Ben Marlow
AS he relaxed in the swimming pool of his bungalow in Dartmouth, Devon, Alvin Smith used a plastic football to help him float. He was struck by the powerful force the ball created when it was pushed below the surface.
“The water generated huge pressure. I immediately realised what an easy form of energy it is to create,” said Smith.
He believed it could be used to devise a wave-powered pump to bring water ashore and drive an electricity generator.
The thought lay dormant for 10 years. Then, in 2007, Smith constructed a prototype in his garden using four bath wastewater pipes, four snooker balls, a dustbin half-full of water, a steel rod and a plastic pipe.
He put it in the River Dart to see if it worked. “It immediately pumped water so I realised I was on to something,” he said.
Smith has since built a bigger pump and tested it off Dartmouth harbour. Left out at sea for a month, it pumped 112 cubic metres ashore each day — equivalent to a large swimming pool — through the simple motion of the passing waves. Once a hydroelectric turbine was fitted on land, the device generated a kilowatt of electricity a day.
Smith called it Searaser. It resembles a navigation buoy and the mechanics are simple. The pump is made of two 8 metre floats, one above the other, attached to a piston the size of a teacup. The passing waves lift the float, which raises the piston and pushes the water.
“It is the simplest device,” he said. Fixed to the seabed by chains and weights, it can operate in shallow water or far offshore.
Smith is excited about the implications for Britain’s energy needs. “We have just made a pump. The rest of the technology required to generate electricity already exists. It is cheaper than nuclear, completely emission-free and self-cleaning.”
The current model is a tenth of the size of what he eventually hopes to build. Smith is aiming for one that pumps 62,000 tonnes of water a day, which would produce nearly a megawatt of electricity — enough to power 1,700 homes.
That will require more money. Searaser has signed a joint venture with Ecotricity, a green power company, which has agreed to provide further funds.
Smith, 63, ran his father’s garage in Surrey for 30 years before moving to Dartmouth. “My plan was to retire to the West Country, but then I decided to explore this idea.”
The government failed to back him, so he was forced to turn to three local investors. The four men have put in £250,000 so far.
“I wrote to Gordon Brown, then met Ed Miliband [the energy and climate change secretary at the time], but I am still waiting.”
The interest from the coalition government has been more promising and Smith hopes Searaser will eventually be seen off coastlines round the world.
Working at half output, it would take approximately 34,000 Searasers to supply 20m British homes. “This country is surrounded by water, we need to put it to good use,” said Smith.
Monday, 14 June 2010
ADM gets $99 million for carbon-capture project
The Associated Press
DECATUR, Ill. -- The U.S. Department of Energy will give Archer Daniels Midland up to $99 million in stimulus funds to help pay for the Decatur-based agricultural company's second carbon-capture project.
ADM says the money will allow it to begin designing and building the new demonstration project starting in 2012. The company hopes the project will capture and store 1 million tons of carbon dioxide a year from ADM's ethanol plant. ADM plans to spend $43.6 million.
The carbon will be stored in a rock formation beneath ADM's Decatur location known as the Mount Simon Sandstone.
ADM has a separate carbon-capture project working at its Decatur location design to store a thousand tons a day for several years. The location will then be monitored for leaks as a test.
DECATUR, Ill. -- The U.S. Department of Energy will give Archer Daniels Midland up to $99 million in stimulus funds to help pay for the Decatur-based agricultural company's second carbon-capture project.
ADM says the money will allow it to begin designing and building the new demonstration project starting in 2012. The company hopes the project will capture and store 1 million tons of carbon dioxide a year from ADM's ethanol plant. ADM plans to spend $43.6 million.
The carbon will be stored in a rock formation beneath ADM's Decatur location known as the Mount Simon Sandstone.
ADM has a separate carbon-capture project working at its Decatur location design to store a thousand tons a day for several years. The location will then be monitored for leaks as a test.
EU sets environmental audit rules for biofuels
13 June 2010
The European Commission on 11 June set out rules to limit the environmental impact of plant-based biofuels, after green groups warned that unregulated use of the products could lead to massive deforestation in Asia and Latin America. The EU in 2007 pledged to draw 10% of its fuel needs from renewable sources by 2020. Boosting the use of fuels from crops such as wheat, maize and sugar-cane is seen as key to meeting that target.
“In the years to come, biofuels are the main alternative to petrol and diesel used in transport, which produces more than 20 % of the greenhouse-gas emissions in the EU. We have to ensure that the biofuels used are also sustainable,” EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said.
The rules are based on a system of voluntary auditing organised and paid for by those companies which market biofuels in the EU. Under the regime, companies which want their fuels to be certified as EU-approved - and therefore eligible for tax breaks and other incentives in EU states - will have to set up audit chains checking every stage of their production, from the farm to the petrol station. Auditors will have, for example, to make sure that the plants used to make the fuel were not grown on land which was cleared of rain forest or other endangered vegetation after January 2008.
Environmental groups have warned that thousands of hectares of rain forest in Malaysia, Indonesia and Latin America could be felled to clear space for EU-bound fuel crops, especially palm oil. “The conversion of a forest to a palm-oil plantation would fall foul of the sustainability requirements,” an EU briefing note said.
Companies will also have to make sure that their biofuels produce at least 35% less greenhouse gas than fossil fuels if they want to benefit from EU certification. Biofuels usually create lower emissions than fossil fuels because the plants from which they come remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But inefficient use can negate that advantage. Palm oil, for example, is only 19% less polluting than fossil fuel if the shredded plants are dumped outside factories to rot and emit gases, EU figures say. If those plants are collected and used as fuel for heating, the figure rises to 56%.
Meanwhile, Gernot Pehnelt of GlobEcon and the author of a recent study, European Policies towards Palm Oil – Setting the Record Straight, criticized Oettinger’s new policy. “Regardless of the announcement today by Energy Commissioner Gunther Oettinger, the Renewable Energy Directive remains discriminatory in its calculations for palm oil. The default assumptions embedded in the Directive about the ecological impact of foreign biofuels reflect politics, not scientific or economic reality,” he wrote
The European Commission on 11 June set out rules to limit the environmental impact of plant-based biofuels, after green groups warned that unregulated use of the products could lead to massive deforestation in Asia and Latin America. The EU in 2007 pledged to draw 10% of its fuel needs from renewable sources by 2020. Boosting the use of fuels from crops such as wheat, maize and sugar-cane is seen as key to meeting that target.
“In the years to come, biofuels are the main alternative to petrol and diesel used in transport, which produces more than 20 % of the greenhouse-gas emissions in the EU. We have to ensure that the biofuels used are also sustainable,” EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said.
The rules are based on a system of voluntary auditing organised and paid for by those companies which market biofuels in the EU. Under the regime, companies which want their fuels to be certified as EU-approved - and therefore eligible for tax breaks and other incentives in EU states - will have to set up audit chains checking every stage of their production, from the farm to the petrol station. Auditors will have, for example, to make sure that the plants used to make the fuel were not grown on land which was cleared of rain forest or other endangered vegetation after January 2008.
Environmental groups have warned that thousands of hectares of rain forest in Malaysia, Indonesia and Latin America could be felled to clear space for EU-bound fuel crops, especially palm oil. “The conversion of a forest to a palm-oil plantation would fall foul of the sustainability requirements,” an EU briefing note said.
Companies will also have to make sure that their biofuels produce at least 35% less greenhouse gas than fossil fuels if they want to benefit from EU certification. Biofuels usually create lower emissions than fossil fuels because the plants from which they come remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But inefficient use can negate that advantage. Palm oil, for example, is only 19% less polluting than fossil fuel if the shredded plants are dumped outside factories to rot and emit gases, EU figures say. If those plants are collected and used as fuel for heating, the figure rises to 56%.
Meanwhile, Gernot Pehnelt of GlobEcon and the author of a recent study, European Policies towards Palm Oil – Setting the Record Straight, criticized Oettinger’s new policy. “Regardless of the announcement today by Energy Commissioner Gunther Oettinger, the Renewable Energy Directive remains discriminatory in its calculations for palm oil. The default assumptions embedded in the Directive about the ecological impact of foreign biofuels reflect politics, not scientific or economic reality,” he wrote
Tax rises should be used to boost the low-carbon economy
As George Osborne will have to raise taxes, argues Geoffrey Lean, he should use the increase to make Britain greener.
By Geoffrey Lean
Published: 8:25PM BST 11 Jun 2010
It could have been one of the election campaign's more embarrassing moments. Quizzed on green taxes at his manifesto launch, David Cameron could not remember his policy. He asked George Osborne, sitting nearby, to look it up in the manifesto, but the soon-to-be Chancellor had trouble finding it.
Luckily, the questioning moved on, and blue blushes were spared – but there would have been no such forgetfulness a few years ago. Then, a "major shift" towards green taxes was a central plank in the two men's modernising platform. Indeed, Osborne once devoted a thoughtful speech to explaining why they were "right" for both "the environment and the economy".
George Osborne: Tories would find it difficult to avoid putting up tax for high earnersHe reiterated his promise to embrace them last November, when setting out his plans for government. But by election time, like the environment generally, they had been shuffled towards the back of the Tory platform. Now it's all change again, with greenery – one of the things both parties most agree on – near the top of the Coalition's agenda. So Osborne's first Budget as Chancellor of David Cameron's "greenest government ever", in 10 days' time, will show whether resources are going to follow the rhetoric, and taxation the talk.
The manifesto pledge, in case the leadership has not yet found it, was to "increase the proportion of tax revenue accounted for by environmental taxes". It was transposed word for word into the Coalition's programme. And although it sounds less ambitious than the "major shift" of a few years ago, it would still mark a sharp change. For despite promising to be "the greenest ever Chancellor", Gordon Brown presided over a 22 per cent fall in green taxes as a proportion of total revenue – to 7.3 per cent, the lowest since 1987.
Under his stewardship, green taxes got a bad name as stealthy impositions, designed only to raise revenue. But if used properly, they are beneficial – as experience from much of Europe, and even Britain itself, has shown.
At present, we disproportionately punish things we should be promoting, like employment and investment, while often subsidising those we should be discouraging, like pollution or squandering energy. It would be better to make it more profitable to reduce wastage than workforces – thereby reducing emissions and increasing energy security, boosting employment and providing reliable revenue at the same time.
This, Osborne has said, is "a win-win-win outcome". "Instead of a tax system that penalises hard work and enterprise," he has explained, "I want to move towards more effective and fair taxes on pollution." His boss has put it even more simply: "We want to increase tax on bad things, and try to relieve tax on good things."
This kind of thing works. In Sweden, a carbon tax has cut emissions by nearly a tenth over the past two decades, while the economy has grown by 48 per cent. In Denmark, a waste tax cut the amount of rubbish going to municipal sites by 26 per cent in six years, while a Dutch tax on water pollution slashed discharges from companies by more than 90 per cent over a decade.
Even Britain's landfill tax, introduced by the last Conservative government, has reduced the amount of rubbish being dumped in holes in the ground by more than a quarter. And the much-reviled fuel tax escalator introduced by Norman Lamont, but later scrapped by Gordon Brown, raised more than £7.5 billion between 1993 and 1999 – enabling the basic rate of income tax to be cut by 2p – while sharply reducing traffic growth.
Ideally, as in that case, such changes to the tax system should be revenue-neutral, with, as Osborne puts it, "every penny of additional green tax revenues used to reduce taxes elsewhere". The Green Fiscal Commission – on which both Energy Secretary Chris Huhne and his Tory deputy Greg Barker served, concluded last year that doubling the green tax take this way would create 455,000 new jobs by 2020, while cutting greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30 per cent.
As it turns out, it looks as if taxes are going to have to go up anyway. But if so, how much better to use the increase to boost the low-carbon economy than to lose jobs through the rise in National Insurance planned by Labour.
Osborne has plenty of options. He could increase the landfill tax. He could change the levy on air travel from one on passengers to one predominantly on planes: this could raise £3 billion a year, as a report by the Green Alliance and the Policy Studies Institute will show next week.
But perhaps the most significant move of all would be to bring back the annual fuel price rises, something mooted back in 2006.
It's time, as the Gulf spill illustrates the true cost of oil, to put that pledge – once it's retrieved from the very last paragraph of the Tory manifesto's 29-page section on economics – into Mr Osborne's Red Box.
By Geoffrey Lean
Published: 8:25PM BST 11 Jun 2010
It could have been one of the election campaign's more embarrassing moments. Quizzed on green taxes at his manifesto launch, David Cameron could not remember his policy. He asked George Osborne, sitting nearby, to look it up in the manifesto, but the soon-to-be Chancellor had trouble finding it.
Luckily, the questioning moved on, and blue blushes were spared – but there would have been no such forgetfulness a few years ago. Then, a "major shift" towards green taxes was a central plank in the two men's modernising platform. Indeed, Osborne once devoted a thoughtful speech to explaining why they were "right" for both "the environment and the economy".
George Osborne: Tories would find it difficult to avoid putting up tax for high earnersHe reiterated his promise to embrace them last November, when setting out his plans for government. But by election time, like the environment generally, they had been shuffled towards the back of the Tory platform. Now it's all change again, with greenery – one of the things both parties most agree on – near the top of the Coalition's agenda. So Osborne's first Budget as Chancellor of David Cameron's "greenest government ever", in 10 days' time, will show whether resources are going to follow the rhetoric, and taxation the talk.
The manifesto pledge, in case the leadership has not yet found it, was to "increase the proportion of tax revenue accounted for by environmental taxes". It was transposed word for word into the Coalition's programme. And although it sounds less ambitious than the "major shift" of a few years ago, it would still mark a sharp change. For despite promising to be "the greenest ever Chancellor", Gordon Brown presided over a 22 per cent fall in green taxes as a proportion of total revenue – to 7.3 per cent, the lowest since 1987.
Under his stewardship, green taxes got a bad name as stealthy impositions, designed only to raise revenue. But if used properly, they are beneficial – as experience from much of Europe, and even Britain itself, has shown.
At present, we disproportionately punish things we should be promoting, like employment and investment, while often subsidising those we should be discouraging, like pollution or squandering energy. It would be better to make it more profitable to reduce wastage than workforces – thereby reducing emissions and increasing energy security, boosting employment and providing reliable revenue at the same time.
This, Osborne has said, is "a win-win-win outcome". "Instead of a tax system that penalises hard work and enterprise," he has explained, "I want to move towards more effective and fair taxes on pollution." His boss has put it even more simply: "We want to increase tax on bad things, and try to relieve tax on good things."
This kind of thing works. In Sweden, a carbon tax has cut emissions by nearly a tenth over the past two decades, while the economy has grown by 48 per cent. In Denmark, a waste tax cut the amount of rubbish going to municipal sites by 26 per cent in six years, while a Dutch tax on water pollution slashed discharges from companies by more than 90 per cent over a decade.
Even Britain's landfill tax, introduced by the last Conservative government, has reduced the amount of rubbish being dumped in holes in the ground by more than a quarter. And the much-reviled fuel tax escalator introduced by Norman Lamont, but later scrapped by Gordon Brown, raised more than £7.5 billion between 1993 and 1999 – enabling the basic rate of income tax to be cut by 2p – while sharply reducing traffic growth.
Ideally, as in that case, such changes to the tax system should be revenue-neutral, with, as Osborne puts it, "every penny of additional green tax revenues used to reduce taxes elsewhere". The Green Fiscal Commission – on which both Energy Secretary Chris Huhne and his Tory deputy Greg Barker served, concluded last year that doubling the green tax take this way would create 455,000 new jobs by 2020, while cutting greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30 per cent.
As it turns out, it looks as if taxes are going to have to go up anyway. But if so, how much better to use the increase to boost the low-carbon economy than to lose jobs through the rise in National Insurance planned by Labour.
Osborne has plenty of options. He could increase the landfill tax. He could change the levy on air travel from one on passengers to one predominantly on planes: this could raise £3 billion a year, as a report by the Green Alliance and the Policy Studies Institute will show next week.
But perhaps the most significant move of all would be to bring back the annual fuel price rises, something mooted back in 2006.
It's time, as the Gulf spill illustrates the true cost of oil, to put that pledge – once it's retrieved from the very last paragraph of the Tory manifesto's 29-page section on economics – into Mr Osborne's Red Box.
Does money grow in wind farms?
Wind turbines are a poor way to harness energy - but a very good way to generate public subsidies, says Andrew Gilligan.
By Andrew Gilligan
Published: 7:00AM BST 13 Jun 2010
From the summit of Plynlimon, in the deep country of the Cambrian Mountains, there is a 70-mile panorama of the Cader range, hill after green-blue hill stretching into the distance, from the peaks around Bala to the shores of Cardigan Bay.
It was a view that caught the breath. It still does, in a different way. The view from Plynlimon now is of more than 200 wind turbines, nearly a tenth of Britain’s onshore total, stretching across ridge-lines, dominating near and far horizons. The author George Borrow wrote a whole chapter on Plynlimon in his classic 19th-century travelogue, Wild Wales. It’s not so wild these days.
Wind turbines cannot exist without back-up power ? and that is running out
Energy gap means nuclear power is a mustLast week’s decision by Miriam González Durántez, wife of the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, to join a leading wind-farm company has thrown the spotlight on one of Britain’s most controversial industries.
Mrs Durántez’s firm, Acciona, is seeking planning permission to add another 23 wind turbines to the view from Plynlimon, filling up some of the remaining skyline not yet occupied by them.
To opponents, land-based wind-turbines – there are currently 2,560 – are, in the words of the chairman of the National Trust, Simon Jenkins, “creatures from the War of the Worlds”, industrialising the countryside, invading precious landscapes.
Supporters are no less high-pitched. At the annual conference of the wind farm trade body, the BWEA, John Prescott, Mr Clegg’s predecessor, stormed: “We cannot let the squires and the gentry stop us meeting our moral obligation to pass this world on in a better state to our children. So let me tell them loud and clear: it’s not your backyard any more – it’s ours!”
The then energy and climate change secretary, now Labour leadership contender, Ed Miliband, said that it “should be socially unacceptable to be against wind turbines in your area – like not wearing your seatbelt”.
Yet like so much else in the climate change debate, the emotions – on both sides – get in the way. Presenting wind farms as either an alien scourge or a moral crusade obscures what is surely the real question: are they effective at reducing CO2 emissions? Do the benefits they bring outweigh the costs they impose?
Last year, Mr Miliband announced that renewables – very largely wind – would be expected to provide “over 30 per cent” of the UK’s electricity by 2020, as part of ambitious new Europe-wide targets.
The BWEA, recently renamed Renewables UK, is confident about the potential. “The UK is the windiest country in Europe, so much so that we could power the country several times over using this free fuel,” it says, describing Britain as the “Saudi Arabia of wind”.
RUK says that “every unit of electricity from a wind turbine displaces one from conventional power stations”, and even the existing wind turbines have “the capacity to prevent the emission of 3.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum”.
The key weasel word in that last sentence is “capacity”. The CO2 reduction figure assumes that all wind turbines are able to generate electricity to 100 per cent of their capacity, 100 per cent of the time. But the basic problem with wind power is that most of the time, the wind does not blow.
A typical commercial turbine needs a wind speed of between 6-10mph to start operating – and automatically stops when the wind is more than around 55mph, to protect its mechanisms. Even when the wind is blowing between those speeds, it – and therefore the amount of electricity generated – is variable, and usually below the turbine’s full theoretical capacity.
According to government figures, the average wind turbine operates to just 27 per cent of its capacity – even the industry only claims 30 per cent – and there are some grounds for suggesting that even this is a significant exaggeration. Professor Michael Jefferson, of the London Metropolitan Business School, says that in 2008 less than a fifth of onshore wind farms achieved 30 per cent capacity.
One analysis of the government figures, albeit commissioned by wind farm opponents, suggested that Britain’s biggest wind farm – the 140-turbine installation at Whitelee, near East Kilbride – operated to just 7.3 per cent of its capacity that year.
That might be all right if we could store electricity for when it is needed – but we can’t, at least not in large quantities. The power companies have to generate it at exactly the moment you want to use it.
Unfortunately, the wind might not be blowing when millions of people want to put the kettle on after Coronation Street ends. If it only starts blowing when everyone has turned off the lights and gone to bed, that is of very little use.
Jeremy Nicholson, director of the Energy Intensive Users’ Group, which represents heavy industrial users of electricity, says: “Wind is a particularly useless form of power if you don’t have a way of storing the energy. It just seems the politicians have been taken in by the wind lobby, and they’ve taken leave of their senses.”
The wind industry argues that the wind is always blowing somewhere in the UK or off its shores, so provided the wind farms are widely enough spread, it should not matter.
But Professor David MacKay, who is now chief scientific adviser at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, has pointed out that in autumn/winter 2006/7 there were 17 days when output from Britain’s wind turbines was less than 10 per cent of their total capacity. On five of those days, output was below 5 per cent and on one day it was only 2 per cent. And those were the windier seasons.
To cope with what’s called “intermittency”, you must do two things.
First, you have to build far more wind turbines, in far more places, than you theoretically need. Prof MacKay says: “We need to be imagining industrialising really large tranches of the countryside.” Every view, from every summit in Britain – apart, perhaps, from a handful of specially preserved recreational mountains – will be like the view from Plynlimon.
The wind turbines required in Britain alone, says Prof MacKay, would amount to about double the number of all turbines in the world. Even then, “the maximum plausible production from on-shore windmills is 20 kilowatt hours per day per person”, about a sixth of Britain’s actual consumption.
Offshore offers further potential, but is much more expensive – meaning it will never provide more than a minority of wind generation in Britain. It also requires huge and ugly infrastructure, such as new harbours and power lines, on land.
The second thing you have to do is build more conventional, carbon-emitting power stations. Unlike wind farms, these can provide electricity predictably and more or less on demand.
Campbell Dunford, director of the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), says that Germany – which has the largest number of wind turbines in Europe – “is building five new coal power stations, which it does not otherwise need, purely to provide covering power for the fluctuations from their wind farms. I am not sure [wind] has been a great success for them.” Mr Dunford claims that Germany’s CO2 emissions have actually risen since it increased its use of wind power. Though the wind itself might, in RUK’s words, be “free,” the cost of backup capacity is likely to be astronomical.
The figures are fluid, and fiercely disputed by the industry, but the House of Lords’ economic affairs committee estimated that wind was at least 50 per cent more expensive per unit generated than the other main non-CO2 option, nuclear.
Even if, as seems likely, wind can remove some CO2 from the generation of electricity, the danger, particularly in a cash-strapped age, is that it offers less CO2 reduction for the buck than other means. The Government’s idea that it can provide approaching a third of our power within 10 years (it currently provides 2.3 per cent) is dismissed by most experts as unrealistic.
John Constable, director of policy at the REF, says: “There is a real risk that governments will succumb to panic and introduce very strong mandates to reach these targets. That would be disastrous, because it will result, as it is already resulting, in the adoption of sub-optimal technology.”
Constable says that far better renewables than wind are available already. Electricity generation accounts for less than half of UK energy consumption – transport and heating make up the rest. “Everybody is fixated with generating electricity, and the low-hanging fruit is being missed,” he says. “Renewables can make an immediate contribution, if encouraged, on the heating sector.” This means established technologies like ground source heat pumps, where heat is extracted from the soil in your garden.
Why, then, are we so “fixated” with wind? The number of onshore wind turbines is likely to treble in the next few years. A total of 7,000 turbines, on and off-shore, are either under construction, approved for building or seeking planning permission.
Part of the answer may be that wind turbines are visible, tangible symbols of political commitment and moral righteousness. Mr Clegg’s party wants 15,000 of them, and the Energy Secretary, Chris Huhne, also a Lib Dem, has described them as “beautiful”. The Lib Dems are also fiercely against nuclear, though their Tory partners are not.
The rest of the answer appears to be subsidy. The Government pays an indirect subsidy, a “renewable obligation”, or RO – and putting up a wind turbine is the cheapest way to collect it. In contrast to better renewable technologies, a turbine is inexpensive to build, perhaps around £2 million, and it lasts at least 20 years.
The total RO paid to the wind industry last year was £400 million. So each of Britain’s wind turbines earned, on average, £138,000 in subsidy last year – more than Mrs Clegg’s husband makes. Add in the profits from selling the electricity they generate and after construction costs are cleared, you will be making nearly £300,000 per year per turbine, half of it courtesy of the Government.
It does make for some slightly perverse outcomes. Research and development on new renewable technologies – which might be able to reduce CO2 without needing to build large towers in the countryside – get far less subsidy than wind farms.
And one of the reasons so many of Britain’s wind turbines turn so little is that the subsidy doesn’t depend on where you put them. Developers like building wind farms in places such as Lincolnshire, where the countryside is dull and there is relatively little public opposition. Unfortunately, there is also relatively little wind in Lincolnshire.
Mrs Clegg has acted with characteristic business acumen. These aren’t just wind farms – they’re subsidy farms. As well as turning a blade or two, at least when the wind is blowing, they’re about to start turning a very healthy profit.
By Andrew Gilligan
Published: 7:00AM BST 13 Jun 2010
From the summit of Plynlimon, in the deep country of the Cambrian Mountains, there is a 70-mile panorama of the Cader range, hill after green-blue hill stretching into the distance, from the peaks around Bala to the shores of Cardigan Bay.
It was a view that caught the breath. It still does, in a different way. The view from Plynlimon now is of more than 200 wind turbines, nearly a tenth of Britain’s onshore total, stretching across ridge-lines, dominating near and far horizons. The author George Borrow wrote a whole chapter on Plynlimon in his classic 19th-century travelogue, Wild Wales. It’s not so wild these days.
Wind turbines cannot exist without back-up power ? and that is running out
Energy gap means nuclear power is a mustLast week’s decision by Miriam González Durántez, wife of the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, to join a leading wind-farm company has thrown the spotlight on one of Britain’s most controversial industries.
Mrs Durántez’s firm, Acciona, is seeking planning permission to add another 23 wind turbines to the view from Plynlimon, filling up some of the remaining skyline not yet occupied by them.
To opponents, land-based wind-turbines – there are currently 2,560 – are, in the words of the chairman of the National Trust, Simon Jenkins, “creatures from the War of the Worlds”, industrialising the countryside, invading precious landscapes.
Supporters are no less high-pitched. At the annual conference of the wind farm trade body, the BWEA, John Prescott, Mr Clegg’s predecessor, stormed: “We cannot let the squires and the gentry stop us meeting our moral obligation to pass this world on in a better state to our children. So let me tell them loud and clear: it’s not your backyard any more – it’s ours!”
The then energy and climate change secretary, now Labour leadership contender, Ed Miliband, said that it “should be socially unacceptable to be against wind turbines in your area – like not wearing your seatbelt”.
Yet like so much else in the climate change debate, the emotions – on both sides – get in the way. Presenting wind farms as either an alien scourge or a moral crusade obscures what is surely the real question: are they effective at reducing CO2 emissions? Do the benefits they bring outweigh the costs they impose?
Last year, Mr Miliband announced that renewables – very largely wind – would be expected to provide “over 30 per cent” of the UK’s electricity by 2020, as part of ambitious new Europe-wide targets.
The BWEA, recently renamed Renewables UK, is confident about the potential. “The UK is the windiest country in Europe, so much so that we could power the country several times over using this free fuel,” it says, describing Britain as the “Saudi Arabia of wind”.
RUK says that “every unit of electricity from a wind turbine displaces one from conventional power stations”, and even the existing wind turbines have “the capacity to prevent the emission of 3.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum”.
The key weasel word in that last sentence is “capacity”. The CO2 reduction figure assumes that all wind turbines are able to generate electricity to 100 per cent of their capacity, 100 per cent of the time. But the basic problem with wind power is that most of the time, the wind does not blow.
A typical commercial turbine needs a wind speed of between 6-10mph to start operating – and automatically stops when the wind is more than around 55mph, to protect its mechanisms. Even when the wind is blowing between those speeds, it – and therefore the amount of electricity generated – is variable, and usually below the turbine’s full theoretical capacity.
According to government figures, the average wind turbine operates to just 27 per cent of its capacity – even the industry only claims 30 per cent – and there are some grounds for suggesting that even this is a significant exaggeration. Professor Michael Jefferson, of the London Metropolitan Business School, says that in 2008 less than a fifth of onshore wind farms achieved 30 per cent capacity.
One analysis of the government figures, albeit commissioned by wind farm opponents, suggested that Britain’s biggest wind farm – the 140-turbine installation at Whitelee, near East Kilbride – operated to just 7.3 per cent of its capacity that year.
That might be all right if we could store electricity for when it is needed – but we can’t, at least not in large quantities. The power companies have to generate it at exactly the moment you want to use it.
Unfortunately, the wind might not be blowing when millions of people want to put the kettle on after Coronation Street ends. If it only starts blowing when everyone has turned off the lights and gone to bed, that is of very little use.
Jeremy Nicholson, director of the Energy Intensive Users’ Group, which represents heavy industrial users of electricity, says: “Wind is a particularly useless form of power if you don’t have a way of storing the energy. It just seems the politicians have been taken in by the wind lobby, and they’ve taken leave of their senses.”
The wind industry argues that the wind is always blowing somewhere in the UK or off its shores, so provided the wind farms are widely enough spread, it should not matter.
But Professor David MacKay, who is now chief scientific adviser at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, has pointed out that in autumn/winter 2006/7 there were 17 days when output from Britain’s wind turbines was less than 10 per cent of their total capacity. On five of those days, output was below 5 per cent and on one day it was only 2 per cent. And those were the windier seasons.
To cope with what’s called “intermittency”, you must do two things.
First, you have to build far more wind turbines, in far more places, than you theoretically need. Prof MacKay says: “We need to be imagining industrialising really large tranches of the countryside.” Every view, from every summit in Britain – apart, perhaps, from a handful of specially preserved recreational mountains – will be like the view from Plynlimon.
The wind turbines required in Britain alone, says Prof MacKay, would amount to about double the number of all turbines in the world. Even then, “the maximum plausible production from on-shore windmills is 20 kilowatt hours per day per person”, about a sixth of Britain’s actual consumption.
Offshore offers further potential, but is much more expensive – meaning it will never provide more than a minority of wind generation in Britain. It also requires huge and ugly infrastructure, such as new harbours and power lines, on land.
The second thing you have to do is build more conventional, carbon-emitting power stations. Unlike wind farms, these can provide electricity predictably and more or less on demand.
Campbell Dunford, director of the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), says that Germany – which has the largest number of wind turbines in Europe – “is building five new coal power stations, which it does not otherwise need, purely to provide covering power for the fluctuations from their wind farms. I am not sure [wind] has been a great success for them.” Mr Dunford claims that Germany’s CO2 emissions have actually risen since it increased its use of wind power. Though the wind itself might, in RUK’s words, be “free,” the cost of backup capacity is likely to be astronomical.
The figures are fluid, and fiercely disputed by the industry, but the House of Lords’ economic affairs committee estimated that wind was at least 50 per cent more expensive per unit generated than the other main non-CO2 option, nuclear.
Even if, as seems likely, wind can remove some CO2 from the generation of electricity, the danger, particularly in a cash-strapped age, is that it offers less CO2 reduction for the buck than other means. The Government’s idea that it can provide approaching a third of our power within 10 years (it currently provides 2.3 per cent) is dismissed by most experts as unrealistic.
John Constable, director of policy at the REF, says: “There is a real risk that governments will succumb to panic and introduce very strong mandates to reach these targets. That would be disastrous, because it will result, as it is already resulting, in the adoption of sub-optimal technology.”
Constable says that far better renewables than wind are available already. Electricity generation accounts for less than half of UK energy consumption – transport and heating make up the rest. “Everybody is fixated with generating electricity, and the low-hanging fruit is being missed,” he says. “Renewables can make an immediate contribution, if encouraged, on the heating sector.” This means established technologies like ground source heat pumps, where heat is extracted from the soil in your garden.
Why, then, are we so “fixated” with wind? The number of onshore wind turbines is likely to treble in the next few years. A total of 7,000 turbines, on and off-shore, are either under construction, approved for building or seeking planning permission.
Part of the answer may be that wind turbines are visible, tangible symbols of political commitment and moral righteousness. Mr Clegg’s party wants 15,000 of them, and the Energy Secretary, Chris Huhne, also a Lib Dem, has described them as “beautiful”. The Lib Dems are also fiercely against nuclear, though their Tory partners are not.
The rest of the answer appears to be subsidy. The Government pays an indirect subsidy, a “renewable obligation”, or RO – and putting up a wind turbine is the cheapest way to collect it. In contrast to better renewable technologies, a turbine is inexpensive to build, perhaps around £2 million, and it lasts at least 20 years.
The total RO paid to the wind industry last year was £400 million. So each of Britain’s wind turbines earned, on average, £138,000 in subsidy last year – more than Mrs Clegg’s husband makes. Add in the profits from selling the electricity they generate and after construction costs are cleared, you will be making nearly £300,000 per year per turbine, half of it courtesy of the Government.
It does make for some slightly perverse outcomes. Research and development on new renewable technologies – which might be able to reduce CO2 without needing to build large towers in the countryside – get far less subsidy than wind farms.
And one of the reasons so many of Britain’s wind turbines turn so little is that the subsidy doesn’t depend on where you put them. Developers like building wind farms in places such as Lincolnshire, where the countryside is dull and there is relatively little public opposition. Unfortunately, there is also relatively little wind in Lincolnshire.
Mrs Clegg has acted with characteristic business acumen. These aren’t just wind farms – they’re subsidy farms. As well as turning a blade or two, at least when the wind is blowing, they’re about to start turning a very healthy profit.
Housebuyers shun extra £50,000 bill for zero carbon
Mark Jansen
CHRIS ENDSOR has a problem. His firm, Miller Homes, has just built some of Britain’s greenest houses, stacked to the rafters with environmental gadgets and gizmos. Now that he is trying to sell them, however, he is on course to make a loss.
The four bedroom properties for sale at Merton Rise in Basingstoke look much like any other new homes. But inside they are loaded with insulation and equipped with a boiler that is powered by biomass. The roofs are fitted with 35 square metres of solar panels. The houses also have a ventilation system that recycles heat from the kitchen and bathroom round the rest of the house.
These are zero-carbon homes. By 2016, all new houses are supposed to be built to these standards. The only trouble is that housebuyers do not seem willing to pay any premium for all the extras.
Although the houses are being sold for almost £300,000, the green features have added £50,000 to the cost. Even if the design were replicated on a mass scale, Endsor said, the additional costs would still come to at least £35,000 a unit. Multiply that by the average build density in England of 15 homes per acre and the housebuilder would be looking to recoup extra costs of £525,000 for every acre of land developed. That is more than the asking price of many sites.
These costs look like a significant obstacle in the battle against climate change. Homes are the source of 27% of Britain’s total carbon emissions. In 2007, Labour introduced regulations requiring all new homes to be built to zero-carbon standards from 2016. The coalition government has promised to continue the policy.
“There is no hope of zero-carbon homes appearing in 2016,” said Liz Peace, chief executive of the British Property Federation. “Demands on developers have to be workable, and asking for mini power stations next to each housing develop- ment simply will not work, financially or practically.”
Housebuilders believe the zero-carbon policy, enshrined in the code for sustainable homes, should be changed to allow housebuilders to concentrate on making homes better insulated.
The current version of the code insists that all renewable-energy sources must be built on the same site as the housing, which housebuilders say is prohibitively expensive and hopelessly impractical in many cases, especially in cities.
Building firms want that burden to be passed to electricity providers, which could provide more renewable energy across the grid, not specifically on site.
The Home Builders Federation is also pushing for a change to the rules. “We want an affordable policy that doesn’t add so much to housebuilders’ costs that sites become unviable,” said a spokesman for the trade body.
Mark Jansen
CHRIS ENDSOR has a problem. His firm, Miller Homes, has just built some of Britain’s greenest houses, stacked to the rafters with environmental gadgets and gizmos. Now that he is trying to sell them, however, he is on course to make a loss.
The four bedroom properties for sale at Merton Rise in Basingstoke look much like any other new homes. But inside they are loaded with insulation and equipped with a boiler that is powered by biomass. The roofs are fitted with 35 square metres of solar panels. The houses also have a ventilation system that recycles heat from the kitchen and bathroom round the rest of the house.
These are zero-carbon homes. By 2016, all new houses are supposed to be built to these standards. The only trouble is that housebuyers do not seem willing to pay any premium for all the extras.
Although the houses are being sold for almost £300,000, the green features have added £50,000 to the cost. Even if the design were replicated on a mass scale, Endsor said, the additional costs would still come to at least £35,000 a unit. Multiply that by the average build density in England of 15 homes per acre and the housebuilder would be looking to recoup extra costs of £525,000 for every acre of land developed. That is more than the asking price of many sites.
These costs look like a significant obstacle in the battle against climate change. Homes are the source of 27% of Britain’s total carbon emissions. In 2007, Labour introduced regulations requiring all new homes to be built to zero-carbon standards from 2016. The coalition government has promised to continue the policy.
“There is no hope of zero-carbon homes appearing in 2016,” said Liz Peace, chief executive of the British Property Federation. “Demands on developers have to be workable, and asking for mini power stations next to each housing develop- ment simply will not work, financially or practically.”
Housebuilders believe the zero-carbon policy, enshrined in the code for sustainable homes, should be changed to allow housebuilders to concentrate on making homes better insulated.
The current version of the code insists that all renewable-energy sources must be built on the same site as the housing, which housebuilders say is prohibitively expensive and hopelessly impractical in many cases, especially in cities.
Building firms want that burden to be passed to electricity providers, which could provide more renewable energy across the grid, not specifically on site.
The Home Builders Federation is also pushing for a change to the rules. “We want an affordable policy that doesn’t add so much to housebuilders’ costs that sites become unviable,” said a spokesman for the trade body.
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