Energy effciency and renewables are the answer

As I've said before most environmentalists, myself included, support research into Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). And we think it should be a prerequisite for new generation of coal-fired power stations. But the government is convinced that energy generating companies like E.ON won’t build coal-fired power stations if CCS is compulsory because of the cost. There’s quite a lot of pressure on the government, including some from inside the cabinet, to set a deadline, say 2020, for coal-fired power stations to capture 90% of their CO2, but they’re reluctant even to do this. So we’re left with a situation where, to keep the lights on, the government is gambling that someone – it’s not clear who – will make CCS work in the future. In the mean time our emissions are guaranteed to rise dramatically in exactly the period when we need to be reducing them by 90% or more. And our attempts to lead global climate change negotiations are undermined.

What the government should be doing is spending a lot of money on energy efficiency rather than giving one-off payments to families or the elderly or the fuel poor. Look at the Camden Eco House. It’s achieved an 80% reduction in carbon emissions mostly by putting in insulation and double glazing. Simple stuff but hugely effective. And a massive retro-fitting programme can be done. When people started to die in London in the 1950s because of smog we passed the Clean Air Act and, in a relatively short period of time, coal fireplaces in urban homes were adapted to burn smokeless fuels or replaced with central heating. That’s the sort of step change we need. The energy companies could be given incentives to help with this. For example, we could tax them on how little energy they sell to people not on how profitable they are.

Renewables can provide all our energy needs as long as we install enough of them in enough different places. The only question today is the cost. But to my mind the cost of runaway climate change or a chaotic transition out of an economy based on cheap oil is likely to be a far higher price for our society to have to pay.

Take wind for example. 40% of Europe’s wind blows through the British Isles. There has never been a day on record when the wind has not blown somewhere in the UK. But we’ve completely blown it on onshore wind (if you’ll pardon the expression). Danish wind farms are almost all cooperatives which give local people a financial stake in energy generation. Over here a big energy generating company simply announces that it wants to build a wind farm in someone’s backyard and – surprise, surprise – residents complain. So I think we’ve missed the boat on onshore wind.

Offshore wind is still huge opportunity for us. In theory, on an averagely windy day, we could supply all of Europe’s electricity needs using offshore wind. The government has belatedly grasped the importance of offshore wind, but if it devoted one thousandth of the time that it’s devoting to nuclear, then we’d be a lot further forward.

The second thing the government should be doing is giving people and companies incentives to produce more electricity and gas which is what most of Europe does. We should be paying a premium to those that feed electricity into the electricity grid. Denmark has been doing this for ages and they get 19% of their electricity from wind. The Spanish and Portuguese both have feed-in tariffs and both generate nearly 10% of their electricity from wind. The Germans have a feed-in tariff and obtain 7% of their power from wind. They also give people incentives to feed biogas into the gas grid. We get a pathetic 1.5% of our electricity from wind.

The Germans and Chinese have built up large photovoltaic panel industries which are driving down the price of photovoltaics fast. Solar water is already financially viable for those who have roofs. Biogas from sewage, food waste, animal slurries and crop waste can generate significant amounts of energy for businesses, farms and municipalities. Just putting an armada of small boats off our coast to go up and down with the waves would generate considerable amounts of electricity. We’re not short of ideas or technologies – just political will.

So I would argue that energy efficiency and renewables can provide our energy needs. Unfortunately the requisite political will, so prevalent in Denmark, Germany and even California, is conspicuously lacking in the UK today.

I would further argue that none of this can be done by one party alone – the problems are too big. Maybe the historic destiny of the Lib Dems is to bang heads together to make all parties understand that they have to work together on the twin issues of climate change and the end of cheap oil. Maybe not.

But there’s another problem underlying all this – the nature of 21st century capitalism itself. As the Sustainability Manager of Asda said at a conference I attended last week: “retailers exist to sell people things they don’t know they need”. But we cannot go on consuming resources the way we are doing. We’re reaching the limits of what the planet can sustain – both in terms of depletion of natural resources and growth of human population. Everyone will have to draw their own conclusions, but my conclusion is that we’re either going to have to find a different way to run human society or we’ re going to run human society into the rocks.