Section 12. UK Renewable Energy | |
Slide A, Renewable EnergyThe media often talk about "renewable energy", but what does that mean? We might be shown pictures of wind turbines and solar panels but the reality of what the government figures for renewable energy encompass are somewhat different. Generally, the pictures above encompass what most people consider to be "renewable energy": The Pelamis (top left) is one of the best wave power devices in the world. But despite being designed in the UK its first large scale application is in Portugal – because the scale of the UK's electricity market doesn't lend itself easily to small renewable systems like Pelamis. Solar power, even in the UK, is readily usable, but to date it's not been adopted by the mainstream building industry because it complicates the development of large housing sites, and because there's not the infrastructure, like with gas, for the servicing and maintenance of solar systems. In any case, through Building Regulations, most renewable systems are considered an add-on to the consumption-led energy grid. Low voltage, off-grid systems – which are better because they encourage greater energy conservation – are not really encompassed by the current regulations. Wind and hydro power are also clearly renewable, but the problem is that only very large development are able to fit in with the current structure of the electricity market. Renewable technologies might be able to scale-up to the size where they can begin to access the market, but often this scale reduces their efficiency and means that, if inappropriately sited, they can cause damage to the environment like any other large source of energy. Of course, what we've looked at here are the 'true renewable energy sources'. As shown in the next slide, what the government considers to be "renewable energy" is something wholly different. Slide B, Renewable EnergyThe graph above shows where the UK's "renewable" energy came from in 2007. As you can see from the labels at the bottom some of these energy sources (heat, 'h', or power, 'p') are clearly not "renewable" but due to the historic evolution of renewable energy from the UK's waste disposal policy Britain labels some extremely wasteful and environmentally damaging operations as "renewable". The majority of the UK's renewable energy is quite literally 'rubbish'; it involves disposing of waste products and trying to recover some of the costs of disposal by producing energy. For example, it's good to burn landfill gas because it has less impact on the climate, but in terms of energy it takes many times more energy to create the waste and put it in the hole compared to the energy landfill gas generation produces. Likewise waste incineration is extremely wasteful because recycling household waste saves four times more energy (and even more carbon) than incineration produces. There are also "grey" renewables – sources which could be renewable but are used in ways which are not. Waste wood is one example. Turning waste wood and wood chips into dense pellets for burning in automated boilers is becoming more popular, but the process of manufacturing and transporting the pellets means that the energy balance of the process (the 'energy return on energy invested') is negligible. Likewise for sources such as sewage sludge, the energy extracted at the sewage works often barely covers the energy required to process and dispose of the sludge, and given that a lot of sludge today is dried and incinerated this is certainly not the best and most efficient use of this material – it should be returned to the land (as we approach, within a couple of decades, the global peak in phosphorus production human waste is one of the best sources of phosphorus for agriculture). Contrary to the image promulgated by the media, the 'true' sources of renewable energy – solar, wind, hydro and geothermal – only make up a very small proportion of the overall annual production of renewable energy in Britain. Slide C, Renewable EnergyThe purpose of the graph above is to show how the sources of renewable energy in the UK have changed over the last 17 years. This is significant because it discloses that there is an immense gap between the stated aims of UK policy on renewable/low carbon energy sources and the actual practice. From government statements and the media we might think that renewable energy was aimed at producing energy from environmentally friendly sources of energy such as wind and solar. But as the graph above shows if we look at where the greatest change in the production of renewable energy has been over the last couple of decades its focussed on the waste-related, and clearly more damaging sources of energy – not the 'true renewable' energy sources. Most sources have not seen any significant change in production. This is because their current use is often tied to existing manufacturing processes, such as wood or paper processing, and so their use has no scope for a large increase. One of the cheapest and simplest of the true renewable energy sources, solar, has change relatively little. In contrast energy from landfill gas has increase by more than ten times. The surge in 'plant biomass' seems to be an improvement, but much of this is large quantities of forestry and wood waste that is being burnt very inefficiently in coal-fired power plants – if that material were burnt in proper biomass combined heat and power system we might be more than twice the amount of energy from the same quantity of material compared to the energy we get from putting it in coal-fired power stations. Liquid biofuels, which have seen a large increase in the past couple of years, are another questionable source of renewable energy. Whilst notionally renewable, much of the increase in biofuels has been met from plantations that cover areas of the planet that were once ecologically important forests and grasslands. Slide D, Renewable EnergyIt's a rather sad reflection on the quality of public debate in Britain at the moment, but much of the discussion of renewable energy systems in the UK is utterly meaningless. On the pro-renewable side we're given views on the development of renewable energy which do not match their potential to deliver within the current economic system, and do not reflect the current statistical reality. From the anti-renewable side we are given views about development in the countryside which are based on romanticist concepts of what the rural areas are for which are in no way borne out historically or by their current use. Both sides use emotion in the place of hard fact, and do not address the central issue – is renewable energy making a difference? The simplest measure for the success of renewable energy is, does it displace the use of fossil fuels in order to reduce carbon emissions. On this basis, as shown in the slide above, renewable energy policy is failing. No matter how you configure your view over what constitutes "renewable energy" within the government's current statistics, the increase in fossil fuels is always greater than the increase in renewable energy sources. In our view both sides in the current debate fail to grasp one essential fact of energy policy; the government's aim is to get more of every kind of energy – fossil fuels, renewable and nuclear – to support the primary policy of growth. In terms of carbon emissions the government's approach is technological – favouring fiscal (e.g. carbon trading) and techno-fixes (e.g., carbon capture) – that mask carbon production without requiring fundamental change and so fail to deal with the problem at source by changing the way society operates. Renewable energy is not a "problem". We know how to do renewable energy – it's a very straightforward matter of civil engineering. The greater issue is that renewable energy cannot deliver our current demand for energy overall. Therefore the priority shouldn't be on developing renewable energy sources as part of a larger energy policy. Instead, and as a means of addressing the symbiotic difficulties of climate change and energy/resource depletion, the central policy should be on delivering a significant cut in energy consumption to a point where renewable energy sources can provide our needs from within the UK's boundaries. Background Information
Wikipedia:
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 The Energy Beyond
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Digest of UK Energy Statistics 2008
Biofuels: no viable solution for climate, survey reveals
Renewable Energy
The Annotated 2-hour EBO Presentation Slides
