By Nigel Morris, Deputy Political Editor
Tuesday, 12 July 2011
More than 2,500 wind turbines will be installed around the coast over the next nine years under plans to be set out today by the Government.
It will promise a dramatic increase in offshore wind generation in an effort to meet the growing demand for electricity and cut carbon emissions.
At present, Britain produces about 1.3GW of energy for the national grid from offshore wind-farms. But Chris Huhne, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, will announce a massive expansion, boosting generation to 18GW, equivalent to 3,000 turbines, with the Government to invest £30m in developing components.
Offshore windpower is in its infancy in Europe, with a current capacity of about 3GW. Unsurprisingly given the length of the British coast, this country has the most turbines, followed by Denmark and the Netherlands.
Mr Huhne, in a statement to MPs on reforming the electricity market, will argue that renewable energy, such as solar energy and water power, is essential to meet Britain's targets on climate change. The Government wants to increase the share of renewable energy to 15 per cent by 2020.
Tuesday, 12 July 2011
U.S. Closer to Allowing Wind Farms Off Atlantic
By RYAN TRACY
The U.S. Interior Department expects little environmental impact from testing the feasibility of wind farms off the coast of four Atlantic coast states, according to a draft document released Monday.
The findings, which could be changed after the department reviews public comments, are an indication that the agency may be prepared to lease the areas for wind development without a more lengthy environmental review.
The document released Monday is a preliminary assessment of a proposal to lease areas off the coasts of New Jersey, Virginia, Delaware and Maryland and to allow companies to test whether the areas are viable for generating wind power. It is part of a wider push by the Obama administration to speed up the permitting process for what are known as wind farms.
In a news release asking for public comment on the document, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that, "with today's announcement, we are taking another step toward ensuring that renewable [energy] development along the Atlantic outer continental shelf becomes a reality."
The areas under consideration for lease include about 354,000 acres off southern New Jersey, 139,000 acres off the Virginia coast, 103,000 acres off Delaware's shores and 80,000 acres off the coast of Maryland. Leasing the areas and allowing testing there would have a relatively small effect on wildlife, commercial fishing, water quality and other concerns, the draft environmental review found.
The department will take public comments for about a month and then evaluate whether to close the environmental review, a decision it expects to make by the end of the summer. It could decide to move forward with the leasing plan or to conduct a further environmental review.
If further review isn't needed, the agency hopes to hold a lease sale by the end of this year, a spokeswoman said.
Before building wind farms, companies that buy leases will still have to come to the department with their own detailed proposals, which will require a separate environmental review.
"We will conduct a thorough environmental analysis of each proposed commercial project [and] will continue to work with our state renewable-energy task forces to advance renewable-energy development carefully and responsibly," said Michael Bromwich, director of the Interior Department's bureau that handles offshore leasing, in a written statement.
The U.S. Interior Department expects little environmental impact from testing the feasibility of wind farms off the coast of four Atlantic coast states, according to a draft document released Monday.
The findings, which could be changed after the department reviews public comments, are an indication that the agency may be prepared to lease the areas for wind development without a more lengthy environmental review.
The document released Monday is a preliminary assessment of a proposal to lease areas off the coasts of New Jersey, Virginia, Delaware and Maryland and to allow companies to test whether the areas are viable for generating wind power. It is part of a wider push by the Obama administration to speed up the permitting process for what are known as wind farms.
In a news release asking for public comment on the document, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that, "with today's announcement, we are taking another step toward ensuring that renewable [energy] development along the Atlantic outer continental shelf becomes a reality."
The areas under consideration for lease include about 354,000 acres off southern New Jersey, 139,000 acres off the Virginia coast, 103,000 acres off Delaware's shores and 80,000 acres off the coast of Maryland. Leasing the areas and allowing testing there would have a relatively small effect on wildlife, commercial fishing, water quality and other concerns, the draft environmental review found.
The department will take public comments for about a month and then evaluate whether to close the environmental review, a decision it expects to make by the end of the summer. It could decide to move forward with the leasing plan or to conduct a further environmental review.
If further review isn't needed, the agency hopes to hold a lease sale by the end of this year, a spokeswoman said.
Before building wind farms, companies that buy leases will still have to come to the department with their own detailed proposals, which will require a separate environmental review.
"We will conduct a thorough environmental analysis of each proposed commercial project [and] will continue to work with our state renewable-energy task forces to advance renewable-energy development carefully and responsibly," said Michael Bromwich, director of the Interior Department's bureau that handles offshore leasing, in a written statement.
Will electric cars ever take over our roads?
Their detractors say are they too pricey and tricky to charge. But a select fleet of drivers in Oxford and London has been testing a prototype electric Mini. Were they won over?
Leo Hickman
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 10 July 2011 21.29 BST
On 6 July last year, the US Patents and Trademark Office in Virginia received an application from General Motors to trademark the term "range anxiety". With just a few months to go before GM was set to launch its much-anticipated Chevy Volt – a plug-in hybrid, which would go on to earn the title of "most fuel-efficient compact car in the US" – the company's marketing team was on the offensive. It knew that prospective buyers would need to be convinced early on that the Volt would not have a limited range, as has proved the case with standard electric cars. "It's something we call 'range anxiety' – and it's real," explained Joel Ewanick, GM's head of marketing, when quizzed about the trademark application by car gossip website Jalopnik.com. "We're going to position this as a car first and electric second . . . People do not want to be stranded on the way home from work."
"Range anxiety" is very much on my own mind as I traverse the M40 between London and Oxford at 70mph in a prototype all-electric Mini E lent to me for the morning by BMW, the company currently conducting the world's most comprehensive trial aimed at gathering data on what it will take to convince people to ditch the internal combustion engine and go electric. (Yes, the same BMW that sells around 1.5m internal combustion engines globally each year.) As I look down at the gauge showing me that the car has less than 50% charge left, I have to keep reminding myself that the engineer who showed me round the car at Mini's Mayfair showroom said the car's 100-mile range at full charge would "easily" get me the 55 miles to BMW's Cowley plant just outside Oxford – with or without the air-con on full blast.
I ease off the accelerator a little; something that, somewhat counter-intuitively, causes the battery to start charging momentarily owing to the regenerative braking system. Having been in the car less than an hour, I'm already having my preconceptions about electric cars challenged, most notably by the fact that I am travelling at the national speed limit in one of the pokiest set of four wheels on the road. This is not the milk float of eternal jokes.
The technical details of the Mini E are certainly noteworthy: it is, I'm told by the engineer, powered by a battery that's the "equivalent of 5,088 AA lithium ion cells"; it has a speed limiter fitted on its reverse "gear" because, without it, the car could go at top speed (95mph) both forwards and backwards (yes, that thought scared me, too); and any sound file can be installed into the car's computer to rectify the fact that the engine is near silent and could therefore be a potential danger to pedestrians. ("You could load in anything you like: the EastEnders soundtrack, or a clip-clopping horse noise," says the engineer, smiling. "Warwick University is now experimenting with different sounds to find the optimum safest sound.")
But I'm not too interested in all this, to be honest. As a driving experience, the Mini E amply disproves the popular notion that electric cars cannot meet the needs of your average petrolhead. I want to better understand why there is still a reluctance among some to drive these things – and how far off we are from overcoming this. The roadblock to the mass acceptance of electric cars is, yes, range anxiety, but also the perceived inconvenience of charging these vehicles. BMW has built 400 Mini Es with the sole purpose of understanding how these two huge hurdles might be cleared in time for its first all-electric production vehicle, the i3 MegaCity, which it expects to launch globally in 2013.
Over the past 18 months, BMW, working with researchers at Oxford Brookes University and partly funded by the government's technology strategy board, has held two separate six-month trials in the Oxford/west London area. Forty hand-selected "pioneers" were invited to drive the Mini E with the intention of reporting back with both their honest opinions and hard data about usage. Similar trials have also been held in Los Angeles, New York, Berlin and Munich, with the same cars soon set to move on to new trials in Paris, Beijing and Tokyo.
The conclusions so far cement the view that range and charging are still the key issues, says BMW's Sarah Heaney, who has overseen the UK trials: "Range is still the big cloud that hangs over electric cars. It is the No1 resistance to change. Charging, and availability of charging points, is the next barrier."
Sarah Brown, a primary school teacher based just outside Oxford, was chosen for the trial because she represented a typical suburban commuter. "I used it mainly for my daily commute around the Oxford ringroad, which comes to about 15 miles return," she says. "I suppose I was doing about 350 miles a month in total. I didn't need to charge it at work because I got into the habit of charging it at home every two to three days."
With a specially fitted charging point in front of her cottage, Brown says she never once needed to charge the car anywhere else. Using a domestic 13amp socket, it takes about 10 hours to charge the Mini E, but this can be reduced to about three hours at public charging points.
"I own a Mazda5 people carrier that runs on petrol," she says. "I have calculated that it costs me about 20p per mile in petrol. But I calculated that the Mini E was costing me about 2p a mile in electricity. We did find ourselves using the Mazda less and less when we had the Mini E."
So would the huge cost advantage ever lead her to trade in her Mazda for an electric car? "I would be tempted, but the charging time and range would have to improve," she says. "The way I would work it would be to rent a petrol car for the longer journeys when we need to, say, visit relatives on the other side of the country."
The price of an electric car typically falls anywhere within the £15,000-£30,000 price point, which, despite the obvious allure of the fuel savings on offer and the carrot of government grants, is way beyond the reach of most drivers. But that is expected to fall as electric cars become ubiquitous over the coming decade – something many city mayors are keen to encourage because of an electric car's lack of tailpipe emissions. For example, in May, Boris Johnson, London's mayor, announced that for a £100 annual fee, electric car owners could use any of the 1,300 charging points scheduled to be installed across the capital by 2013. (Although, a year earlier, he had promised 7,500 points by 2013.) At present, there are just over 2,000 electric cars registered for exemption from central London's congestion charge.
The experience of Keren Barber – another of BMW's pioneers – was rare in that she got to drive her Mini E in and out of central London each day as part of her trial. As a resident of Chiswick in west London, she drove into her work at a bank on Saville Row each day, taking advantage of four nearby charging points and four hours of free parking offered by Westminster council to electric car drivers.
"Even though there was a lot of competition for the charging points near my work, I found I never used our charging point at home," she says. "I live in a private development with a private drive so I did have the opportunity to do so, but I just always ended up doing it at work. I can see that without a private garage, or off-street parking, it would be a problem as you'd have to have the charging cable draped across the pavement."
Berber admits to charge anxiety, though: "The de-charging is very variable. Broadly, a 100% charge equals 100 miles, but sometimes you see a big drop when you're driving and that can be unsettling. I never risked going below 25% charge."
Berber says that, with her husband Asa, she continued to use her Mercedes diesel for weekend trips during the trial. "But I also started using the Mini for commuting, rather than use public transport as before," she adds.
And, with this admission, she highlights one of the key societal issues that a mass switchover to electric vehicles would raise: yes, localised air pollution would drop dramatically, but would going electric only further aggravate congestion on urban and suburban roads, especially if concessions such as cheap parking encourage drivers to reject public transport?
Furthermore, the central, unavoidable criticism of going electric is that the "pollution free" claim is largely a mirage. As long as the electricity consumed by the car is generated by a fossil-fuelled power plant then the pollution is only deferred from the tailpipe to the smoke stack. While this is true, from a strict CO2 point of view, David MacKay, a Cambridge University physics professor and the Department of Energy and Climate Change's chief scientist, has calculated that an electric car produces about as much CO2 per passenger kilometre as the most fuel efficient "fossil cars", as he describes them. And if our energy sources decarbonise over the coming decades – as is current policy – so the electric car really begins to come into its own.
But big questions still need to be answered about the huge additional demands a rapidly growing fleet of electric cars would place on an electricity grid already struggling to balance supply and demand.
Similarly, current concerns over the high price of batteries – and the energy-intensity of their highly polluting production – has to be viewed, say EV advocates, against the fact that battery technologies are fast advancing, as is the scale of their production, which should force prices down and improve their environmental credentials. This month, for example, the University of Leicester announced its involvement in a European research project aimed at developing zinc-based batteries for electric cars that could prove to be far less energy-intensive in their production than the lithium ion batteries currently in favour.
But so-called "range parity" – equalling the typical range of an internal-combustion engine on a full tank – is just as important a goal for battery manufacturers. The current world-record distance for driving an electric car on one charge is 623 miles, achieved by members of the Japan Electric Vehicle Club in a converted Daihatsu travelling at 25mph around an oval race track. But most electric cars on sale today cannot yet challenge the 300-mile range of the average internal combustion engine. The Nissan Leaf, an all-electric five-door hatchback that launched in the UK in March with a £30,000 price tag, boasts a maximum range of about 100 miles.
One work-around that seemingly nullifies the concerns over range and charging is the brain child of the world's most prominent electric car advocate, Shai Agassi. In his native Israel last year, he launched a startup called Better Place that allows electric-car users to swap their drained battery for a new fully charged one at a network of "switch stations" at the same time as it would take to fill a car with petrol. And because Better Place owns the batteries, the owner of the car need not worry about the deteriorating condition or high price of the battery.
If the idea gains traction – Agassi is already in talks with the Chinese government, which promised last year to invest $15bn in seed money to kickstart its own electric car industry – then it could seriously challenge not just our perception of electric cars, but also the interests of oil companies with their vast global network of petrol stations.
But BMW tells me that it doesn't see itself following this path. Rather, it is confident that when it finally launches its MegaCity in 2013 its customers will be content to charge the car themselves. It accepts, though, that this will mean the car will only ever really be suited to what it describes as the "suburban" driver.
The trial data BMW has collected over the past 18 months is telling it that the perception many of us have that we need a vehicle with an extended range just isn't borne out by the facts. It has found that the average "trip distance" driven by its Mini E pioneers was 8.6 miles, and that the average daily distance driven was 27.5 miles. This largely mirrors the data it received from a control sample of drivers using the "normal" Mini Cooper. It also found that the pioneers were charging their cars an average of 2.7 times a week. And, when quizzed, most said that they expected to be an owner of an electric car within five to 10 years; good news for the government's climate change watchdog that wants to see 1.7m electric cars on UK roads by 2020.
Personally, I enjoyed my short time with the Mini E, but I can see why there is still some way to go before electric cars become fully normalised within our driving culture. Collectively, the purchase price, the charging and the range all still slightly outweigh the advantages offered by the vastly cheaper refuelling costs and the promised (but far from conclusive) environmental gains.
"We looked into buying an electric car once the trial period finished," says Keren Barber. "But at nearly £30,000, the Nissan Leaf was just too much for us. As were the Peugot iOn, Citroen C1 Ev'ie and Mitsubishi i-MiEV. They were all between £16,000 and £30,000. This price, plus the hassle of charging, is just not worth it. It still all feels a bit premature."
Leo Hickman
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 10 July 2011 21.29 BST
On 6 July last year, the US Patents and Trademark Office in Virginia received an application from General Motors to trademark the term "range anxiety". With just a few months to go before GM was set to launch its much-anticipated Chevy Volt – a plug-in hybrid, which would go on to earn the title of "most fuel-efficient compact car in the US" – the company's marketing team was on the offensive. It knew that prospective buyers would need to be convinced early on that the Volt would not have a limited range, as has proved the case with standard electric cars. "It's something we call 'range anxiety' – and it's real," explained Joel Ewanick, GM's head of marketing, when quizzed about the trademark application by car gossip website Jalopnik.com. "We're going to position this as a car first and electric second . . . People do not want to be stranded on the way home from work."
"Range anxiety" is very much on my own mind as I traverse the M40 between London and Oxford at 70mph in a prototype all-electric Mini E lent to me for the morning by BMW, the company currently conducting the world's most comprehensive trial aimed at gathering data on what it will take to convince people to ditch the internal combustion engine and go electric. (Yes, the same BMW that sells around 1.5m internal combustion engines globally each year.) As I look down at the gauge showing me that the car has less than 50% charge left, I have to keep reminding myself that the engineer who showed me round the car at Mini's Mayfair showroom said the car's 100-mile range at full charge would "easily" get me the 55 miles to BMW's Cowley plant just outside Oxford – with or without the air-con on full blast.
I ease off the accelerator a little; something that, somewhat counter-intuitively, causes the battery to start charging momentarily owing to the regenerative braking system. Having been in the car less than an hour, I'm already having my preconceptions about electric cars challenged, most notably by the fact that I am travelling at the national speed limit in one of the pokiest set of four wheels on the road. This is not the milk float of eternal jokes.
The technical details of the Mini E are certainly noteworthy: it is, I'm told by the engineer, powered by a battery that's the "equivalent of 5,088 AA lithium ion cells"; it has a speed limiter fitted on its reverse "gear" because, without it, the car could go at top speed (95mph) both forwards and backwards (yes, that thought scared me, too); and any sound file can be installed into the car's computer to rectify the fact that the engine is near silent and could therefore be a potential danger to pedestrians. ("You could load in anything you like: the EastEnders soundtrack, or a clip-clopping horse noise," says the engineer, smiling. "Warwick University is now experimenting with different sounds to find the optimum safest sound.")
But I'm not too interested in all this, to be honest. As a driving experience, the Mini E amply disproves the popular notion that electric cars cannot meet the needs of your average petrolhead. I want to better understand why there is still a reluctance among some to drive these things – and how far off we are from overcoming this. The roadblock to the mass acceptance of electric cars is, yes, range anxiety, but also the perceived inconvenience of charging these vehicles. BMW has built 400 Mini Es with the sole purpose of understanding how these two huge hurdles might be cleared in time for its first all-electric production vehicle, the i3 MegaCity, which it expects to launch globally in 2013.
Over the past 18 months, BMW, working with researchers at Oxford Brookes University and partly funded by the government's technology strategy board, has held two separate six-month trials in the Oxford/west London area. Forty hand-selected "pioneers" were invited to drive the Mini E with the intention of reporting back with both their honest opinions and hard data about usage. Similar trials have also been held in Los Angeles, New York, Berlin and Munich, with the same cars soon set to move on to new trials in Paris, Beijing and Tokyo.
The conclusions so far cement the view that range and charging are still the key issues, says BMW's Sarah Heaney, who has overseen the UK trials: "Range is still the big cloud that hangs over electric cars. It is the No1 resistance to change. Charging, and availability of charging points, is the next barrier."
Sarah Brown, a primary school teacher based just outside Oxford, was chosen for the trial because she represented a typical suburban commuter. "I used it mainly for my daily commute around the Oxford ringroad, which comes to about 15 miles return," she says. "I suppose I was doing about 350 miles a month in total. I didn't need to charge it at work because I got into the habit of charging it at home every two to three days."
With a specially fitted charging point in front of her cottage, Brown says she never once needed to charge the car anywhere else. Using a domestic 13amp socket, it takes about 10 hours to charge the Mini E, but this can be reduced to about three hours at public charging points.
"I own a Mazda5 people carrier that runs on petrol," she says. "I have calculated that it costs me about 20p per mile in petrol. But I calculated that the Mini E was costing me about 2p a mile in electricity. We did find ourselves using the Mazda less and less when we had the Mini E."
So would the huge cost advantage ever lead her to trade in her Mazda for an electric car? "I would be tempted, but the charging time and range would have to improve," she says. "The way I would work it would be to rent a petrol car for the longer journeys when we need to, say, visit relatives on the other side of the country."
The price of an electric car typically falls anywhere within the £15,000-£30,000 price point, which, despite the obvious allure of the fuel savings on offer and the carrot of government grants, is way beyond the reach of most drivers. But that is expected to fall as electric cars become ubiquitous over the coming decade – something many city mayors are keen to encourage because of an electric car's lack of tailpipe emissions. For example, in May, Boris Johnson, London's mayor, announced that for a £100 annual fee, electric car owners could use any of the 1,300 charging points scheduled to be installed across the capital by 2013. (Although, a year earlier, he had promised 7,500 points by 2013.) At present, there are just over 2,000 electric cars registered for exemption from central London's congestion charge.
The experience of Keren Barber – another of BMW's pioneers – was rare in that she got to drive her Mini E in and out of central London each day as part of her trial. As a resident of Chiswick in west London, she drove into her work at a bank on Saville Row each day, taking advantage of four nearby charging points and four hours of free parking offered by Westminster council to electric car drivers.
"Even though there was a lot of competition for the charging points near my work, I found I never used our charging point at home," she says. "I live in a private development with a private drive so I did have the opportunity to do so, but I just always ended up doing it at work. I can see that without a private garage, or off-street parking, it would be a problem as you'd have to have the charging cable draped across the pavement."
Berber admits to charge anxiety, though: "The de-charging is very variable. Broadly, a 100% charge equals 100 miles, but sometimes you see a big drop when you're driving and that can be unsettling. I never risked going below 25% charge."
Berber says that, with her husband Asa, she continued to use her Mercedes diesel for weekend trips during the trial. "But I also started using the Mini for commuting, rather than use public transport as before," she adds.
And, with this admission, she highlights one of the key societal issues that a mass switchover to electric vehicles would raise: yes, localised air pollution would drop dramatically, but would going electric only further aggravate congestion on urban and suburban roads, especially if concessions such as cheap parking encourage drivers to reject public transport?
Furthermore, the central, unavoidable criticism of going electric is that the "pollution free" claim is largely a mirage. As long as the electricity consumed by the car is generated by a fossil-fuelled power plant then the pollution is only deferred from the tailpipe to the smoke stack. While this is true, from a strict CO2 point of view, David MacKay, a Cambridge University physics professor and the Department of Energy and Climate Change's chief scientist, has calculated that an electric car produces about as much CO2 per passenger kilometre as the most fuel efficient "fossil cars", as he describes them. And if our energy sources decarbonise over the coming decades – as is current policy – so the electric car really begins to come into its own.
But big questions still need to be answered about the huge additional demands a rapidly growing fleet of electric cars would place on an electricity grid already struggling to balance supply and demand.
Similarly, current concerns over the high price of batteries – and the energy-intensity of their highly polluting production – has to be viewed, say EV advocates, against the fact that battery technologies are fast advancing, as is the scale of their production, which should force prices down and improve their environmental credentials. This month, for example, the University of Leicester announced its involvement in a European research project aimed at developing zinc-based batteries for electric cars that could prove to be far less energy-intensive in their production than the lithium ion batteries currently in favour.
But so-called "range parity" – equalling the typical range of an internal-combustion engine on a full tank – is just as important a goal for battery manufacturers. The current world-record distance for driving an electric car on one charge is 623 miles, achieved by members of the Japan Electric Vehicle Club in a converted Daihatsu travelling at 25mph around an oval race track. But most electric cars on sale today cannot yet challenge the 300-mile range of the average internal combustion engine. The Nissan Leaf, an all-electric five-door hatchback that launched in the UK in March with a £30,000 price tag, boasts a maximum range of about 100 miles.
One work-around that seemingly nullifies the concerns over range and charging is the brain child of the world's most prominent electric car advocate, Shai Agassi. In his native Israel last year, he launched a startup called Better Place that allows electric-car users to swap their drained battery for a new fully charged one at a network of "switch stations" at the same time as it would take to fill a car with petrol. And because Better Place owns the batteries, the owner of the car need not worry about the deteriorating condition or high price of the battery.
If the idea gains traction – Agassi is already in talks with the Chinese government, which promised last year to invest $15bn in seed money to kickstart its own electric car industry – then it could seriously challenge not just our perception of electric cars, but also the interests of oil companies with their vast global network of petrol stations.
But BMW tells me that it doesn't see itself following this path. Rather, it is confident that when it finally launches its MegaCity in 2013 its customers will be content to charge the car themselves. It accepts, though, that this will mean the car will only ever really be suited to what it describes as the "suburban" driver.
The trial data BMW has collected over the past 18 months is telling it that the perception many of us have that we need a vehicle with an extended range just isn't borne out by the facts. It has found that the average "trip distance" driven by its Mini E pioneers was 8.6 miles, and that the average daily distance driven was 27.5 miles. This largely mirrors the data it received from a control sample of drivers using the "normal" Mini Cooper. It also found that the pioneers were charging their cars an average of 2.7 times a week. And, when quizzed, most said that they expected to be an owner of an electric car within five to 10 years; good news for the government's climate change watchdog that wants to see 1.7m electric cars on UK roads by 2020.
Personally, I enjoyed my short time with the Mini E, but I can see why there is still some way to go before electric cars become fully normalised within our driving culture. Collectively, the purchase price, the charging and the range all still slightly outweigh the advantages offered by the vastly cheaper refuelling costs and the promised (but far from conclusive) environmental gains.
"We looked into buying an electric car once the trial period finished," says Keren Barber. "But at nearly £30,000, the Nissan Leaf was just too much for us. As were the Peugot iOn, Citroen C1 Ev'ie and Mitsubishi i-MiEV. They were all between £16,000 and £30,000. This price, plus the hassle of charging, is just not worth it. It still all feels a bit premature."
Bold target set for offshore wind power but sceptics see hidden nuclear subsidy
Reforms intended to encourage industry investment in low-carbon energy, which may include nuclear power
Fiona Harvey, Environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 July 2011 18.58 BST
The government will lay out plans on Tuesday to create a huge offshore wind industry in the UK, with new targets going far further than even its own advisers have recommended.
Instead of the 13GW of offshore wind power by 2020 called for by the Committee on Climate Change – the statutory body that advises ministers on carbon emissions targets and how to meet them – the government wants the UK to have as much as 18GW by the same date.
An industry taskforce will be set up to drive forward the plans, with the aim of bringing down the cost of offshore wind from about £140 to £170 per megawatt hour produced today to about £100 a megawatt hour by 2020. That would make offshore wind competitive with other forms of production, which should reduce the need for subsidies in the long term.
The plans will call for subsidies funded by increases in the electricity bills of homes and businesses, billions of pounds of investments from overseas turbine manufacturers, potentially creating tens of thousands of jobs, and an overhaul of port infrastructure.
Chris Huhne, the climate change and energy secretary, will set out the renewable energy overhaul alongside proposals for other far-reaching reforms of the electricity market, to be announced to parliament on Tuesday . The reforms – the biggest shakeup of the energy market since privatisation two decades ago – are intended to encourage energy companies to make long-term investments in low-carbon energy while keeping down the costs to electricity consumers. They will include reforms to the subsidy regime and new contracts for electricity providers to ensure they keep the lights on while stimulating energy efficiency improvements.
But business groups and green campaigners have attacked the plans, saying they could be costly and may not go far enough respectively. There are fears, in both the industry and environmental pressure groups, that the plans are a way of subsidising nuclear energy without appearing to do so directly, because some of the reforms will benefit all forms of "low-carbon electricity", which will be taken to include nuclear reactors. The coalition has pledged not to subsidise the nuclear industry "directly" but by including it with renewable forms of generation, it can get round this stipulation.
Neil Bentley, deputy director general of the CBI, criticised the complexity of some reforms, which include complex mechanisms such as "contracts for difference" and "capacity payments". He said: "We're looking for absolute clarity on how the costs [of the £200bn overhaul of the UK's energy infrastructure] will be paid for."
Andy Atkins, director of Friends of the Earth, accused the government of creating the right conditions for a new "dash for gas", which would leave the UK more dependent than ever on gas-fired power generation. He warned this was not a long-term solution for decarbonising the electricity supply, which the Committee on Climate Change has said must be achieved by 2030 if the UK's legally binding climate targets are to be met.
Louise Hutchins, of Greenpeace, said that recent price rises in domestic energy bills were due in part to the import of fossil fuels, such as gas. She said: "Consumers are bearing the brunt of colossal price hikes in domestic energy bills because of the over reliance of the big six energy suppliers on importing expensive fossil fuels while at the same time ignoring clean energy sources around our shores." She said the white paper should address the "stranglehold" of the big six energy companies, which supply 99% of the UK's energy, over the bills of ordinary people.
Fiona Harvey, Environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 July 2011 18.58 BST
The government will lay out plans on Tuesday to create a huge offshore wind industry in the UK, with new targets going far further than even its own advisers have recommended.
Instead of the 13GW of offshore wind power by 2020 called for by the Committee on Climate Change – the statutory body that advises ministers on carbon emissions targets and how to meet them – the government wants the UK to have as much as 18GW by the same date.
An industry taskforce will be set up to drive forward the plans, with the aim of bringing down the cost of offshore wind from about £140 to £170 per megawatt hour produced today to about £100 a megawatt hour by 2020. That would make offshore wind competitive with other forms of production, which should reduce the need for subsidies in the long term.
The plans will call for subsidies funded by increases in the electricity bills of homes and businesses, billions of pounds of investments from overseas turbine manufacturers, potentially creating tens of thousands of jobs, and an overhaul of port infrastructure.
Chris Huhne, the climate change and energy secretary, will set out the renewable energy overhaul alongside proposals for other far-reaching reforms of the electricity market, to be announced to parliament on Tuesday . The reforms – the biggest shakeup of the energy market since privatisation two decades ago – are intended to encourage energy companies to make long-term investments in low-carbon energy while keeping down the costs to electricity consumers. They will include reforms to the subsidy regime and new contracts for electricity providers to ensure they keep the lights on while stimulating energy efficiency improvements.
But business groups and green campaigners have attacked the plans, saying they could be costly and may not go far enough respectively. There are fears, in both the industry and environmental pressure groups, that the plans are a way of subsidising nuclear energy without appearing to do so directly, because some of the reforms will benefit all forms of "low-carbon electricity", which will be taken to include nuclear reactors. The coalition has pledged not to subsidise the nuclear industry "directly" but by including it with renewable forms of generation, it can get round this stipulation.
Neil Bentley, deputy director general of the CBI, criticised the complexity of some reforms, which include complex mechanisms such as "contracts for difference" and "capacity payments". He said: "We're looking for absolute clarity on how the costs [of the £200bn overhaul of the UK's energy infrastructure] will be paid for."
Andy Atkins, director of Friends of the Earth, accused the government of creating the right conditions for a new "dash for gas", which would leave the UK more dependent than ever on gas-fired power generation. He warned this was not a long-term solution for decarbonising the electricity supply, which the Committee on Climate Change has said must be achieved by 2030 if the UK's legally binding climate targets are to be met.
Louise Hutchins, of Greenpeace, said that recent price rises in domestic energy bills were due in part to the import of fossil fuels, such as gas. She said: "Consumers are bearing the brunt of colossal price hikes in domestic energy bills because of the over reliance of the big six energy suppliers on importing expensive fossil fuels while at the same time ignoring clean energy sources around our shores." She said the white paper should address the "stranglehold" of the big six energy companies, which supply 99% of the UK's energy, over the bills of ordinary people.
Republicans defend 'personal liberty' in battle to ban energy-saving lightbulbs
New breed of conservatives cast the promotion of efficient lights as an example of government interference
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 July 2011 13.00 BST
Republicans in Congress are pressing for a vote on one of the stranger elements of their environmental agenda – a ban on the adoption of energy-efficient lightbulbs.
If passed during Tuesday's scheduled vote, a bill championed by presidential contender Michele Bachmann and others would repeal a law phasing out incandescent bulbs from 2012.
According to some reports, the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives was pressing to introduce the bill under rules that would limit debate, but also require a two-thirds vote to pass. Energy-saving bulbs were seen as an entirely harmless innovation – even by the same Republicans who now oppose them – when the lighting efficiency measure was signed into law by the then president, George W Bush, as part of a broader energy package.
The 2007 law would have started phasing out old-fashioned 100-watt bulbs starting in January 2012, with an aim of making lightbulbs more than 25% efficient. Incandescent bulbs emit most of the energy they consume as heat.
Fred Upton, now the chair of the energy and commerce committee, supported the law – a vote which has come back to haunt him in a more rightwing Congress. The initiative also had the support of lighting manufacturers.
But the new breed of Tea party conservatives, encouraged by chat show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, have cast the promotion of the more efficient LED and CFL lights as a shining example of needless government interference. They also argue that the bulbs cost more than the old-fashioned variety and are health hazards, because they contain mercury. But their most passionately voiced argument is freedom. Hanging on to the old-style bulbs is really about personal liberty, they say.
Republicans in the Texas, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina state legislatures are also working on measures to keep burning incandescent bulbs. "This is about more than just energy consumption, it is about personal freedom," said Joe Barton, the Texas Republican behind the new bill, said in a statement after last year's mid-term election.
"Voters sent us a message in November that it is time for politicians and activists in Washington to stop interfering in their lives and manipulating the free market. The lightbulb ban is the perfect symbol of that frustration. People don't want Congress dictating what light fixtures they can use."
However the energy secretary, Steven Chu, has argued that the 2007 law does not amount to a blanket ban on all incandescent bulbs. But it does require those bulbs to be more efficient. "These standards do not ban incandescent bulbs," Chu told a conference call with reporters. "You're still going to be able to buy halogen incandescent bulbs. They'll look exactly like the ones you're used to. They can dim. They cut out instantly. They look and feel the same."
The Natural Resources Defence Council also produced a study on Friday suggesting that the energy-saving bulbs would save the average American household $85 a year on their electricity bill. They would also eliminate the need for 30 large power plants, reporters were told.
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 July 2011 13.00 BST
Republicans in Congress are pressing for a vote on one of the stranger elements of their environmental agenda – a ban on the adoption of energy-efficient lightbulbs.
If passed during Tuesday's scheduled vote, a bill championed by presidential contender Michele Bachmann and others would repeal a law phasing out incandescent bulbs from 2012.
According to some reports, the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives was pressing to introduce the bill under rules that would limit debate, but also require a two-thirds vote to pass. Energy-saving bulbs were seen as an entirely harmless innovation – even by the same Republicans who now oppose them – when the lighting efficiency measure was signed into law by the then president, George W Bush, as part of a broader energy package.
The 2007 law would have started phasing out old-fashioned 100-watt bulbs starting in January 2012, with an aim of making lightbulbs more than 25% efficient. Incandescent bulbs emit most of the energy they consume as heat.
Fred Upton, now the chair of the energy and commerce committee, supported the law – a vote which has come back to haunt him in a more rightwing Congress. The initiative also had the support of lighting manufacturers.
But the new breed of Tea party conservatives, encouraged by chat show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, have cast the promotion of the more efficient LED and CFL lights as a shining example of needless government interference. They also argue that the bulbs cost more than the old-fashioned variety and are health hazards, because they contain mercury. But their most passionately voiced argument is freedom. Hanging on to the old-style bulbs is really about personal liberty, they say.
Republicans in the Texas, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina state legislatures are also working on measures to keep burning incandescent bulbs. "This is about more than just energy consumption, it is about personal freedom," said Joe Barton, the Texas Republican behind the new bill, said in a statement after last year's mid-term election.
"Voters sent us a message in November that it is time for politicians and activists in Washington to stop interfering in their lives and manipulating the free market. The lightbulb ban is the perfect symbol of that frustration. People don't want Congress dictating what light fixtures they can use."
However the energy secretary, Steven Chu, has argued that the 2007 law does not amount to a blanket ban on all incandescent bulbs. But it does require those bulbs to be more efficient. "These standards do not ban incandescent bulbs," Chu told a conference call with reporters. "You're still going to be able to buy halogen incandescent bulbs. They'll look exactly like the ones you're used to. They can dim. They cut out instantly. They look and feel the same."
The Natural Resources Defence Council also produced a study on Friday suggesting that the energy-saving bulbs would save the average American household $85 a year on their electricity bill. They would also eliminate the need for 30 large power plants, reporters were told.
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