.

It is sometimes argued that we can’t abandon nuclear power without major problems of energy security. It will be harder for some countries than others, with France, which currently obtains around 75% of its electricity from nuclear plants, probably being the worst case. However most of the French plants are now old and the ‘red-green’ coalition government seems unlikely to replace them. Indeed it has launched a major renewable energy programme. Belgium, which currently obtains 57% of its electricity from nuclear plants, now has a programme of phasing them out by 2025, while Germany plans to phase out its 19 nuclear plants by around 2030, and has embarked on a major renewable energy programme which, it hopes, will supply around 50% of its electricity by 2050.

These are relatively leisurely phase-out and replacement programmes, and most environmentalists would like to see them accelerated. The UK currently obtains around 25% of its electricity from nuclear plants, most of them being operated by British Energy. Most are scheduled for closure over the next two decades, as they reach the end of their operational life: some have already reached that point. However a faster phase-out is possible. A study by the ILEX consultancy, produced for Greenpeace in 2003, found that, given the UK’s large excess generating capacity, all British Energy’s nuclear plants could be closed by the winter of 2005/6 without undermining security of supply. The UK would still have an overall 20% generation margin over maximum winter demand. That is hardly surprising—the UK has nearly 80 gigawatts of generation capacity installed, whereas meeting the maximum winter demand in 2002 only required around 59GW. Indeed, ILEX concluded, the UK could close all its nuclear plants, including BNFL’s old MAGNOX reactors, by the winter of 2006/7 and still retain a 20% plant margin.⁶

What about the longer term? With nuclear removed, the way ahead for a rapid expansion of renewables would be open, so that, with energy efficiency continuing to make significant contributions, emissions would continue to fall. The removal of nuclear power would of course mean the loss of some carbon-free generation, but the expansion of renewables and energy efficiency should more than compensate for this. It interesting to note that, although 32GW of nuclear generation capacity has so far been phased out around the world, coincidentally, exactly 32GW of wind generation has been installed. Of course, the load factors for wind and nuclear plants differ by around a factor of two, so this is not a full replacement, but given continued expansion of wind, wave, tidal, solar and other renewables, and the development of more efficient ways of using fossil fuel, it should be possible to replace nuclear and reduce emissions. A report produced in 2003 by Friends of the Earth, ‘Tackling Climate Change without Nuclear Power,’ found that by 2020, a sustainable energy policy, based mainly on renewables and energy efficiency, with nuclear power being phased out, could reduce overall emissions by 45%.⁷ That would put the UK well on the way to the 60% reduction by 2050 called for by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution as a response to climate change.⁸

A low carbon non-nuclear future for the UK, based increasingly on renewables, is not an eco-enthusiasts’ fantasy. It a practical proposition. That was one of the conclusions of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. In his detailed study of ‘The UK’s Transition to a Low Carbon Economy’, Paul Ekins came to similar conclusions.⁹ So did the government’s Performance and Innovation Unit in its ‘Energy Review’.¹⁰ What we now need is the political will and financial commitment to make this approach a reality, rather tha...