15 October 2010
A researcher from Sheffield University has scooped a national award for leading a team of scientists that has created an innovative device that will make the production of alternative biofuels more energy efficient.
Prof William Zimmerman, from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Sheffield University, was awarded the Royal Society Brian Mercer Award for Innovation after leading a team that has adapted a unique bioreactor for use in the production of alternative renewable fuels.
The approach is currently being tested with researchers from Suprafilt in Rochdale on industrial stack gases. The team is also currently testing the application of the device with Yorkshire Water.
The Brian Mercer Award for Innovation provides funding of up to £250,000 for researchers to develop an already proven concept of prototype into a near-market product that can be commercially exploited.
The award, established in 2001 by a bequest from the late Brian Mercer OBE FRS, was presented to Dr Zimmerman on 14 October at the Royal Society.
The air-lift loop bioreactor produces micro-bubbles to reduce the energy usage in biochemical processes.
Read more: http://www.theengineer.co.uk/bioreactor-for-energy-efficient-biofuels-wins-award/1005531.article#ixzz12dSWvNlD
Sunday, 17 October 2010
China's wind power capacity to increase five-fold by 2020
Sunday, 17 October 2010
China's wind power capacity will increase more than five-fold over the next decade from 2009, a report forecast Wednesday, as the country steps up its drive to develop clean energy.
Total installed wind power capacity will reach at least 150 gigawatts by 2020 compared with 25.8 gigawatts at the end of 2009, according to the China Wind Power Outlook 2010 report.
A more ambitious forecast by the publishers of the report - Greenpeace, the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association (CREIA) and the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) - is 230 gigawatts over the next 10 years.
That would be equal to 13 times the capacity of the Three Gorges Dam and could cut 410 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, or 150 million tonnes of coal consumption, said Yang Ailun of Greenpeace China.
In a more optimistic forecast, GWEC itself predicts China's wind power capacity could reach 253 gigawatts by 2020.
"China is at a crossroads," said Yang, head of the Climate and Energy Team of Greenpeace.
"It can choose between the dirty, dangerous world of coal and fossil fuels, or the new, clean future promised by wind. The answer is obvious."
China now depends on coal for nearly 70 percent of its energy consumption.
Experts see the growth of the wind power industry in China as a bright spot in the country's efforts to curb growth in its world-leading greenhouse gas emissions.
China, which ranked second in the world in installed wind generating capacity in 2009, pledged last year to slow the growth in those emissions by reducing energy consumption per unit of GDP by 40-45 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.
That is essentially a vow of greater energy efficiency that would likely, however, see emissions continue to increase.
Officials have so far rejected suggestions that Beijing commit to emissions cuts and outside verification.
China's wind power capacity will increase more than five-fold over the next decade from 2009, a report forecast Wednesday, as the country steps up its drive to develop clean energy.
Total installed wind power capacity will reach at least 150 gigawatts by 2020 compared with 25.8 gigawatts at the end of 2009, according to the China Wind Power Outlook 2010 report.
A more ambitious forecast by the publishers of the report - Greenpeace, the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association (CREIA) and the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) - is 230 gigawatts over the next 10 years.
That would be equal to 13 times the capacity of the Three Gorges Dam and could cut 410 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, or 150 million tonnes of coal consumption, said Yang Ailun of Greenpeace China.
In a more optimistic forecast, GWEC itself predicts China's wind power capacity could reach 253 gigawatts by 2020.
"China is at a crossroads," said Yang, head of the Climate and Energy Team of Greenpeace.
"It can choose between the dirty, dangerous world of coal and fossil fuels, or the new, clean future promised by wind. The answer is obvious."
China now depends on coal for nearly 70 percent of its energy consumption.
Experts see the growth of the wind power industry in China as a bright spot in the country's efforts to curb growth in its world-leading greenhouse gas emissions.
China, which ranked second in the world in installed wind generating capacity in 2009, pledged last year to slow the growth in those emissions by reducing energy consumption per unit of GDP by 40-45 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.
That is essentially a vow of greater energy efficiency that would likely, however, see emissions continue to increase.
Officials have so far rejected suggestions that Beijing commit to emissions cuts and outside verification.
How electric cars could become a giant battery for renewable energy
Yale Environment 360: Will electric cars one day become part of a network of rechargeable batteries that can help smooth out the intermittent nature of wind and solar power?
Dave Levitan for Yale Environment 360 guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 October 2010 12.20 BST
The United States now has more than 35GW of installed wind energy, enough to power close to 10 million homes. Close on the heels of this ongoing renewable energy revolution is another green technology: By next year tens of thousands of Nissan LEAFs, Chevy Volts, and other electric vehicles will start rolling off assembly lines.
The electricity generation and transportation sectors may seem like two disparate pieces of a puzzle, but in fact they may end up being intimately related. The connection comes in the form of the vehicle-to-grid concept, in which a large electric vehicle (EV) fleet — essentially a group of rechargeable batteries that spend most of their time sitting in driveways and garages — might be used to store excess power when demand is low and feed it back to the grid when demand is high. Utilities and electricity wholesalers would pay the EV owners for providing that power.
Vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, is not a new idea. In fact, it's been floating around environmental and green tech circles for a decade at least. But it has always had the tough-to-shed image of a utopian technology. Now, though, V2G — as well as simpler schemes based on smart-timed charging of the vehicles — is slowly becoming reality, evolving in quiet synergy with the worldwide push for renewable energy.
The main drawback of wind and solar power has always been their intermittency: By now it is more than a cliché to say that the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. To some extent, that claim is specious: Existing power supplies also vary by huge amounts, and flexible generators, such as natural gas power plants, are called on to balance out the blips. This is called frequency regulation.
Those generators can handle only so much variation, though, says Willett Kempton, director of the Center for Carbon Free Power Integration at the University of Delaware and one of the pioneers of the V2G concept. "And also, we'd rather not be using those generators at all. When you get to 40 percent, 50 percent generation coming from renewables, you need some kind of storage, and this [V2G] is a way of getting storage on the system."
That storage takes the form of the lithium-ion battery pack on board most EVs being produced today. For V2G to work, though, the cars need to be able to communicate with system operators running the electrical grid — this can be accomplished with a simple Internet connection that could be built into the car's plug. That communication link and a power converter that lets electricity flow both in and out of the battery will allow an overtaxed electrical grid to draw power from a group of cars, and then charge them when there is plenty of electricity to go around. If renewable energy ever supplies a sizeable portion of a nation's power needs, using EVs as a diffuse network for storing electricity — and then feeding it back to the grid on demand — could be an important tool in decarbonizing the economy.
V2G technology is beginning to emerge in a number of countries. Japanese carmakers, including Nissan and Mitsubishi, plan to start producing V2G-ready cars by mid-decade. Small pilot projects to test the idea are also underway in Europe, from Sweden to Italy.
Increasingly-green Denmark, though, has taken the lead in V2G adoption. Wind power already accounts for about 20 percent of its electricity supply, and additional planned wind farms will raise that level to 27 percent by the end of 2012 and beyond 50 percent by 2025. At times, when the wind blows strongest, the entire country's power demand is already met and exceeded by wind turbines. But without a way to store that excess energy, it is essentially lost.
So could a large number of EVs actually help with the huge variations in wind that can occur? According to Claus Ekman, a researcher at the Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy in Frederiksborgvej, Denmark, it can, to an extent. Ekman recently published a paper in the journal Renewable Energy that modeled how well EVs could handle increasing wind power generation. He found that in a scenario involving 500,000 vehicles and 8 gigawatts of wind power, various strategies would reduce the excess, or lost, wind power by as much as 800 megawatts — enough to power more than 200,000 homes. Ekman calls this a "significant but not dramatic" effect on the grid. Scenarios involving 2.5 million vehicles and even more wind power show an even greater impact.
"The limitation is the total amount of power that the EVs can absorb," Ekman told Yale Environment 360. "The peaks in the wind power will be too high for the EVs to absorb them completely."
Even if a large EV fleet couldn't handle the full extent of a 50-percent wind power penetration in a country like Denmark, which could be fossil fuel-free by mid-century, it could clearly make a dent. And Denmark has already gone beyond the theoretical, with a V2G project called EDISON running on the small island of Bornholm. The goal is to use the storage capacity of EVs to bring the island's wind power capacity up to 50 percent of the total demand. Because V2G will reduce the need to generate power from traditional sources, researchers estimate that the price of electricity on the island could drop by 50 percent or more. Though the island is home to only 40,000 people, the project could eventually be used as a proof-of-concept for larger systems, both in Denmark and elsewhere.
In the U.S., commercial-scale V2G projects are farther off, but then again so is 20 percent renewable energy penetration. (The U.S. is currently hovering around 2 percent.) Nonetheless, some progress is being made. For almost a year, several modified vehicles based at the University of Delaware have been providing power back to the grid, and getting paid for it.
Kempton, who runs the Delaware V2G pilot program, notes that using V2G storage, rather than huge centralized aggregations of batteries, eliminates the need for additional high-voltage infrastructure, and the economic benefits of using car batteries that consumers are buying anyway are undeniable.
"Maybe once a year you won't have enough power in your battery to drive where you want to drive, and you'll have to wait half an hour before you go somewhere," says Kempton. "In exchange, you'll get these payments and you'll be helping bring more renewables onto the system. That's the deal."
The Delaware project involves fewer than 10 cars at this point, each earning about $6 per day for the power fed back into the grid. The price will depend on external factors like the cost of natural gas, so as fossil fuel prices rise in the future a plugged-in EV might generate even more money for its owner. And a common concern, that V2G might tax the car batteries too much and shorten their lifespan substantially, hasn't proven to be an issue to this point.
Policy makers are also getting on board. Delaware now features a first-of-its-kind law requiring utilities to buy back electricity that EVs can offer up to the grid, and an energy storage bill recently passed in California could open the door to V2G in the future. Jon Wellinghoff, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) — which governs the interstate sale and movement of electricity — has also expressed support.
Still, the need for further hardware on board the cars may present an economic challenge to large-scale V2G integration. A standard EV can receive a charge but lacks the equipment necessary to send it back out. Paul Denholm, a senior analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Strategic Energy Analysis Center, says that issue is far from resolved.
"I get the impression that the vehicle [manufacturers] aren't particularly interested in V2G because that's not a core vehicle technology," Denholm says. "That would be a lot of extra costs, and they're in the business of selling cars, not grid services."
The EVs coming onto the market now — including the Volt, LEAF, and Tesla's Roadster — aren't equipped for V2G, but Kempton says he is working with manufacturers and hopes to see that change soon. He guesses that within five years, tens of thousands of V2G-ready cars will be produced, and within 10 years "it will be a major component of the vehicle fleet."
The logical intermediate step before full V2G adoption, most seem to agree, is the use of managed- or smart-charging practices for EVs. With smart charging, a car won't have to feed any power back to the grid. Instead, it will charge at certain times when demand is low or when the wind is blowing the strongest. Both of those often occur early in the morning, say, between the hours of 1 a.m. and 4 a.m.
"When people get home at 5 or 6 p.m., that's typically when the grid peaks in terms of demand for air conditioning and things like that, so it's a really bad idea to charge right when people get home and plug in," says Denholm. "If you're talking about thousands or millions of vehicles, some kind of controlled charging scheme is going to be absolutely necessary."
In this case, the technology isn't hard to come by, with smart meters already being deployed nationwide and software that could control the car's charge readily available. Denholm says that on the simplest level, just a basic timer could do the trick. In Ekman's Danish study, the best schemes he modeled combined V2G with smart-charging practices to maximize the benefit to wind power integration.
Even with managed charging, though, we may be years off from EVs playing a significant role in renewable energy's growth.
"It's fine to talk about plug-ins, but it is really going to be a while until we see a sufficient number of vehicles on the road to have an impact on the grid," Denholm says. "How many Volts are they going to sell, how many LEAFs are they going to sell this year and next year? We've got time to figure this all out."
Chevrolet's and Nissan's EV entries won't ramp up to full-scale production — on the order of hundreds of thousands of vehicles — for a few years, and 20,000 cars here or there won't provide the type of grid impact that Kempton and others envision. President Obama, however, has set a goal of 1 million EVs and plug-in hybrids on the road by 2015, and last year the administration threw $2.4 billion of stimulus funding behind that goal.
And if slowly building a scattered fleet of residential vehicles won't help the mass adoption of V2G and managed charging, there are other possibilities. Ken Huber, the senior technology and education principal at regional transmission organization PJM Interconnection — they're the ones paying that $6 per day to the University of Delaware cars — says fleet vehicles like those of the U.S. Postal Service might make a very attractive place to start with V2G.
"They park at the same place, they are very regular in their routes, they know the amount of distance and charge that they need, and they are typically available during those periods when we need it, those 12 off-peak hours," he says. School bus fleets, which often sit for the entire summer in a parking lot, offer another opportunity.
Such vehicle fleets could fill a need immediately. According to Huber, PJM Interconnection — which provides electricity to about 18 percent of the country's population in 13 states and the District of Columbia — currently has only about three gigawatts of wind power out of its peak capacity of 144 gigawatts. Even now, there are periods in the early morning when the price of electricity actually becomes negative: There is too much generation and not enough demand, demonstrating the need for power storage.
Huber said that if, as planned, wind generation in the PJM system eventually rises from the current three gigawatts to almost 50 gigawatts — and if EVs in the area reach 1 million in the next five years — the goal of large-scale V2G technology will become a reality in a market that supplies electricity to 51 million people in the mid-Atlantic, Midwestern, and southern states.
• Dave Levitan is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn who writes about energy, the environment, and health. His articles have been published by Reuters, SolveClimate, IEEE Spectrum, and Psychology Today.
Dave Levitan for Yale Environment 360 guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 October 2010 12.20 BST
The United States now has more than 35GW of installed wind energy, enough to power close to 10 million homes. Close on the heels of this ongoing renewable energy revolution is another green technology: By next year tens of thousands of Nissan LEAFs, Chevy Volts, and other electric vehicles will start rolling off assembly lines.
The electricity generation and transportation sectors may seem like two disparate pieces of a puzzle, but in fact they may end up being intimately related. The connection comes in the form of the vehicle-to-grid concept, in which a large electric vehicle (EV) fleet — essentially a group of rechargeable batteries that spend most of their time sitting in driveways and garages — might be used to store excess power when demand is low and feed it back to the grid when demand is high. Utilities and electricity wholesalers would pay the EV owners for providing that power.
Vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, is not a new idea. In fact, it's been floating around environmental and green tech circles for a decade at least. But it has always had the tough-to-shed image of a utopian technology. Now, though, V2G — as well as simpler schemes based on smart-timed charging of the vehicles — is slowly becoming reality, evolving in quiet synergy with the worldwide push for renewable energy.
The main drawback of wind and solar power has always been their intermittency: By now it is more than a cliché to say that the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. To some extent, that claim is specious: Existing power supplies also vary by huge amounts, and flexible generators, such as natural gas power plants, are called on to balance out the blips. This is called frequency regulation.
Those generators can handle only so much variation, though, says Willett Kempton, director of the Center for Carbon Free Power Integration at the University of Delaware and one of the pioneers of the V2G concept. "And also, we'd rather not be using those generators at all. When you get to 40 percent, 50 percent generation coming from renewables, you need some kind of storage, and this [V2G] is a way of getting storage on the system."
That storage takes the form of the lithium-ion battery pack on board most EVs being produced today. For V2G to work, though, the cars need to be able to communicate with system operators running the electrical grid — this can be accomplished with a simple Internet connection that could be built into the car's plug. That communication link and a power converter that lets electricity flow both in and out of the battery will allow an overtaxed electrical grid to draw power from a group of cars, and then charge them when there is plenty of electricity to go around. If renewable energy ever supplies a sizeable portion of a nation's power needs, using EVs as a diffuse network for storing electricity — and then feeding it back to the grid on demand — could be an important tool in decarbonizing the economy.
V2G technology is beginning to emerge in a number of countries. Japanese carmakers, including Nissan and Mitsubishi, plan to start producing V2G-ready cars by mid-decade. Small pilot projects to test the idea are also underway in Europe, from Sweden to Italy.
Increasingly-green Denmark, though, has taken the lead in V2G adoption. Wind power already accounts for about 20 percent of its electricity supply, and additional planned wind farms will raise that level to 27 percent by the end of 2012 and beyond 50 percent by 2025. At times, when the wind blows strongest, the entire country's power demand is already met and exceeded by wind turbines. But without a way to store that excess energy, it is essentially lost.
So could a large number of EVs actually help with the huge variations in wind that can occur? According to Claus Ekman, a researcher at the Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy in Frederiksborgvej, Denmark, it can, to an extent. Ekman recently published a paper in the journal Renewable Energy that modeled how well EVs could handle increasing wind power generation. He found that in a scenario involving 500,000 vehicles and 8 gigawatts of wind power, various strategies would reduce the excess, or lost, wind power by as much as 800 megawatts — enough to power more than 200,000 homes. Ekman calls this a "significant but not dramatic" effect on the grid. Scenarios involving 2.5 million vehicles and even more wind power show an even greater impact.
"The limitation is the total amount of power that the EVs can absorb," Ekman told Yale Environment 360. "The peaks in the wind power will be too high for the EVs to absorb them completely."
Even if a large EV fleet couldn't handle the full extent of a 50-percent wind power penetration in a country like Denmark, which could be fossil fuel-free by mid-century, it could clearly make a dent. And Denmark has already gone beyond the theoretical, with a V2G project called EDISON running on the small island of Bornholm. The goal is to use the storage capacity of EVs to bring the island's wind power capacity up to 50 percent of the total demand. Because V2G will reduce the need to generate power from traditional sources, researchers estimate that the price of electricity on the island could drop by 50 percent or more. Though the island is home to only 40,000 people, the project could eventually be used as a proof-of-concept for larger systems, both in Denmark and elsewhere.
In the U.S., commercial-scale V2G projects are farther off, but then again so is 20 percent renewable energy penetration. (The U.S. is currently hovering around 2 percent.) Nonetheless, some progress is being made. For almost a year, several modified vehicles based at the University of Delaware have been providing power back to the grid, and getting paid for it.
Kempton, who runs the Delaware V2G pilot program, notes that using V2G storage, rather than huge centralized aggregations of batteries, eliminates the need for additional high-voltage infrastructure, and the economic benefits of using car batteries that consumers are buying anyway are undeniable.
"Maybe once a year you won't have enough power in your battery to drive where you want to drive, and you'll have to wait half an hour before you go somewhere," says Kempton. "In exchange, you'll get these payments and you'll be helping bring more renewables onto the system. That's the deal."
The Delaware project involves fewer than 10 cars at this point, each earning about $6 per day for the power fed back into the grid. The price will depend on external factors like the cost of natural gas, so as fossil fuel prices rise in the future a plugged-in EV might generate even more money for its owner. And a common concern, that V2G might tax the car batteries too much and shorten their lifespan substantially, hasn't proven to be an issue to this point.
Policy makers are also getting on board. Delaware now features a first-of-its-kind law requiring utilities to buy back electricity that EVs can offer up to the grid, and an energy storage bill recently passed in California could open the door to V2G in the future. Jon Wellinghoff, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) — which governs the interstate sale and movement of electricity — has also expressed support.
Still, the need for further hardware on board the cars may present an economic challenge to large-scale V2G integration. A standard EV can receive a charge but lacks the equipment necessary to send it back out. Paul Denholm, a senior analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Strategic Energy Analysis Center, says that issue is far from resolved.
"I get the impression that the vehicle [manufacturers] aren't particularly interested in V2G because that's not a core vehicle technology," Denholm says. "That would be a lot of extra costs, and they're in the business of selling cars, not grid services."
The EVs coming onto the market now — including the Volt, LEAF, and Tesla's Roadster — aren't equipped for V2G, but Kempton says he is working with manufacturers and hopes to see that change soon. He guesses that within five years, tens of thousands of V2G-ready cars will be produced, and within 10 years "it will be a major component of the vehicle fleet."
The logical intermediate step before full V2G adoption, most seem to agree, is the use of managed- or smart-charging practices for EVs. With smart charging, a car won't have to feed any power back to the grid. Instead, it will charge at certain times when demand is low or when the wind is blowing the strongest. Both of those often occur early in the morning, say, between the hours of 1 a.m. and 4 a.m.
"When people get home at 5 or 6 p.m., that's typically when the grid peaks in terms of demand for air conditioning and things like that, so it's a really bad idea to charge right when people get home and plug in," says Denholm. "If you're talking about thousands or millions of vehicles, some kind of controlled charging scheme is going to be absolutely necessary."
In this case, the technology isn't hard to come by, with smart meters already being deployed nationwide and software that could control the car's charge readily available. Denholm says that on the simplest level, just a basic timer could do the trick. In Ekman's Danish study, the best schemes he modeled combined V2G with smart-charging practices to maximize the benefit to wind power integration.
Even with managed charging, though, we may be years off from EVs playing a significant role in renewable energy's growth.
"It's fine to talk about plug-ins, but it is really going to be a while until we see a sufficient number of vehicles on the road to have an impact on the grid," Denholm says. "How many Volts are they going to sell, how many LEAFs are they going to sell this year and next year? We've got time to figure this all out."
Chevrolet's and Nissan's EV entries won't ramp up to full-scale production — on the order of hundreds of thousands of vehicles — for a few years, and 20,000 cars here or there won't provide the type of grid impact that Kempton and others envision. President Obama, however, has set a goal of 1 million EVs and plug-in hybrids on the road by 2015, and last year the administration threw $2.4 billion of stimulus funding behind that goal.
And if slowly building a scattered fleet of residential vehicles won't help the mass adoption of V2G and managed charging, there are other possibilities. Ken Huber, the senior technology and education principal at regional transmission organization PJM Interconnection — they're the ones paying that $6 per day to the University of Delaware cars — says fleet vehicles like those of the U.S. Postal Service might make a very attractive place to start with V2G.
"They park at the same place, they are very regular in their routes, they know the amount of distance and charge that they need, and they are typically available during those periods when we need it, those 12 off-peak hours," he says. School bus fleets, which often sit for the entire summer in a parking lot, offer another opportunity.
Such vehicle fleets could fill a need immediately. According to Huber, PJM Interconnection — which provides electricity to about 18 percent of the country's population in 13 states and the District of Columbia — currently has only about three gigawatts of wind power out of its peak capacity of 144 gigawatts. Even now, there are periods in the early morning when the price of electricity actually becomes negative: There is too much generation and not enough demand, demonstrating the need for power storage.
Huber said that if, as planned, wind generation in the PJM system eventually rises from the current three gigawatts to almost 50 gigawatts — and if EVs in the area reach 1 million in the next five years — the goal of large-scale V2G technology will become a reality in a market that supplies electricity to 51 million people in the mid-Atlantic, Midwestern, and southern states.
• Dave Levitan is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn who writes about energy, the environment, and health. His articles have been published by Reuters, SolveClimate, IEEE Spectrum, and Psychology Today.
Severn barrage plan likely to be sunk
Government expected tomorrow to refuse to back controversial £21bn tidal energy project with public finance
Damian Carrington guardian.co.uk, Sunday 17 October 2010 16.44 BST
Plans for the world's biggest tidal energy project, spanning the Severn estuary between Somerset and Wales, are likely to be dashed tomorrow when the government announces its refusal to back the controversial £21bn project with public finance.
The 10-mile-long scheme, which the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) believes could provide 8.6GW of renewable electricity - equivalent to 5% of the UK's needs and two or three nuclear power stations - has long proved controversial. Engineers first proposed plans for a barrage across the Severn in the 1930s. The scheme has divided environmentalists, some of whom say it would destroy an internationally important marsh and mudflat habitat, increase local flooding and reduce fish stocks.
The department will publish its decision on whether or not to back the project tomorrow morning, but sources close to the process have told the Guardian they cannot conceive of the government backing it with public finance at a time when it is focused on cutting the budget deficit. The department's own documents state that the Cardiff-Weston barrage could not be built without government funding. The financing and ownership options report, published in December 2008, says: "A larger scheme would not be constructed without public sector intervention [because] the private sector would not have the capacity to finance or build the scheme without government support."
Jonathon Porritt oversaw a 2007 report that backed the giant barrage while he was chair of the government advisory body, the Sustainable Development Commission, which was itself abolished last week. Last night he said: "If the government is not prepared to find any mechanism to put public funds into the pot, it will die..
"It's a good way to generate a lot of clean energy," he said. "If it is a choice between a [large] barrage on the Severn and two nuclear power stations, then it is clear to me which is better - it is the barrage."
Last month, the Observer revealed the large barrage was unlikely to go ahead and that ministers were expected to recommend that further feasibility studies be carried out on one of four much smaller projects, which would cost about £3bn and have a capacity between 0.6GW and 1.4GW. But ministers are not expected to give any guarantee that the selected option will go ahead. "It will make pretty depressing reading," according to a source who had seen the report.
The four smaller options include two shorter barrages further upstream from the Cardiff-Weston barrage, and two lagoon proposals, which capture water in an artificial lake and do not block the entire estuary.
• Shoots barrage: would generate about 1GW, equivalent to a large fossil fuel plant.
• Beachley barrage: further upstream again, just above the Wye river, would generate about 0.6GW.
• Bridgewater Bay lagoon: would impound a section of the estuary on the coast between east of Hinkley Point and Weston-super-Mare, would generate 1.36GW.
• Fleming lagoon: a similar scheme which would generate the same power from a section of the Welsh shore between Newport and the Severn road crossings.
Roger Hull, spokesman for the Severn Tidal Power Group, a consortium of engineering and construction companies that has supported plans for Severn tidal projects for over 20 years, said that even these smaller-scale projects would require considerable government funding. "The renewable energy available from the tides in the Severn estuary are enormous and we as a nation should be making use of them," he said.
The government is committed to generating 20% of the UK's energy from renewable sources by 2020 in order to cut the nation's greenhouse gas emissions and limit the impact of climate change. Days after becoming prime minister, David Cameron said he wanted his government to be the "greenest ever"; ruling out the largest Severn barrage would mean that more of the other low-carbon sources of energy, such as wind, solar and nuclear, will have to be developed.
Nik Shelton, of the RSPB, which opposes the Cardiff-Weston barrage, said: "We want the Cardiff-Weston barrage turned down for ecological reasons, not economic ones, as the latter leaves the door open for this destructive scheme to be resurrected at a later date."
Steph Merry, head of marine renewables at the Renewable Energy Association, said last year that only the giant barrage made sense. "You need something that is a large-scale project on the same scale as a power station in order to meet the renewables targets. The Severn barrage, or something similar, is the only way of achieving that. It's much bigger than any other marine renewable or solar or wind."
The 2007 SDC report controversially suggested the wetlands lost under a Cardiff-Weston barrage could be compensated for by the sacrifice of low-grade farmland in East Anglia, Wales and elsewhere, which was already proving impractical to defend against sea level rises. It also argued the large barrage could provide a much-needed additional river crossing.
Damian Carrington guardian.co.uk, Sunday 17 October 2010 16.44 BST
Plans for the world's biggest tidal energy project, spanning the Severn estuary between Somerset and Wales, are likely to be dashed tomorrow when the government announces its refusal to back the controversial £21bn project with public finance.
The 10-mile-long scheme, which the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) believes could provide 8.6GW of renewable electricity - equivalent to 5% of the UK's needs and two or three nuclear power stations - has long proved controversial. Engineers first proposed plans for a barrage across the Severn in the 1930s. The scheme has divided environmentalists, some of whom say it would destroy an internationally important marsh and mudflat habitat, increase local flooding and reduce fish stocks.
The department will publish its decision on whether or not to back the project tomorrow morning, but sources close to the process have told the Guardian they cannot conceive of the government backing it with public finance at a time when it is focused on cutting the budget deficit. The department's own documents state that the Cardiff-Weston barrage could not be built without government funding. The financing and ownership options report, published in December 2008, says: "A larger scheme would not be constructed without public sector intervention [because] the private sector would not have the capacity to finance or build the scheme without government support."
Jonathon Porritt oversaw a 2007 report that backed the giant barrage while he was chair of the government advisory body, the Sustainable Development Commission, which was itself abolished last week. Last night he said: "If the government is not prepared to find any mechanism to put public funds into the pot, it will die..
"It's a good way to generate a lot of clean energy," he said. "If it is a choice between a [large] barrage on the Severn and two nuclear power stations, then it is clear to me which is better - it is the barrage."
Last month, the Observer revealed the large barrage was unlikely to go ahead and that ministers were expected to recommend that further feasibility studies be carried out on one of four much smaller projects, which would cost about £3bn and have a capacity between 0.6GW and 1.4GW. But ministers are not expected to give any guarantee that the selected option will go ahead. "It will make pretty depressing reading," according to a source who had seen the report.
The four smaller options include two shorter barrages further upstream from the Cardiff-Weston barrage, and two lagoon proposals, which capture water in an artificial lake and do not block the entire estuary.
• Shoots barrage: would generate about 1GW, equivalent to a large fossil fuel plant.
• Beachley barrage: further upstream again, just above the Wye river, would generate about 0.6GW.
• Bridgewater Bay lagoon: would impound a section of the estuary on the coast between east of Hinkley Point and Weston-super-Mare, would generate 1.36GW.
• Fleming lagoon: a similar scheme which would generate the same power from a section of the Welsh shore between Newport and the Severn road crossings.
Roger Hull, spokesman for the Severn Tidal Power Group, a consortium of engineering and construction companies that has supported plans for Severn tidal projects for over 20 years, said that even these smaller-scale projects would require considerable government funding. "The renewable energy available from the tides in the Severn estuary are enormous and we as a nation should be making use of them," he said.
The government is committed to generating 20% of the UK's energy from renewable sources by 2020 in order to cut the nation's greenhouse gas emissions and limit the impact of climate change. Days after becoming prime minister, David Cameron said he wanted his government to be the "greenest ever"; ruling out the largest Severn barrage would mean that more of the other low-carbon sources of energy, such as wind, solar and nuclear, will have to be developed.
Nik Shelton, of the RSPB, which opposes the Cardiff-Weston barrage, said: "We want the Cardiff-Weston barrage turned down for ecological reasons, not economic ones, as the latter leaves the door open for this destructive scheme to be resurrected at a later date."
Steph Merry, head of marine renewables at the Renewable Energy Association, said last year that only the giant barrage made sense. "You need something that is a large-scale project on the same scale as a power station in order to meet the renewables targets. The Severn barrage, or something similar, is the only way of achieving that. It's much bigger than any other marine renewable or solar or wind."
The 2007 SDC report controversially suggested the wetlands lost under a Cardiff-Weston barrage could be compensated for by the sacrifice of low-grade farmland in East Anglia, Wales and elsewhere, which was already proving impractical to defend against sea level rises. It also argued the large barrage could provide a much-needed additional river crossing.
Renewables policies must be improved, not undermined with cuts
Investors are keen on clean technologies but nervous about the political risks. Without policy guidance they may never reach the mass market
Robert Gross and Jim Watson
guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 October 2010 11.32 BST
In the run-up to the comprehensive spending review in less than a week's time, there have been repeated rumours that Britain's policies to promote renewable energy and other carbon-reduction technologies are under threat. There are compelling reasons why such cuts should be resisted.
Firstly, though abandoning clean energy policies may be presented as essential cost-cutting, this simply isn't the case. For example, "feed in tariffs" (FIT) which pay homeowners to generate their own renewable electricity, aren't paid for by the Treasury. They never have been.
Neither will the levy to fund the demonstration of carbon capture and storage on coal-power plants. Arcane accounting rules mean that such policies are viewed as taxes. In fact they are funded from our energy bills via power companies. Abandoning them won't do anything to cut the deficit, so why wield the axe?
Some people question these policies on behalf of consumers, since anything which turns up in our bills is bad news for the poor. It is essential that policymakers are honest about the cost of policies, no matter how they are funded. But the cost per person is relatively small and protecting lower-income consumers is perfectly possible. Some of the policies are specifically designed to do so. The planned "green deal" for home insulation, for example, puts money back into our pockets and is designed to help poorer households. With careful thought, the FIT could do the same.
Secondly, we must support technologies directly. Tidy-minded economists in the Treasury might be tempted to sweep away policies to promote solar, biomass and wave power. Some people may ask, why not just price carbon and let the market decide? Policy Exchange, David Cameron's favourite thinktank, argued for just such an approach in a recent report.
But such simplicity over carbon-pricing is misleading and it won't work. After all, high oil prices might encourage us to drive less (or feel poorer), but the sky high prices of the 1970s, 80s and 2000s patently failed to usher in a low-carbon revolution. Anyhow, in the real world, can we really imagine politicians imposing a high carbon tax? Today's policies aren't perfect, but the goal of change must be to improve policies, not undermine them. So what can we do? Putting a price on carbon is important, but it's not a one-stop-shop solution.
Creating markets is vital. Few technologies go straight from the laboratory to widespread use; rather they go into "niche markets" where people pay a premium for a new technology. As costs come down more people buy in. This has worked for mobile phones since the 1980s. Hybrid cars popular with noble-minded Hollywood stars also provide a recent example.
But electricity isn't a phone or a car; it's just electricity no matter how it's made. There are no niches for "early adopters" and nothing to allow the green-minded the opportunity to show off. So policy needs to intervene to give a start to wind, solar and the rest. The prize is terrifically important – lower costs, better products and ultimately green energy that is cheaper than fossil fuels.
Past policies helped the current set of technologies along the road. The giant gas turbines we use to make electricity today started their journey in the 1940s when governments supported jet fighter planes. State support for aerospace has helped them ever since. Nuclear power also got its first niche in the military, modern reactors having their roots in submarine engines.
We need to replicate this for renewable energy. It is vital to avoid the "valley of death" where new technologies never reach the mass market. This means support for deployment, not just people in lab coats. Sadly, Britain has a history of abandoning innovative concepts at the very stage they begin to offer commercial prospects, leaving competing countries to reap the rewards.
Policy must also create conditions international investors can buy into. This means tailored policies delivering real world technologies, not imaginary ideals of market-based instruments. Evidence from around the world suggests that bankable policies (such as feed-in tariffs) to create markets for key technologies are more attractive to investors than technology-neutral schemes.
Investors are keen on clean technologies but nervous about political risks. There is no shortage of countries competing for clean investment with the UK. Britain enjoys an almost unique degree of political consensus on the need to tackle climate change. How ironic therefore that Britain's tax accounting rules might be allowed to consign effective policies to the dustbin, along the way making the UK a politically risky place to invest.
• Robert Gross is the director of the centre for energy policy and technology, Imperial College London. Jim Watson is the director of the Sussex Energy Group, University of Sussex
Robert Gross and Jim Watson
guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 October 2010 11.32 BST
In the run-up to the comprehensive spending review in less than a week's time, there have been repeated rumours that Britain's policies to promote renewable energy and other carbon-reduction technologies are under threat. There are compelling reasons why such cuts should be resisted.
Firstly, though abandoning clean energy policies may be presented as essential cost-cutting, this simply isn't the case. For example, "feed in tariffs" (FIT) which pay homeowners to generate their own renewable electricity, aren't paid for by the Treasury. They never have been.
Neither will the levy to fund the demonstration of carbon capture and storage on coal-power plants. Arcane accounting rules mean that such policies are viewed as taxes. In fact they are funded from our energy bills via power companies. Abandoning them won't do anything to cut the deficit, so why wield the axe?
Some people question these policies on behalf of consumers, since anything which turns up in our bills is bad news for the poor. It is essential that policymakers are honest about the cost of policies, no matter how they are funded. But the cost per person is relatively small and protecting lower-income consumers is perfectly possible. Some of the policies are specifically designed to do so. The planned "green deal" for home insulation, for example, puts money back into our pockets and is designed to help poorer households. With careful thought, the FIT could do the same.
Secondly, we must support technologies directly. Tidy-minded economists in the Treasury might be tempted to sweep away policies to promote solar, biomass and wave power. Some people may ask, why not just price carbon and let the market decide? Policy Exchange, David Cameron's favourite thinktank, argued for just such an approach in a recent report.
But such simplicity over carbon-pricing is misleading and it won't work. After all, high oil prices might encourage us to drive less (or feel poorer), but the sky high prices of the 1970s, 80s and 2000s patently failed to usher in a low-carbon revolution. Anyhow, in the real world, can we really imagine politicians imposing a high carbon tax? Today's policies aren't perfect, but the goal of change must be to improve policies, not undermine them. So what can we do? Putting a price on carbon is important, but it's not a one-stop-shop solution.
Creating markets is vital. Few technologies go straight from the laboratory to widespread use; rather they go into "niche markets" where people pay a premium for a new technology. As costs come down more people buy in. This has worked for mobile phones since the 1980s. Hybrid cars popular with noble-minded Hollywood stars also provide a recent example.
But electricity isn't a phone or a car; it's just electricity no matter how it's made. There are no niches for "early adopters" and nothing to allow the green-minded the opportunity to show off. So policy needs to intervene to give a start to wind, solar and the rest. The prize is terrifically important – lower costs, better products and ultimately green energy that is cheaper than fossil fuels.
Past policies helped the current set of technologies along the road. The giant gas turbines we use to make electricity today started their journey in the 1940s when governments supported jet fighter planes. State support for aerospace has helped them ever since. Nuclear power also got its first niche in the military, modern reactors having their roots in submarine engines.
We need to replicate this for renewable energy. It is vital to avoid the "valley of death" where new technologies never reach the mass market. This means support for deployment, not just people in lab coats. Sadly, Britain has a history of abandoning innovative concepts at the very stage they begin to offer commercial prospects, leaving competing countries to reap the rewards.
Policy must also create conditions international investors can buy into. This means tailored policies delivering real world technologies, not imaginary ideals of market-based instruments. Evidence from around the world suggests that bankable policies (such as feed-in tariffs) to create markets for key technologies are more attractive to investors than technology-neutral schemes.
Investors are keen on clean technologies but nervous about political risks. There is no shortage of countries competing for clean investment with the UK. Britain enjoys an almost unique degree of political consensus on the need to tackle climate change. How ironic therefore that Britain's tax accounting rules might be allowed to consign effective policies to the dustbin, along the way making the UK a politically risky place to invest.
• Robert Gross is the director of the centre for energy policy and technology, Imperial College London. Jim Watson is the director of the Sussex Energy Group, University of Sussex