The Sunak story (on which I am still broadcasting this morning, suggesting that it is not going away as yet) has distracted me from other significant issues over the last few days. There are, war in Ukraine and the French election apart, two of significance to review. They relate to the government's new energy policy, and the developing crisis in the NHS, both of which indicate the inability of this government to work out its priorities, and deliver a strategy to deal with them.
The energy policy has been heavily condemned, with the FT taking a strong lead in doing so, with no sign that it is going to let up. There is more criticism from it out this morning.
The crisis in energy is fourfold. First, we have a short term supply problem. Second, we have a climate crisis. Third, we clearly use too much energy in that context. Fourth, no one knows what to do about nuclear power and the waste it gives rise to, which is why it was being allowed to be phased out, albeit without any decision as to what to replace it with because of political dithering, almost all of it because the Tories have been anxious not to go green. You can play around with these, but I think they are the core issues needing to be addressed.
The short term issues demanded, as I have always campaigned for, massive investment in insulation and more wind and solar energy. There is no indication that any of these things will happen. In other words, whatever short term issue there is this policy completely fails to address it. In that case it is simply not a response to the crisis, at all. As a policy, it fails as a result.
As a green policy and response to climate change it fails totally by failing to address demand and how it can be reduced. Again, there is literally nothing in what has been said that comes near addressing the issue that needs to be addressed on climate-related matters, which is the reduction in energy use we must make. So again, as a policy, it fails.
The reason for both of these failures is very apparent: Johnson is under pressure from his party to go nowhere near green issues, and he has succumbed to it. They will not change planning laws to allow onshore wind, and they do not believe in the need to cut consumption when their entire ethos in life is about its maximisation. The green frontier that we need to face to save life on earth is becoming very apparent. The Tories are the enemy of survival.
Finally, there is nuclear power. Not only is a policy based on nuclear not a policy at all, because the timescales involved in this issue are so long, but it also completely fails any reasonableness test because no one does as yet know how to deal with nuclear waste, and for that reason this is quite literally no solution, in the same way that it never has been.
To pretend that the current energy crisis will only be solved by 2050, when in practice by that point we will be in complete climate crisis anyway, about which nothing is being done, is a farce, and that is the best it can be said about this entire supposed policy.
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How’s this:
My local authority has just had an uplift in new houses required by central government (all worked out centrally of course like a good fascist country does).
This ‘requirement’ is so onerous it means that EXISTING planning law and decision making must now lean more heavily towards allowing housing development – it now must have a bias towards housing.
Speaking to a senior planning officer at my LA last week, it can only mean one thing – the loss of green space.
This is policy by the back door, to create a housing crises to bend or break the existing planning system. Who will benefit? Well, the housebuilding industry who just want to make money.
I’ve no idea how it will affect onshore windfarms, but the green belt is now under threat which considering the amount of brown field sites we cannot use around the country because no one wants to pay to remediate them is ridiculous.
It’s also becoming clear that no extra money is being spent of infrastructure like drainage to cope with the new housebuilding which can help to lead to more sewage in our rivers.
It’s insane and sneaky all at the same time like most Tory policy these days.
Agreed
It is hard to understand why the Conservatives refuse to see that the first two steps in addressing climate change and the short term energy crisis must be (1) reduction in consumption, principally through insulation, and (2) rapid increase in renewable supply, of which the quickest and cheapest is onshore wind. If we act immediately we can make great strides by next year. We can’t wait for a decade or two to deal with either problem.
I still think nuclear has to be part of the energy mix for the next generation. But I am open to being convinced otherwise if renewables can fill the gap in the next decade or two, before the nuclear plants are built. Fusion is still decades off – ITER is not planned to start generating until 2035.
On nuclear waste, we reprocess as much as we can and store what is left. A little like we are storing all of that waste CO2 from fossil fuels in the atmosphere. Until we have the technology to extract 3.7 kg of CO2 from the atmosphere for every kg of carbon that we emit, and store that waste CO2 safely, we cannot meet net zero. But we also can’t reshape society to stop emitting carbon tomorrow.
Agreed
https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/04/07/chernobyl-why-did-the-nuclear-zone-s-red-forest-defeat-these-russian-troops
36 years on since the Chernobyl disaster, it is still killing people. The government must know about this. Why do they still want nuclear power stations?
I wish I knew
It is clear that the Tories are completely clueless regarding nuclear power generation. Not only is it the most expensive form of energy compared with renewables and even coal, oil, and gas. The capital costs are astronomic and always overrun and years later than planned. The disposal of the highly dangerous nuclear waste as you point out is an impossible technoglical problem and will be with us for hundreds of thousands of years with no solution in sight. Tories have forgotten about the disasters at Windscale/Sellafield, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. The investment planned for Sizewell C and 6 other supposedly planned new nuclear stations if invested in the insulation of every home in the UK and in expanding solar and wind generation would go a long way to meeting our climate commitments. Clearly, the anti-green policies of the Tories must be challenged in the forthcoming local elections.
Agreed
Interesting article from The Grauniad
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/11/putin-autocracies-fossil-fuels-climate-action
Hoped you would get around to this disastrous energy non-policy.
Nuclear is increasingly unaffordable – given the proposed massive subsidy formulae and projected consumer price for recent schemes. It is increasingly technically unfeasible. EDF’s Flammanville 3 started construction in 2007 and was originally due to start producing in 2013 is still not functioning at a cost of almost 13bn euros.
‘Up to eight’ new stations in this ‘strategy’ – seems to be code for ‘dont take this seriously’.
Ex Labour and Conservative politicians have been signed up for years already to help sell the mythical Rolls Royce modular reactors.
Decades ago my ex physics professor was head of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and concluded there should be no commitment to a large prograrnme of nuclear unless there was ‘safe containment of longJived,
highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future’.
We so obviously need clear targets for offshore and onshore wind and solar in this decade and a clear decision to leave fossil fuels in the ground. That is just what we dont get in this strategy.
The strategy is blindingly simple and signposted – wind and solar are cheap and getting cheaper fossil and nuclear are expensive and getting dearer.
We have wasted decades with pretend schemes to reduce demand and insulate – and are apparently going to continue pretending.
As usual the Opposition is barely heard.
Thanks
Almost the worst of the problems caused by the Tories desperate desire to hang on to the world that has made them so rich and powerful is that it blots out any realistic national, democratic discussion of the full spectrum of problems we face, can the great car economy continue for instance, and equally prevents full discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of possible solutions.
Why can’t we start insulating now? It appears to be a win-win for warm homes and employment but a disaster for the profits of fossil fuel companies
Are solar and wind enough on their own if deployed effectively? I suspect not.
Is nuclear a solution? Probably too long to implement and for good reason politically toxic.
What about hydrogen? Not if it comes from fossil fuel and what will be the effect of pumping billions of tons of water vapour into an already unstable climate.
Heat pumps? How much heat can you pump out of the atmosphere and/or ground before it starts to have nasty side effects.
Most of the above are ideas that have been around for centuries, where are the new green technologies.
For instance, a closed, infinitely recyclable, artificial carbon cycle, producing synthetic burnable carbon, then capturing the carbon dioxide when it is burnt, which can then be used to produce more synthetic carbon. Sun/wind electricity used to maintain the process. The synthetic carbon to be stored when not needed.
I have no idea if it would work but new ideas that are effective definitely need to be found.
Maybe the reason is that insulating now will make a small amount of profit for a short time and less profit going forward from lower energy use? Political economics is all about transferring wealth to a small proportion of the population from everyone else over as long a period as possible. And that’s not just the Tories I am very sad to say.
No mention of hydropower? We are an island surrounded by water, and with lots of fast flowing rivers. On the River Wear in Durham city centre there is an Archimedes screw which provides 75% of the power for the Freeman’s Reach area. In Scotland there is lots of hydropower. Unfortunately the government also refused to agree to Hydro at Swansea Bay, another short-sighted idea.
Puzzles me too. Is there something inherently unfeasible in tidal power? And, something else dependent on the sea, osmotic power. Distinct lack of interest in that as well.
There is a lack of invetsment that I have never understood
Reading has a community hydro power project: https://readinghydro.org/ generating about 320MWh each year.
In the case of on-shore wind, if the locals are in favour of, for example, a single wind turbine, which they will own, & which requires no subsidy, there is little central gov’ can do about it. I suppose tory-s central gov could try to ban it – at which point even more people will vote for anything other than the Tory-s party. Our community project is rumbling along, & I am fairly confident that we will get to where we want to be (100% RES elec & 100% RES heating) with the only gov support coming from local gov, helping local people get organised to implement the project.
In the case of the nuke announcement: it is either a fiction (probable) or if the tory-s really do plan to do it, the rationale will be projects for the UK construction industry and bribes/bungs/contributions to the tory-s party. It won’t happen of course, but Mendacious Fatberg thinks it makes the tory-s bunch look good.
Oh & on electricity market reform, an EU member state has contacted me & we will be opening discussions maybe this week.
I see the nuclear announcement as just another way to keep us addicted to gas for another decade or so. It will take so long with so many overruns to get the plants running that the corrupt tory planet killers will keep their dirty investments and low tax dividends rolling in for a long while yet.
That way they get to appear green while doing the bare minimum they can get away with.
> Heat pumps? How much heat can you pump out of the atmosphere and/or ground before it starts to have nasty side effects.
Just on this, almost as much as you want. The heat is lost again out of the heated thing over the timescales you extracted it with a net effect of a little extra warmth (the power required to drive the heat pump). The perturbations are much less than the extra warmth you put into the system with conventional heating systems, which we’ve pretty thoroughly explored as regards to domestic heating.
Heat pumps are absolutely the right way to heat stuff. Whatever magic new green tech you create, it’s still going to use some form of heat pump for the “make warm” bit (assuming it can’t be entirely passive, which is definitely possible without any magic tech).
We don’t need new technology, we just need to roll out the technology we have (though that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be striving to improve the technology!).
do you think your headline is slightly OTT?? ??? do they try harder than China, Saudi, Russia, America, Korea?? i could go on..
Maybe they do because they pretend that’s not what they’re doing
so hang on…you are saying that the UK is as bad as Russia, Saudi, china, Korea etc??..and if so where is your evidence? or are you just making noise?
I am saying you’re being crass
Because we no longer make as many things in this country, and we import from other nations like China, only half of our carbon emissions get counted as ours. Therefore we are worse than places like China.
Simon
Who cares what they are doing elsewhere?
It’s about using your own democracy derived from your citizenship to get the desired changes needed to keep life sustainable on the planet.
It’s about deciding on what county you want to live in and making a contribution to getting it to where it needs to be at on these issues – issues that are being denied by this so-called democracy.
Once enough of us have done that then hopefully other nations will follow suit.
But it seems that change these days can only come from the bottom up as those at the top have already been captured by the carbon industry.
BTW China is noted as having made quite a large contribution to emission reductions over the years. They used to have mainline steam engines up to the early 2000’s and much of that has now gone except in industrial railway systems.
Saudi Arabia is a Wasabi regime (noted as hard line Islam) but has vested interests in oil which could see its power base undermined – the same with Russia – another large oil (and gas) producer who must face the music.
What is it that prevents us being a massive tidal power producer? This country and Ireland have insane tidal ranges. Take it from a boating enthusiast
A lack of willing
As the UK is an island, why isn’t tidal power being mentioned by anyone? Its highly renewable and until the the moon drifts away from the earth as not to have a pull on tides the energy produced will be endless.
As usual the tories opted out of building a tidal lagoon in Wales to build the third runway at Heathrow
To ignore tidal as we largely do makes no sense
Starmer was in Scotland yesterday and was criticising the SNP for its opposition to nuclear – clearly Starmer (one supposes with an eye on the union vote) still thinks nukes are the answer. This is imbecilic at three levels.
First in terms of cost, as Hinkley Pointless shows when compared to any other form of renewables. (£120/MWh vs £60/MWh – off-shore)
Secondly in terms of speed, both on & off-shore can be built at a rate of knots (& more cheaply) than nukes. (Off-shore farm 1GW – 1 year – start to finish – nukes 18 years for 3.6GW)
Thirdly, the system. Last week Belgium was constraining off wind because it cannot easily modulate its nukes.
Pathetic (and ditto netherlands – which constrained off wind in favour of…..gas – I’m not making this up – the ENTSO-E numbers are all there).
This is what Sir Keef and Liebore want to sign the Uk up to: inflexible, expensive, slow to build nukes. Vote Liebore, vote imbecile – they are as stupid as the tories and seemlingly only interested in tactics/political optics – not what is best for the country.
Profoundly annoying, I think
I’m a longterm supporter of renewables – I worked on wave energy from 1974 onwards – but I also recommend looking at Moltex’s stable salt reactors –
https://www.moltexenergy.com/reduces-waste
These were recommended to me by an old colleague from wave energy research, who described them as “a reactor for people who don’t like nuclear, un-presses all the buttons relating to safety, size, economics, schedule and waste.”
They’re not a quick fix – they seem to be just getting to the commercial stage, but with their ability to use and thus greatly reduce our nuclear waste stockpiles, they promise to be a really useful contribution to our long term energy mix.
I will take a look
Thanks
Not only did the energy policy not mention tidal power or hydroelectric, it didn’t mention storage either. As an example of policy, it’s ludicrously poor.
We desperately need more pumped storage hydroelectric to smooth out the fluctuations in output from all those wind turbines we’re planning to build, never mind solar or anything else.
Just as an example, the Pentland Firth has potential for 2.4GW of tidal power. If we built enough tidal turbines to collect all of that and built SSE’s Coire Glas pumped storage hydroelectric project to go with it, we could dispense with the entire nuclear power station at Torness (or over a third of Hinkley Point C).
Coire Glas has been shovel ready for years. The only reason we don’t have it already is that Westminster refuses to support it.
There are commercial-scale turbines generating tidal power in the Pentland Firth already as part of a demonstration project, but Westminster refuses to support full scale deployment on those either.
I really wish Scotland had voted for independence. We could have been doing so much better.
What do you think of this?
https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/04/12/solar-energy-can-now-be-stored-for-up-to-18-years-say-scientists
Thanks for the link – I hadn’t seen this particular technology before and it’s interesting.
It needs to be made more efficient, which is made harder by the convoluted energy conversions (solar energy to molecular potential to heat to electricity). I would be surprised if it could achieve the energy density needed for a portable device, and I suspect the cost of manufacturing the storage molecules would make it too expensive to compete with pumped storage hydroelectric in large-scale applications.
If this technology becomes mainstream, I think it would be most likely to turn up in applications like heating buildings at night (where you can use the released heat directly instead of doing that last conversion to electricity) or as a competitor to things like large batteries in stationary installations.
As a way of storing heat for buildings, it has the advantage of avoiding the need to insulate a thermal reservoir (which will always leak heat sooner or later, no matter how good your insulation is). Unlike a storage heater, which releases heat over the course of the day after being heated up at night, this system could store heat for several days if desired. You could collect energy on a warm sunny day and use it during cool, cloudy weather a few days later.