World land temperatures for June hit record high

You wouldn’t guess this from the UK’s weather, but world temperatures on land were the highest ever recorded for June. May was similarly record-breaking. The April to June quarter exceeded historic records for northern hemisphere land temperatures. Combined land and ocean figures make June the fourth hottest ever across the globe as a whole. As the cool water phase (El Nina) of the eastern Pacific drew to a close, world land temperatures have risen as expected in the last few months. The hot weather continues in July while Britain waits for a sight of the sun.

Many of us trying to communicate climate change issues have been approached by news media over the past few weeks asking whether the UK abysmal summer weather indicates that ‘the global warming scare’ is over. No, I say, the science remains exactly the same. In a warmer world weather may well become more erratic, more unusual. We should not pay much attention to episodes of unusual cold in Britain or elsewhere but focus on global averages. The last few months have been as warm, or warmer, than the past few years. Many places – on all continents -  are experiencing record temperatures.

Somehow, this response simply doesn’t work. Journalists are not interested in extreme temperatures 1000 km away in Austria (highest ever June temperatures) or the US (records broken across most of the country). The only thing worth commenting on is that the UK has had the wettest June since record-keeping began and the coldest midsummer month since 1991. Humankind finds its very difficult  to comprehend a global mean or a new record set in a strange and unknown part of the world.

A poll this week shows that Americans (experiencing hot weather on their continent) are agreeing with the climate change hypothesis in increasing numbers. But Britons drying their houses after repeated inundations understandably show no such belief. Truly it is going to be difficult to get any substantial global response to the climate change challenge.

 

DECC numbers on energy efficiency need checking

Today’s presentation on electricity efficiency opportunities from the Department of Energy (DECC) makes a series of important errors in its estimates of the savings that can be made in domestic homes.[1] For example DECC overstates the amount of power used in domestic lighting by almost a factor of three. Its projected efficiency savings are almost twice as great as today’s total use of electricity for this purpose. By contrast, DECC substantially underestimates the use of power for space and water heating. What is most surprising is the clear conflict between many of the figures presented and other recently published DECC data. Today’s document was supposed to show the large possibilities for improvements in the efficiency of electricity use. What seem to be simple mistakes completely undermine its credibility. More fact checking, please. Domestic homes consume about a third of all UK electricity. This figure is tending to rise both because of de-industrialisation and because of the relatively slow progress at reducing electricity use in households. It is only recently that home use has fallen substantially whereas industrial and commercial consumption has been falling for most of the last decade.

Efficiency matters. As DECC said on its web site when it released the presentation today.

Encouraging greater efficiency in the use of electricity is potentially very valuable to all of us. It can reduce electricity bills both directly and also indirectly through limiting the overall cost of the electricity system in terms of funding for new generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure.

Lighting

This DECC report suggest that domestic homes use 42 terawatt hours (TWh, over 10% of total UK electricity demand). In the magisterial GB Housing Energy Fact File, published by DECC in September 2011, this figure is estimated at only 16.5 TWh.[2] This second figure is widely used and is assumed to be approximately accurate. The recent Energy Savings Trust report suggests an even lower figure of about 540 kWh a year per house, equivalent to about 14 TWh for all UK homes.

Today’s  DECC document estimates that efficiency savings of 26 TWh can be made, largely by the replacement of old-fashioned light bulbs (‘incandescents’) by compact fluorescent lamps(CFLs). So the total savings claimed to be available are far greater than total domestic use. Not only is the number wrong, but the efficiency improvements from the switch to CFLs have already been partly made. The remaining gain will come from moving from comparatively wasteful CFLs to high efficiency LEDs. The savings from this switch might be about 10 TWh but are unlikely to be more.

Appliances and electronics

The new DECC document says that appliances and electronics in homes consume about 47 TWh but its own September 2011 report suggested a figure of 58.4 TWH, a figure almost 25% higher and in rough agreement with the EST June analysis.

In the case of home electronics, efficiency savings of 38% are said to come from a reduction in standby losses. (I could find no source provided for this estimate).This is not a credible figure. No modern consumer electronics now have significant power consumption when not in use and efficiency saving will be much lower than 38%

Heating use

The new report suggests that household electricity use can be reduced by building improvements such as installing ‘high efficiency windows’. The total potential saving identified is almost 15 TWh. But in another DECC document, this time from 2010, the total amount of electricity used to heat UK homes is estimated at 17 TWh.[3] Therefore the new estimate is that almost 90% of electricity consumption to heat homes can be avoided by retrofitting insulation and other improvements. This is not a supportable assumption.

 

Reducing electricity demand in the UK is an important objective. I have only researched the section on domestic use but this portion is said to offer almost half the possible efficiency savings.  Furthermore, the costs of efficiency improvements are stated to be less than the financial gains to the householder from using electricity. This assumption, which in my experience is rarely true, is never examined. It seems to me that the DECC report does not meet reasonable expectations for policy proposals from a government department, even in the draft form in which it is currently presented.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can you predict someone's carbon footprint by knowing how much money they have

(This article was written in 2009 and uses data from previous years. Expenditure patterns change slowly and the conclusions are likely to be broadly  accurate today. I am posting it now because the data is referred to in an magazine article to be published in the next few weeks.) If we include the full impact of flying, the average person in the UK is responsible for about twelve and a half tonnes of greenhouse gases each year. About half of this total comes directly from running our homes and from personal travel. The rest comes from the things we buy, our carbon dioxide output at work and from manufacturing industry.

In mid November the Prime Minister gave his first speech on climate change. He said that emissions may have to fall by 80% by 2050. This means moving from twelve and a half tonnes per person down to two and a half. Many scientists say that even this is too much and we may eventually have to cut our average emissions to no more than one tonne. This is less than 10% of today's level.

Who is going to find it most difficult to reduce their emissions? What types of families are going to have to make the steepest cuts? We did some work to examine how much carbon dioxide the rich generate compared to the less well-off. The results show that if all of us are going to have to live within a small allowance, the better-off are going to have to really cut back. The richer you are, the more you spend on goods and services that produce carbon dioxide emissions. So, for example, people who don’t have much money don’t fly away on holidays very much. But some people travel by air ten times a year. The wealthiest ten per cent of the country have a carbon dioxide footprint just from motoring of almost two tonnes, enough to use up most of an individual's allowance for 2050. This is over four times the level of the least well-off. When we added up the sums, we found that the richest ten per cent have emissions almost two and a half times as great as people at the other end of the income range.

Our technique.

We used a very good source of government data, the annual Family Spending survey. The information in this huge report is taken from a large number of detailed questionnaires that were completed in 2005 and 2006, the latest year for which data is available. For each group of one tenth ofUKhouseholds, moving from poorest to richest, the survey says what they typically spend on hundreds of different items. For example, you can find out what people in various income groups spend in ice cream, alcopops, children's clothing or even reading glasses. Thousands of people fill in the questionnaire and the numbers are thought to be very accurate.

In the latest report, the top ten per cent of households have an average spending, across all family members, of almost £1,300 a week. The middle-ranked households had an expenditure of about £500, and the people at the lowest income level were spending less than £135 a week.

How did we calculate a carbon footprint?

We looked at the main different types of household expenditure that involve burning fossil fuels. For example, we noted spending of gas and electricity. When you heat your house, the boiler is emitting carbon dioxide to the outside world. Slightly differently, when you turn on the lights, a power station has to burn just a bit more fuel. This means more CO2 up the power station chimney. We also looked at how much people spend on petrol and diesel. If they spend money, it means they bought litres of fuel which are burnt in the engine and carbon dioxide comes out of the exhaust. We also examined the money spent on public transport and flying, though the numbers are slightly less good for aviation than we'd like. Information about foreign holidays is there and, finally, we looked at money spent on meat. Meat is important because animals emit greenhouse gases such as methane and because they eat grains, which have generally required artificial fertiliser to grow. Fertilisers take a lot of fossil fuel to make.

Let's look at the main categories in turn.

Heat and power for the home

People in the top income groups spend a lot more on gas and electricity. The latest data shows the richest 20% of households spending £17 a week on domestic power and heat, while the bills of the poorest 20% were only £9 a week. But richer families have much larger households. Many of the poorest people in theUKlive alone but the top 20% of families have an average of over 3 people in the house. So when we look at spending per person on gas and electricity, we find that it doesn’t vary much across the income groups.  The richest people actually have a slightly lower carbon footprint than the less well-off. But there isn’t a big difference between the various groups. This was surprising. Because rich people generally have much bigger houses and more space per person, we thought that they would spend more on fuel per person. This isn’t the case, suggesting that less well-off people may live in houses that are not particularly well insulated.

Interestingly, we also made a calculation about the carbon footprint of the electricity we use. We used standard government numbers to work out what the average emissions are per person. Very roughly, it is just under a tonne each for electricity, and between one and a half and two tonnes for gas.  If nothing else, this does show how far we have to go to meet the latest targets set by Gordon Brown.

Petrol and diesel for the car

Whereas there isn’t much difference between income groups when it comes to heat and power, we do see large disparities in fuel use for cars. The richest people spend over four times as much per person as the least well-off. Richer people generally have bigger cars and drive them longer distances. Very roughly, people in the least well-off portion of theUKpopulation have a carbon footprint of less than half a tonne from driving, compared to almost two tonnes among the wealthiest.

Public transport

Public transport expenditure is very interesting. Rail use goes up dramatically as people get wealthier. It is almost ten times as much among the richest as among the people at the bottom end of the spectrum. On the other hand, households with less money actually spend more on bus and coach fares. As we know, most people don’t travel much by public transport, so the impact on total carbon dioxide emissions is not that great.

Air travel

It's here that we see the most striking differences. The numbers are less precise than for car travel, but the richest groups spend over ten times as much on foreign holidays (usually taken by air) and perhaps five times as much on flights. This almost certainly  means that the top 10% have a footprint of more than four tonnes from flying compared to well under half a tonne for the least well off group. In a future world in which carbon dioxide is much more carefully controlled, many people's flying habits are going to have to change, or the airlines are going to have to have to find a way of burning less fossil fuel.

Meat

At about £4 per person per week, this doesn’t vary much between income groups, though high income homes do spend a little more. Household diets vary enormously and there isn’t any obvious evidence that the most carbon-intensive food are disproportionately eaten by any one income group.

What does it all add up to?

We have looked briefly at the main carbon culprits – the things which have the greatest impact on your personal responsibility for climate changing gases. We can summarise roughly how emissions vary by income group.

 

Approximate greenhouse gas emissions per person

(tonnes per year)

 

Bottom 10% Average income Top 10%
Electricity 0.9 0.8 0.9
Gas 1.7 1.6 1.7
Motor fuels 0.4 1.1 1.8
Public transport 0.1 0.1 0.2
Air travel 0.4 1.5 4.0
Meat 0.3 0.3 0.4
TOTAL 3.8 5.4 9.0
 
Approximate expenditure per person per week £80 £200 £450

 

Almost all of the difference is driven by the much higher figures for air and car travel in the highest income groups. The most prosperous people have carbon emissions from these sources of almost two and a half times the least well-off. Add all these numbers up, and the climate emissions vary by almost two and a half times across the income range.

 

 

 

 

Dutch trial of domestic fuel cells for grid balancing

In late May, Germany met more than 50% of its power needs from solar PV at midday on two successive days. This astounding success brings a problem with it. How does the country manage to balance its electricity grid as solar electricity ramps up towards noon and then falls away later in the afternoon? Most analysts assume that large-scale natural gas power stations are the logical complement to intermittent renewables. An announcement today (June 19th 2012) from a small Australian company should make us question this assumption. It has just announced a trial of its domestic-scale fuel cell power plants for grid balancing in the Netherlands. These tiny fuel cells are highly flexible, powering up and down in a matter of seconds. In theory this technology could be the cheapest way of matching supply and demand in a renewables-dominated world. But they need to be in millions of homes to create a large enough buffer and to push the capital costs down to competitive levels.

I wrote the first edition of Ten Technologies to Fix Energy and Climate four years ago. Each of the ten chapters focuses on one or two companies that looked as though they had the technical edge to prosper in a world in which low carbon energy sources take a larger role. The good news is that almost of these businesses are still in existence. The bad news is that most of them haven’t broken through to commercial viability. This probably tells us a great deal about the state of the battle against carbon emissions: even the best technologies have yet to take off because of the difficulties of getting to competitiveness against fossil fuel power stations that have had a century to reduce their costs.

One of the most interesting companies I wrote about was Australia’s Ceramic Fuel Cells. Ceramic, as it seems to be known in its home country, is the owner of the grid balancing technology now on trial in the Netherlands. Ceramic makes what are in effect small domestic electric power plants. These refrigerator-sized devices sit in the kitchen or boiler room generating about one and half kilowatts of power, about three times the average domestic consumption, by splitting natural gas (mostly methane or CH4) into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The hydrogen then combines with oxygen in air in an electric circuit creating water, an electric current and some heat. Most of the time these units are exporting their power into the local grid and they  do so at about 60% fuel efficiency, at least as good as the best full-sized power station. Moreover, the waste they generate can be captured to provide 100 litres a day of hot water, enough for most homes.

The Ceremic technology is still expensive – almost £20,000 to install a device that generates electricity worth (at retail prices) no more than £1,200 a year. (For comparison, a modern gas turbine plant might have a capital cost of about £1,500 per 1.5 kilowatts of peak output). The value of the hot water might be another £3000 at most. Even with hefty feed-in tariffs, the homeowner is unlikely to see a high return. As with many clean technology companies, Ceramic is stuck making small volumes of its products at a high unit cost. To get down to £4-5,000 per installation, the company needs to make several thousand units a year, not the hundreds it is making at the moment. Although many people say that its technology is further advanced than other small fuel cell company in the world, it still has to fight for every sale and is reliant on the support from big utilities around the world which are charmed by the technology.

Fuel cell technologies are not carbon neutral if they use natural gas. But if the gas comes from biological sources, such as anaerobic digestion of agricultural wastes, it can provide genuinely renewable electricity. In addition, the ability of Ceramic’s products to turn up and down at a few seconds notice can provide very valuable grid balancing. At the moment of writing, wind is barely providing any of the UK’s electricity but is expected to generate almost two gigawatts by this time tomorrow. As the wind turbines ramp up, small deviations from the expected increase could be evened out by tens of thousands of Ceramic fuel cells adjusting their output to smooth the power from wind. This service can be worth much more than the standard wholesale price of power and may be the most important single source of income for the owner of a small fuel cell power plant.

Of course the critical thing is to get thousands of fuel cells spread around a country to all respond quickly to a signal to increase or decrease their power output. This is purpose of Ceramic’s trial in the Netherlands with its partners, the utility Liander and IBM. A number of its Blue Gen products will be controlled remotely by ‘smart grid’ software to see how effectively they can be combined to rapidly ramp output up or down to match minute by minute variations in the power from wind and solar.

Whether you believe that the carbon-free future for electricity generation should be based on nuclear or renewables, we all have to face the difficulty of ensuring that the electricity system can match supply  and demand minute by minute. Nuclear power stations have to be run at peak power or not at all and wind and solar production can neither be accurately predicted nor managed. We will either need huge amounts of storage (perhaps hydrogen or pumped water or compressed air) or highly flexible generators. As things stand today, Ceramic’s products are the most easily adjustable generators on the market. The company may need another £200m of capital to get its products down to reasonable production costs, but its twenty year old technology is one of the most interesting parts of the low carbon future.

The Rothamsted battle

Eight small plots of wheat at Rothamsted research centre are the focus of an increasingly bitter dispute. These 6 metre by 6 metre squares of genetically modified cereals are threatened with destruction by one group of determined environmental campaigners this weekend (27th May 2012). Other equally committed environmentalists fiercely defend the importance of the science. If successful, the Rothmasted GM wheat will reduce the need for the use of insecticides, particularly the group called pyrethroids that kill aphids and other pests as well as beneficial insects. Since pyrethroids may be implicated in the collapse in pollinating bee numbers, GM wheat might have major beneficial impacts.

Wheat is the single most important source of human nutrition. About 20% of the world’s calories come from this crop. Increasing the yield from this cereal is therefore a crucial part of the world’s route towards securing food for three billion more people by 2050. Aphid infestation can cause significant losses to the tonnage of wheat taken from a field. One pest – wheat midge – can reduce yields by 50% or more in the most affected fields. Reducing losses to wheat crops caused by aphids is a vital part of improving global food availability.

The Rothamsted GM wheat incorporates a gene that helps create a substance called (E) beta farnesene. The chemical is what is known as an ‘alarm pheromone’ produced by aphids.  It signals danger to other aphids, which therefore tend to avoid it. By contrast, the predators of aphids seem to be attracted to it, perhaps because it identifies where large concentrations of their prey might be found.

( E) beta farnesene is found in several common plants, such as peppermint, and the Rothamsted researchers have added the genes that create this substance to the genome of wheat. (Anyone with mint in the garden knows that it is rarely damaged by insects – so at least in the UK the omens are good). This genetic modification is building on a recent series of papers suggesting that directly applying  E beta farnesene to wheat may reduce aphid numbers on the crop. Incorporating the production of farnesene into the wheat itself may be an even better way of reducing aphid damage.

The main benefit from the genetic modification may be the reduction in the need to use synthetic insecticides. In the UK about three quarters of all wheat has an insecticide applied, according to the last government survey. Most of these fields have synthetic pyrethroids sprayed onto the crop. Artificial pyrethoids are similar to the natural insect repellent in plants such as chrysanthemums. These insecticides work by affecting the sodium ‘gates’ in organisms and are particularly destructive to insects and to aquatic animals. These insecticides are only toxic to mammals in extremely high doses and their short life means that they are regarded as relatively safe. But they destroy all insects, including the predators of wheat-destroying aphids and so tend to diminish biodiversity.

There is some evidence that sub-lethal doses of pyrethroids, perhaps in combination with other insecticides such as neonictiniods, affect many higher functions of creatures such as bees. By ‘higher functions’, I mean such things as memory (for example, where the home hive is) and ability to communicate the direction of pollen through the bee dance to other hive residents.

Vital though they are to crop protection, pyrethroids may therefore also cause some of the problems we now see in bee survival. Wheat itself does not require bees for pollination but the doses of insecticides are possibly reducing the number of bees in the wild, with severe consequences for the future pollination of many other crops.

The argument in favour of the Rothamsted GM experiment is that – if successful – it will help to reduce the insecticide load experienced by bees during their foraging. The world needs Rothamsted to succeed if it is to produce more food at a lower environmental cost. Many of the complaints about the experiment, such as the risk of contamination of locally grown wheat, are almost certainly wrong, simply because the E beta farnesene gene introduced into the Rothamsted wheat is extremely unlikely to be able to be transmitted to non-GM crops. In particular, wheat pollen does not travel more than a few metres and even if does merge with non GM wheat almost certainly cannot transmit the E beta farnesene gene.

Rothamsted research centre is probably the oldest plant breeding laboratory in the world. Not only has it assisted in the development of new agricultural technologies, it also claims with much justification to be the ‘birthplace of modern statistical theory and practice’. The new GM wheat trial, properly approved by regulatory authorities, is a worthy and scientifically robust attempt to see if techniques can be developed to reduce the use of chemicals, particularly pyrethroids, in the field. Unfortunately, it is a wonderful irony that the lab that initially developed pyrethroids in the 1960’s was none other than Rothamsted itself. The major improvements in insect control that the laboratory developed to the benefit of people around the world may just have helped trigger part of the collapse of bee populations. Perhaps GM wheat will have the same short term benefits as pyrethroids but then cause further problems in ecological stability.

 

Food versus fuel: a debate that has only one possible conclusion

Ben Caldecott of Climate Change Capital argues in the Guardian that ‘sustainable’ aviation requires the use of biofuels. He suggests a target of about 60% bio-based ingredients in the fuel that powers planes at UK airports . He doesn’t begin to address the implications for food supply, or show how biofuels will reduce global emissions. My calculations suggest replacing 60% of the UK’s aviation kerosene with fuels of biological origin would use all of the UK’s home produced cereal and oil seeds crops and substantially increase food imports. Furthermore, to replace the food used to make aviation fuel on farmland elsewhere in the world would result in a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions. The inconvenient truth is that biofuels are never an answer to climate change problems. Put crudely, photosynthesis in growing plants captures energy provided by the sun. This energy can either be used to fuel human beings, providing them with the two or three kilowatt hours a day they need to function, or it can be used to create power for other purposes. For example, the energy in corn (maize) can be turned into alcohol that replaces petrol in a car. Or it can provide food for human beings or cattle.

A kilogramme of wheat contains about 3,000 (kilo) calories, equivalent to about three and a half kilowatt hours. Biofuel processing plants use the energy in foods to create liquids that can power engines and jet turbines. Ben Caldecott wants us to switch to 60% biofuels in aviation fuel. How much food would that require?

In 2011, the UK used about 11.4 million tonnes of aviation fuel. The total energy value in this kerosene was about 133 terawatt hours. (Contrast this with the UK’s total electricity use of about 350 TWh, about three times as much).

Britain produced about 24 million tonnes of grain and oil seeds. This was mostly wheat but also included barley, oats and oil seed rape. The energy value of this was about 84 terawatt hours. So if every single food grain produced in Britain this year was turned into liquid fuel at 100% energy efficiency, we’d only cover about 60% of our needs for aviation fuel. But even in the most efficient conversion process, only about half of the energy value in grains can be turned into fuel. Even if Britain turned every single grain produced this year into kerosene, the country would barely meet a third of its need for aviation fuel.

No problem, Ben Caldecott and other biofuel fans might say: we simply need to import more food. The question that arises is whether growing more food elsewhere would increase greenhouse gas emissions to a greater or lesser extent than the savings from reduced oil use in airplanes. Unfortunately, even simple calculations show that conventional agriculture produces more emissions than aviation per unit of energy. Growing food using conventional agriculture uses large amounts of energy to produce nitrogen and phosphorus fertilisers. More importantly, nitrogen applications to fields increases the emissions from soils and watercourses of nitrous oxide, a far worse global warming gas than CO2. The net impact on global emissions of producing an extra tonne of food is probably at least 550 kilogrammes of carbon dioxide equivalent. (Much, much more if it is new land converted from forest or grassland to arable). And unfortunately the saving of CO2 from replacing kerosene with oil seeds is far less than 550 kg per tonne of food.

As study after study has shown around the world, biofuels don’t save emissions. As importantly,  every tonne of food that is converted to liquid fuel increases the price of basic foodstuffs for poor people. Ben Caldecott's article welcomes increased air travel. He and his colleagues at Climate Change Capital should ask themselves whether feeding the aviation industry is more important than avoiding hunger and starvation. The numbers simply don’t support the view that aviation can become more ‘sustainable’ by switching from fossil fuels to biologically sourced equivalents.

Rubbish

In a report published this week (1st May 2012), the UK’s Royal Society asserted (p68) that the accumulation of waste products in a modern society is strongly linked to the size of GDP. In simple terms, more growth equals more rubbish.  Similar jeremiads about the severe impact of economic growth on global ecologies pervade the report. So the authors might be slightly embarrassed to see the latest data on household rubbish published a couple of days later by the UK government. These numbers show that the average person now produces less waste than fifteen years ago. Let’s get the facts right, please: economic progress is not necessarily bad for the environment. The volume of waste produced by an economy is a good index of its impact on the natural world. Everything we consume starts by being extracted from the earth’s crust or soil, is then processed to make it useful to us and eventually turns into waste. Whether it is an iPad, a hamburger or a Volkwagen Golf, our goods all ultimately come from the ground. After delivery a service to us, everything is discarded and becomes rubbish, collected by the local council every week or so.

The conventional view of the world is that growth in GDP always takes the form of increased consumption of physical goods. As we get richer, we’re told,  we buy more stuff. For a long while this simplification was broadly correct. A large fraction of the extra income that households gained in wealthy countries between 1960 and about 2000 was spent on things you could touch. We bought cars, washing machines, more clothes, TVs and garden furniture. As the Oxford sociologist Jonathan Gershuny points out, the second half of the 20th century is often portrayed as the beginning of the ‘service’ economy but it is characterised more accurately as the period when household life became mechanised. Households acquired a large number of heavy machines.

That era ended in advanced economies a decade or so ago. In the UK, most indices of physical consumption show a decline from around 2002, a point I have called ‘peak stuff’. That decline will continue. We have the machines we need and the ones we have last longer (compare the lifespan of a car today with one a generation ago for example), and are generally lighter and easier to recycle. I know it is difficult to believe, but we eat less, use less water and travel fewer kilometres each year. Broadly speaking, we are slowly replacing the consumption of physical goods with the pursuit of pleasurable experiences. Each year, a larger fraction of our income goes on visiting the David Hockney exhibition, attending a Manchester United football match or paying for out Netflix subscription.

We see this in the amount of waste we throw away. Waste production per person in the UK peaked at around 520 kg a year in the year to March 2002. The latest two quarters figures are fifteen per cent below that level. The lastest quarterly figures suggest a figure of about 443 kg. The decline from year to year isn’t smooth but is probably getting steeper. (Please note that the last two columns in the chart below are for the most recent quarters. The apparent slackening in the rate of decline is an artefact of the way DEFRA draws the chart). Today’s waste levels are well below the levels of 1996/7. By contrast, in the period from 1997 to today, inflation-adjusted GDP has risen by over a third. (This isn’t quite a fair comparison since the UK population has also increased during the last fifteen years). Household rubbish is actually a small fraction of the total flow of waste out of the economy. Construction waste is far more important but this is also falling sharply. All in all, we produce far less rubbish than we did a couple of decades ago.

The probable implication? In contrast to what the Royal Society says, growth may be good for the environment. We waste less and are prepared to devote more cash to ecological protection. Technology improvements mean things last longer and use fewer physical resources to make.  Regretfully, I have to say that the world’s most prestigious scientific institution should spend more time checking its facts. As people get richer, they don’t buy, and then dispose of,  more goods. As England shows, more GDP doesn't mean more waste.

 

Source: DEFRA, Local Authority Collected Waste for England, May 2012

(http://www.defra.gov.uk/statistics/environment/waste/wrfg22-wrmswqtr/)

The cost of our dietary habits

The world produces plenty of food – over 5,000 calories a day per person. Nevertheless, the sustainability of our food supply is one of the central problems facing the world. As countries become wealthier an increasing fraction of the world’s agricultural output is fed to animals, which typically turn eight calories of food into only one calorie of meat. Can the world’s total food supply expand fast enough to accommodate the increasing percentage of calories going to feed animals? A new paper suggests that a 2050 world that has global agricultural productivity as good as the US today, but also copies the US’s dietary patterns, would need nearly double the global land area devoted to arable crops in 2050. This is impossible to achieve without large scale further destruction of vital forests.[1] Over the past four decades, a growing fraction of world food supply has been diverted to meat animals. Nevertheless, the typical person has access to about 2,750 calories today, up from 2,250 forty years ago. This increase has occurred as a result combination of four interlinked factors.

1)      The amount of land used for growing food has increased by about 35%. This increase has, of course, partly come from the destruction of forests, pushing many gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.

2)      Yields per hectare have risen, and are still rising, at  between 1 and 2% per year.

3)      The population has grown sharply

4)      Lastly, diets have changed, implying a need to produce more primary calories in the form of crops for use by animals.

The paper has a very interesting and elegant way of expressing the impact of each of these forces. It estimates the impact on agricultural land area of each factor, showing how the extra cropland was used. Total land area devoted to arable crops rose by nearly 270 million hectares from 840 to about 1,110 million hectares.

Force at work Impact on global arable land area
   
Increase in population +682 million hectares
Increase in animal products in human diet +239 million hectares
Improved agricultural technology, including irrigation -654 million hectares
Net land extra land area devoted to arable crops +267 million hectares

 

We know that global population is likely to increase sharply between now and 2050. The paper assumes that the number rises by about 2bn to around 9bn. (Many people will regard this as improbable, seeing a figure of around 10bn as more likely.) If the rest of world ends up with US style dietary habits, expressed in terms of animal products consumption and overall calorie intake, but also is as good as the US is today at  producing food, then 9bn people of 2050 will need almost double today’s arable land area. If the global patterns are of Western European dietary and agricultural productivity, then the increase is about 70%.

The FAO says that arable land area can be increased by 5% from today’s levels without further loss of forest. The implication is therefore that the world is set on a collision course as rising prosperity meets insufficient land area to meet demand for animal products. The price of food will continue to rise sharply, probably pushing large numbers back into malnutrition. Or the world continues to cut down its forests, increasing carbon losses and also affecting local and regional rainfall patterns. Both routes are terrifying.

 


[1] Global changes in diets and the consequences for land requirements for food. Thomas Kastner et al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April 2012

GM cotton: an expensive mirage for Indian farmers

India first allowed the use of GM cotton seeds in 2002. Only ten years later, almost the country’s entire crop is grown using genetically engineered seed. This remarkably fast transition was driven by small farmers deciding that GM seed would improve profitability and reduce insecticide use. Scientists and agronomists initially agreed, producing evidence that the insertion of a natural insecticide (Bt or Bacillus Thuringiensis) into the genes of the plant was the best way of improving India’s historically low cotton yields per hectare. But the last few years have seen optimism fade rapidly as yields have stabilised or fallen and insect resistance has increased.  An Indian anti-GM pressure group produced research this week showing that Bt cotton productivity now appears to be falling. (1) As global population increases to about 10 billion in 2050, the world must find ways of increasing the productivity of the limited reserves of usable cropland. Little land is available for conversion from other uses so yields per cropped hectare must grow at close to the rate of population increase. In the past this has proved possible, partly as a result of improved agronomic techniques and hybrid seeds and partly from greater irrigation. Does genetic modification offer a means of continuing the increase as fresh water supplies become stretched? The evidence has been mixed across the world but the Indian experience with cotton is a powerful indication of the issues that can result from GM introduction.

Cotton cultivation in many countries requires huge inputs of pesticide to counter the threat of multiple pests that can reduce yields to virtually nothing. Monsanto’s GM cotton contains one or more genes that produce large concentrations of the natural Bt insecticide in the plant’s leaves. The purpose of the genetic change is to reduce the need for the farmer to spray expensive insecticides which can also severely affect human health.

India has often been touted as strong evidence for the success of Bt cotton, perhaps the country’s most important cash crop. The chart below shows why. Until the turn of the millennium, yields of cotton lint had stagnated at around 300 kilogrammes per hectare of cultivated land. Bt cotton was first officially planted in 2002, though black market seeds were probably in the soil a year earlier. National cotton yields then climbed sharply to levels well over 50% higher. At first sight, the coincident increase in GM plantings and yield increases seems strong evidence for the success of GM.

(Source: Cotton Advisory Board of India for yield figures, SAGE for percentage of GM plantings)

The Indian NGO group, Southern Action on Genetic Engineering (SAGE) points to the possible error in this conclusion. The large part of the yield jump occurred in the first two years after GM introduction. But by that stage only 6% of the cotton planted was Monsanto’s Bt variety. It couldn’t have been the introduction on GM on little more than one twentieth of the land that caused the national increase. Other factors must have played an important role.

The peak year for production per hectare was 2007/08 when yields hit 554 kg per hectare. At this time, 62% of plantings were GM. Since then, the yield has fallen in most years, and is forecast to be 481 kg per hectare in the period to September 2012. SAGE points out that although almost all cotton land in India is now GM, the average yield per hectare will be about the same this year as in 2007/08, when only 6% was planted with GM.

They conclude that GM isn’t helping cotton yields and they are now not alone in their argument. Other NGOs have joined in, railing at the government for encouraging the adaption of Bt cotton a decade ago. But despite the stagnant yields has GM helped in other ways, such as by decreasing the cost of insecticides? The SAGE report says that farmers are now spending 50% more on their agricultural inputs. The seed is more expensive and pesticide use has risen.

So what did cause the sharp rise in yields in the early part of the last decade if it was not the use of GM seeds? One candidate is the increased use of irrigation in Gujarat state. In 2001/02, Gujarat produced 20% of Indian cotton at a yield of 327 kg per hectare, barely above the national average. By 2011/12 projections are for Gujarat yields to be 660 kg per hectare, with the state accounting for 33% of national output. Irrigation seems to have had more impact than GM.

SAGE and other groups have identified several reasons for the apparent failure of GM cotton. First, the insects targeted by the Bt genes have already developed resistance in some parts of India. Other GM crops tagged with Bt genes, such as maize, have begun to see similar problems and so the adaptability of cotton pests should not be a surprise. Second, other pests have moved in to take over. Indian agronomists report increasing problems with pink bollworm, jassids and leaf curl. (As one commentator pointed out ‘in a contest between Monsanto and Darwin, Darwin will always win). Third, GM may have induced a short period of increased yield  but this came at the price of decreasing fertility as soil nutrients were drained by the faster growth. To remedy the deficiency farmers will need to increase the use of artificial fertilisers in the future.

We cannot rule out GM on the basis of a poor history for one crop in one country. But the evidence that GM can sustainably increase agricultural yields is still strikingly inconclusive.

(This is part of Chris Goodall’s forthcoming book, Sustainability: All That Matters, to be published by Hodder later this year).

Heathrow expansion: the lack of flights to Chinese cities is not a good argument

The owners of Heathrow want to expand the airport and have started another campaign to get a third runway built. (The impact on carbon emissions is calculated here.) Sensing that senior politicians are increasingly susceptible to their blandishments, BAA commissioned yet another piece of analysis to show expansion would help the UK’s economy. It takes about five minutes to demolish the arguments that they put forward. 1)      The UK needs more connections to emerging markets, China in particular. The lack of capacity at Heathrow is choking off UK exports because people cannot get to large Chinese cities.

Here’s a quote from BAA’s recent press release

Colin Matthews, CEO, BAA, said: “The centre of gravity in the world economy is shifting and we need to forge new links with emerging markets. Instead, we are edging towards a future cut off from some of the world’s most important markets, with Paris and Frankfurt already boasting more flights to the three largest cities in China than Heathrow, our only hub airport.

BAA has made great play of this point over the last year. First, a September 2011 report from Frontier Economics and now a similar document from Oxford Economics tell us that the UK connects to fewer cities in China than Frankfurt does. (Why BAA has to use two   consulting firms to make this point is unclear).

Look carefully below at the data that backs this assertion up, published by BAA itself. Yes, you can get directly from Frankfurt to Guangzhou and Shenyang as well as the cities to which London connects. But please also note that the yearly flights from Heathrow to Hong Kong are almost three times as frequent as the most connected other link (Shanghai –Paris).

Airlines operating into London have worked out where the demand lies and have voluntarily chosen to go to Hong Kong and not to other Chinese cities. It isn’t a shortage of capacity at Heathrow that is stopping connections to Chinese cities, it is a lack of potential passengers. Airlines have decided that it makes more commercial sense to fly to Hong Kong than to Shenzhen.

There are over five thousand flights a year from Heathrow to China compared to less than three and a half thousand from Frankfurt. Any one  of these flights could switch from Hong Kong to elsewhere but the airlines choose not to. To put at its simplest, it is not the lack of a third runway that stops the UK having connections to more Chinese cities.

City Population (millions) Connectivity (flights per year)
2007 2025 LHR AMS FRA CDG MAD
 Shanghai
15 19.4 621 589 1110 1323
 Beijing 11.1 14.5 698 658 1032 964 104
 Guangzhou 8.8 11.8 311 211 290
 Shenzhen 7.6 10.2
 Wuhan 7.2 9.3
 Tianjin 7.2 9.2
 Hong Kong 7.2 8.3 3,539 720 778 1145
 Chongqing 6.5 8.3
 Shenyang 4.8 6.2 364
 Dongguan 4.5 6.2

 

Source: Frontier Economics, http://www.frontier-economics.com/_library/publications/Connecting%20for%20growth.pdf. LHR = Heathrow, AMS Amsterdam, FRA Frankfurt, CDG Paris, MAD Madrid.

2)      The lack of connections is stunting economic activity because Heathrow is of reducing importance as a hub airport.

Air Malta flies twice a day from Heathrow to Valetta, the main city in Malta. Malta has about 0.4 million people, less than a thousandth of China and its GNP is commensurately small. Air Malta has access to these slots because of ‘grandfather’ rights acquired generations ago. In a rational world, Air Malta would be priced out of its Heathrow slots and would transfer to Stansted, which nobody says is full. But it sticks at Heathrow, blocking the flights that the airport wants to go to Rio or Dallas or Delhi. Yes, of course Heathrow is at bursting. It has been for decades. But the reason isn’t shortage of capacity but because of the ludicrously inefficient failure to auction takeoff slots leaving a number of operators such as Air Malta using up the most valuable landing rights in the world.

3)      More widely, lack of capacity is constraining business.

By ceaseless repetition, BAA hopes to convince us that business travel is growing and the constraints on Heathrow represent a major impediment to economic growth. It doesn’t tell us the uncomfortable fact that flying for business purposes is down about 25% since the turn of the century. UK residents made 8.9 million business trips abroad by air in 2000 and 6.6m  in 2010.[1] It is leisure travel that keeps airports busy, not harried business travellers. Business air travel is falling fast and will probably continue to do so.

4)      Tourism is affected by Heathrow’s shortage of space.

Maybe. But Heathrow isn’t a tourist airport. There’s no reason why visitors cannot comfortably fly into the other London airports. There is space elsewhere, not least because total passenger numbers are down over 10% since 2007. In Q4 2011, UK airports handled a total of 49.1 million passengers compared to 54.7 million in Q4 2007.

 

We expect commercial companies to argue their case and Heathrow’s operators have every reason to want to get more revenue from airlines flying out of the airport. The disturbing thing is that reputable economics consulting firms are prepared to act as highly paid lobbyists for businesses such as BAA. And, even more unfortunately governments haven’t the courage to contest the lamentably weak points made by these lobbyists.

Another series of misquotes from Bjorn Lomborg

Articles by Bjorn Lomborg usually include more than a grain of truth. They also contain a mass of gross inaccuracies and misstatements of what others say. His recent article on the economics of wind power is entirely typical. I have tried to locate the sources for each of his assertions in this piece, focusing on those points at which he used a figure or a range of numbers. I found that in only one paragraph was his source material correctly quoted: the paragraph on the Gordon Hughes paper for the Global Warming Policy Foundation. In all other cases, his statements were not an accurate representation of what the original author(s) said. In some cases the inaccuracies and misstatements were not important. But in others he substantially altered the meaning of the original author or misquoted the text.

There is an almost pathological problem with Lomborg's writing. He simply doesn't seem to care about accuracy in the use of data or  fair representation of quotations from sources. I have tried to briefly summarise his errors below. His text is in bold. Where I have extracted material directly from his source the words are in italics. My comments are in standard font.

  1. 1.       ‘Using the UK Electricity Generation Costs 2010 update and measuring in cost per produced kilowatt-hour, wind is still 20-200% more expensive than the cheapest fossil-fuel options. And even this is a significant underestimate.’

 Contrast this with a direct quote from the source that Lomborg says he has used ‘Onshore wind is the current least cost zero carbon option with a total cost of £94/MWh, which puts it between CCGT and coal. A modest real cost reduction over the next decade means that it is projected to undercut CCGT to be the least cost substantive renewable option.

Source: http://www.decc.gov.uk/assets/decc/statistics/projections/71-uk-electricity-generation-costs-update-.pdf

Bjorn Lomborg is not properly stating the current consensus on the costs of onshore wind in the UK. Sea-based or offshore wind is more expensive than gas or coal but land-based turbines are now only slightly more expensive that fossil fuels plants and the study to which Lomborg refers actually says that wind will become cheaper than (gas) CCGT power stations, usually regarded as the ‘cheapest fossil-fuel option’.

  1. 2.    ‘At the same time, people increasingly protest against the wind farms in their backyards. Local opposition has tripled over the past three years……’

Mr Lomborg’s conclusion mirrors the first sentence in a Guardian article. But the Guardian was mis-stating the results of its research. The percentage of people ‘strongly opposing’ the idea of a local windfarm has risen from 7% to 21%, but the number of people ‘tending to oppose’ has fallen from 9% to 6%, implying that the percentage opposed has risen from 16% to 27%.

Local opposition to onshore windfarms has tripled since 2010, a new Guardian poll reveals, following a series of political and media attacks on the renewable technology. However, a large majority of the British public (60%) remains firmly in favour of wind power, while also opposing the building of new nuclear or coal power plants in their local area. The poll shows that the national debate over wind energy is becoming sharply polarised, with the percentage of Britons strongly supporting the building of a new windfarm in their area going up by 5%, and the percentage strongly against rising by 14%.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/01/local-opposition-onshore-windfarms-tripled

  1. ……and local approval rates for new wind farms have sunk to an all-time low.

This is almost true. Planning permission rejections are on an increasing trend. But last year saw a small rise in the percentage of UK schemes approved from 49% to 54%.  (However measured by the amount of capacity, measured in megawatts, Lomborg is right) See Table 4 in

http://www.bwea.com/pdf/publications/SOI_2011.pdf

  1. 4.    ‘The UK Carbon Trust estimates that the cost of expanding wind turbines to 40 gigawatts, in order to provide 31% of electricity by 2020, could run as high as £75 billion ($120 billion). And the benefits, in terms of tackling global warming, would be measly: a reduction of just 86 megatons of CO2 per year for two decades.’

Only three mistakes here. One, the Carbon Trust report is only about *offshore* wind not about wind in general. Two, it deals with an estimated need of 29 GW of offshore wind, not 40. Three, 86 million tonnes a year (‘megatons’ in Lomborg’s language) is 17% of the UK’s entire CO2 output, an amount which cannot remotely be described as ‘measly’. (Additionally, the figure of 86 million tonnes a year does not actually appear to be included in the Carbon Trust report).

More important, the Carbon Trust’s report was designed to show how the high cost of offshore wind could be reduced . It says, for example,

The investment required to deliver 29GW of offshore wind can be reduced by 40% – from £75bn to £45bn.

 Source: http://www.carbontrust.co.uk/Publications/pages/PublicationDetail.aspx?id=CTC743

  1. 5.    ‘Whereas wind power, on average, supplies 5% of the UK’s electricity, its share fell to just 0.04% that day.’

Wind power currently supplies much less of the UK’s electricity than Lomborg states. In the very windy month of December 2011, it reached over 5% but typical figures are perhaps half this.

  1. 6.    ‘This is also why simple calculations based on costs per kWh are often grossly misleading, helping to make wind and other intermittent renewables appear to be cheaper than they are. This has been shown in recent reports by KPMG/Mercados and Civitas, an independent think tank.’

(I have removed brackets and a paragraph break).

The Mercados report was disowned by KPMG. Please see http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2012/03/not-the-kpmg-report-a-tale-of-two-consultancies for Carbon Brief’s analysis of the position.

The Civitas report was written by Ruth Lea and used figures produced by a single individual who used to work for National Grid. I wrote about the problems with Ruth Lea’s analysis here: http://www.carboncommentary.com/2012/01

  1. 7.    ‘Contrary to what many think, the cost of both onshore and offshore wind power has not been coming down. On the contrary, it has been going up over the past decade. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledged this in its most recent renewable-energy report.’

The IPCC actually says that wind power costs went up from 2004 to 2009 not that they has increased over the past decade. The rises from 2004to 2009 were largely driven by a mismatch between supply and demand as the rate of wind power installation increased sharply. Since 2009, costs have fallen sharply for the countervailing reason. Moreover, the IPCC report mentioned by Lomborg says that:

Recognizing that the starting year of the forecasts, the methodological approaches used, and the assumed deployment levels vary, these recent studies nonetheless support a range of levelized cost of energy reductions for onshore wind of 10 to 30% by 2020, and for offshore wind of 10 to 40% by 2020.

http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/IPCC_SRREN_Full_Report.pdf page 590

  1. ‘Likewise, the UK Energy Research Center laments that wind-power costs have “risen significantly since the mid-2000’s.’

The text from the ERC referred to is solely concerned with *offshore* wind, not onshore. The ERC does not say wind power costs have risen overall. The focus on offshore is clear from the title of the report:  ‘Great Expectations: the cost of offshore wind in UK waters – understanding the past and projecting the future’,

Moreover the report is optimistic about future trends in offshore costs, saying that the ‘deployment of offshore wind is more advanced than any other emerging low carbon option, and there is evidence to suggest that a plateau in costs may now have been reached. The report cautions that costs are likely to come down slowly at first, but that material reductions are available if the right incentives are in place’.

http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/support/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=613

  1. 9.    Like the EU, the UK has become enamored with the idea of reducing CO2 through wind technology. But most academic models show that the cheapest way to reduce CO2 by 20% in 2020 would be to switch from coal to cleaner natural gas. The average of the major energy models indicates that, downscaled for the UK, achieving the 20% target would imply a total cost of roughly £95 billion over the coming decade, and £18 billion every year after that.

This is the most damming part of Lomborg’s piece. In the first half he rails against the cost of wind energy, saying in extract 4 above that the cost could be ‘as high as £75 billion’ to achieve a 17% reduction in CO2 output. But in this extract he says that it would be cheaper to use gas power stations to cut CO2 by 20% even though the cost is ‘roughly £95 billion over the coming decade’ and much more thereafter. He doesn’t appear to recognise that his own sources suggest that wind is a highly cost effective means of meeting the UK’s obligations.

 

 

British Airways biofuel plans - wrong by a a factor of ten

The world’s airlines face a painful challenge; of all the main energy sources, aviation fuel is going to be the most difficult to replace with low carbon equivalents. As the number of flights increases in the industrialising world, it is not far-fetched to see aviation using up the entire global CO2 budget in 2050. Some of the more progressive airlines can see the clear need to experiment with making an equivalent liquid fuel made from biological sources. British Airways is to be congratulated for examining the feasibility of using a gasification process to create a kerosene-like fuel from domestic waste. Unfortunately its sums are wrong and the amount of energy available from municipal rubbish (garbage in US terminology) is only a few percent of what BA rcentlly claimed to The Guardian. According to Damian Carrington writing in his blog on the Guardian web site, the airline thinks that the UK produces about 200 million tonnes of waste that is usable for conversion into aviation fuel.[1] BA’s head of environment says that half a million tonnes of this rubbish used in its new gasification plant can produce about 50,000 tonnes of aviation fuel – a ratio of about ten to one. In addition to the liquid fuel, the new BA unit will generate about 33 megawatts of electricity.

These numbers aren’t right. The UK does produce about 200 million tonnes of waste a year, but only a small fraction of this is in the form of hydrocarbons that can be converted to energy-laden fuels. Very roughly, about half the waste is from construction and demolition sites. This is mostly used concrete and stone. Not even the world’s most advanced energy conversion technology can take an inert lump of concrete (composed largely of calcium, silicon and oxygen) and turn it into molecules of carbon and hydrogen.

To make a hydrocarbon fuel¸ BA needs waste material of containing the right chemical elements. Potential sources of liquid fuel include food waste, rubber, textiles, paper and other products containing carbon and hydrogen. This type of waste very largely arises from household collections and to a much lesser extent from garbage from restaurants and cardboard from shops. In the last financial year to April 2011, the UK’s households produced about 23.5 million tonnes of waste, not much more than 10% of the total national figure[2]. About 9.5 million tonnes of this was recycled, composted or reused, leaving about 14 million tonnes of true waste.

In addition to this, just under 4 million tonnes of other waste collections, not from households, were of animal or vegetable origin. (If it isn’t of this origin, it won’t contain usable amounts of carbon or hydrogen for fuel). So the absolute maximum amount of UK waste available to be converted into complex hydrocarbons for fuel is about 13.5 million tonnes. This number is tending to fall quite rapidly as households produce less waste each year and, second, this rubbish is increasingly recycled or reused. But even today’s maximum figure of 13.5 million tonnes is less than 7% of BA’s claims for the weight of available UK feedstock for its plant.

The second problem is the efficiency of conversion. The energy value of municipal waste is generally thought to be between 6 and 7 gigajoules per tonne. This is about a seventh of the value of aviation fuel. In other words, for every seven tonnes of waste, we can only conceivably get one tonne of aviation fuel. This is a law of physics; we cannot create energy. Moreover the process of changing waste into fuel must involve losses of energy – all energy conversion processes result in the production of low grade waste heat. The very best gasification technologies only capture 50% of the energy in the feedstock and the BA plant is probably much less. So the ratio of tonnes of waste in to tonnes of fuel out will be, at best, about fourteen to one and probably far worse. In other words, instead of the BA fuel production process producing 50,000 tonnes of aviation kerosene from half a million tonnes of rubbish, it can only possibly produce 30,000 tonnes. This is still a worthwhile amount, but significantly below what BA says.

These two adjustments – the actual amount of waste available and the lower efficiency of conversion – will reduce the possible yield from UK rubbish from 20 million tonnes to about 1 million tonnes of fuel. This lower figure is about 8% of the UK’s total use of aviation fuel. Moreover, we are reducing domestic waste every year and are getting systematically better at recycling. Recycling an object is almost always more efficient in energy terms than converting it into fuel. We therefore can’t discourage recycling just because BA needs feedstock for its waste plant. In a few years it is not inconceivable that the UK’s total amount of carbon-based waste falls to well 10 million tonnes. Concomitantly, the absolute maximum fuel output will fall to not much more than 5% of aviation needs.

These numbers should not be a surprise to us. The false promise of biofuels (such as aviation fuel from municipal waste or ethanol from corn) is that we will get low-carbon energy from a plentiful supply of biological material, whether it be waste or US corn crops. The promise always fails when it hit biological limits. Our needs for transport fuels are simply far too great - by between one and two orders of magnitude -ever to be met from organic sources such as waste or agricultural crops. We cannot both feed the world and power our airplanes with biofuels.

 

Community renewable energy

The previous post on this website has prompted a number of calls from communities wanting to build their own renewable energy installation similar to Eden’s employee project.  Alongside the not-for-profit electricity retailer Ebico, I am very interested in helping to get these projects completed. Together, we can provide help with the financial analysis of a proposal (is it viable? can it be financed?), writing of the business plan, approval of the investment document (alongside an FSA registered accountant) and assistance in marketing to investors. We have three key advantages.

  • we know about the electricity market
  • we understand renewable energy and its finances
  • and we are strongly commercial, wanting to get as much generating capacity installed as quickly and as cheaply as possible.

It may be worth writing down our view of the best way of getting projects completed

  • use an ordinary limited company. Cooperatives and other non-standard ventures work well but the cheapest and most effective structure will generally be a private limited company. They can be surprising flexible: for example, you can write the company documents in a way that will ensure that the shares stay in the hands of people within the community.
  • if you want outside money, it is always much easier to find it if you offer a commercial rate of return. Some people will invest in a venture because they approve of its objectives. Most people are financially pressed and want to get the most for their money.
  • go for simplicity at every opportunity. No complicated structures, avoid multiple objectives. A simple statement, such as ‘we want to build a wind turbine that provides enough power to meet the typical needs of our village and gives a good return to local investors’ is fine. Complex or contradictory objectives are always a problem, not least because they make investors scared. You can have strong social objectives but the business has to make reasonable money for its shareholders first.
  • planning permission is not always the problem that it seems to be. Local authorities will usually (but not always) be intensely sympathetic to projects that have high levels of community support. It’s worth spending time getting that support as early as possible.
  • all of us need to be paid for what we do, but costs can be held down at every turn. The financing of a community renewable energy installation needs to be done quickly, efficiently and using well-established routes.

If these views are similar to yours, and you want to build a wind turbine, a PV farm, an AD plant, a biomass heating system or a run-of-river hydro installation as part of a community, employee or other group, please do get in touch. We would love to help.

The UK’s first employee-owned renewable energy installation

A new 50 kilowatt PV array at the Eden Project has just become the UK’s first employee owned renewables installation. Ebico, the Witney-based social enterprise that is the UK’s only not-for-profit electricity supplier, lent money to a new company that put 200 panels on the roofs of some of Eden’s storage buildings. Employees are now able to buy shares in the new business and the proceeds of this unique offer will be used to pay back Ebico. Savers putting in as little as £200 each will share in the feed-in tariff income for the next 25 years. Returns are projected to be over 10% per year for small investors. Feed-in tariffs, particularly for solar PV,  have been attacked because they subsidise richer householders at the expense of the rest of the population. The aim at Eden has been to show that renewables can also be of financial benefit to people not able to afford to put PV on their own roofs. I helped structure this deal and wrote the document that offers the shares to employees.

The recent changes in the solar PV tariffs mean that installation such as the one at Eden are less attractive to small investors. Other technologies, such as wind and anaerobic digestion, are now much more appropriate for employee or community financing. The returns to investors can be at least as high as we project for savers buying shares in the PV array at Eden.

The aims of feed-in tariffs are to encourage smaller renewable energy installations, push down the cost of new low-carbon technologies and, third, to assist in the decentralisation of electricity supply. The solar PV tariffs worked extraordinarily well at building up an efficient and competitive base of installers and reducing the price of household installations by about 50% in the space of two years. Anybody wanting an array on the roof of their house in 2009 would have got a quote of about £5,000 per kilowatt. Today, that price can be below £2,500 for a larger installation. There is no doubt that the PV tariffs successfully met the first two of the three aims that the government had for the tariffs.

What about the third objective- the decentralisation of electricity supply? The evidence here is mixed. Although hundreds of thousands of household PV installations have taken place, the impact on the electricity supply of the UK has been of the order of 0.1%. Wind turbines owned by community companies must surely be the next step. One 500 kilowatt wind turbine, the sort of size that might sit  on a small hill at the edge of a town, can typically provide the same power output as three or four hundred domestic PV installations or twenty five times as much as the Eden array.[1]

The striking thing about community ownership of wind turbines is that local resistance disappears if people have a financial stake in their success. One wonderful Dutch study even showed that people ceased to hear the swishing noise of the blades if they had some ownership of the wind farm. Community ownership is the only way we are ever going to see the UK use its under-exploited resources of onshore wind. Today, the costs of the subsidies for renewable energy are borne by everybody but the benefits are largely flowing to the large electricity companies and richer householders. Larger scale community energy installations, such as the one at Eden, can achieve rapid growth of low carbon energy sources and also remove the regressive element in the feed-in tariffs.


[1] The 50 kW Eden array will deliver about 47,000 kilowatt hours a year, or just under 1,000 kilowatt hours per kilowatt capacity. A well sited wind turbine will deliver a ‘capacity factor’ of over twice as much.

Air Source Heat Pumps: more evidence of problems in cold weather

Air source heat pumps are a risky choice for householders trying to save money and CO2 emissions. This piece looks at the experience of one householder in the south of England who has kept detailed meter readings over the last few weeks. The findings are disturbing. The recent low temperatures (early February 2012) have shown that the costs of running a heat pump can be unacceptably high in cold weather. Anybody considering this new - and apparently eco-friendly technology – should be very wary indeed about their energy bills in deep winter. In fact, they should consider turning off the pump and going back to electric radiators when temperatures drop. The date in this article come from a home of about 90 sq metres (approximately 1000 sq ft), which is about 20% larger than the UK average dwelling. Because the house is detached, with a larger exposed wall area, energy bills are likely to be higher than a terraced house or a semi-detached of the same size.  But the householder has done substantial eco-renovation on the house, including filling the cavity wall and insulating the floors and loft. The windows are double-glazed. His final action was to install a new air source heat pump, put in place by specialists. He knew that a heat pump could only possibly be effective in a well-insulated house but he thought his work would mean that his family would benefit finacially from the new heating system. So far, this hasn't been the case

My rough calculations suggest that this well insulated house probably loses about 200 watts per degree of temperature difference between the inside and the outside. That is, if it’s 10 degrees outside and 20 inside, it will need a heating system that provides 2000 watts, or 2 kilowatts. The key question : is a heat pump a good way of providing this?

The big advantage of this relatively new technology is its potential ability to use relatively small amounts of electricity to create larger amounts of heat. (No – this doesn’t break the laws of thermodynamics, see here).  The effectiveness of using heat pumps to cut our energy bills depends crucially on how much heat you get out for every unit of electricity you put in. Manufacturers will usually quote ratios of three or four. This householder’s experience suggests that the real figure may be as low as 2 or below.

At that level it makes no sense in cash or carbon terms to use a heat pump. Even for homes with cheap rate meters (‘Economy 7’) for night electricity, the average 24 hour price of power is about 8.5p per kilowatt hour at the moment.  Mains gas - which isn’t available around the home whose electricity usage I am reporting here - is about 3.5p per kilowatt hour. In other words, a heat pump which converts one unit of electricity into only two units of heat costs more than 2 units of gas. The carbon dioxide emitted at the average power station to produce a unit of electricity is also over twice as much as the direct emissions from burning gas in a home boiler. If the figures at this home are typical, heat pumps don’t work well in the UK. (This is a strange finding – they really do work well in some other countries such as cold Sweden and nobody seems to be sure why things aren’t the same in the UK).

The failure of many air source heat pumps to save money in Britain must, I suspect, be down to poor expertise among installers. Heat pumps are fiddly to operate and require delicate adjustments. Unfortunately, until this problem is solved, no householder will be prepared to be the guinea pig for a technology that often seems to struggle in (relatively) cold weather. Some sources suggest that the problem arises because the pump ices up - but this doesn't explain why the same problem doesn't occur in colder countries

The numbers

We’ve had a wide range of external temperatures over the last couple of weeks. It started quite warm but the last few nights have been very cold by UK standards, with the thermometer dipping to as low as minus 7 degrees in the local area.  As the chill worsened, the efficiency of the heat pump dropped dramatically.

Dates of measurements Average amount of heating required over 24 hours* Estimated heating need for the house over 24 hours** Typical daily  electricity use*** Implied ratio of electricity input to heat output (‘coefficient of performance’)
Around 23rd January 10 degrees 50 kilowatt hours 25 kilowatt hours 2
Around 28th January 15 degrees 75 kilowatt hours 50 kilowatt hours 1.5
Around 3rd February 20 degrees 100 kilowatt hours 100 kilowatt hours 1

 

*The difference between the average external and internal temperatures

** The average heat loss from the house’s walls, windows, door, floors and roof per degree of temperature difference multiplied by the average temperature difference.

** The metered use of electricity over a typical 24 hour period

In the early part of this short study period, the electricity consumption figures were poor but not excessively so. The family was getting 10 degrees of heating of his house from the pump for about 25 kilowatt hours a day. This meant the ratio of heat output to power input was about 2, well below the level promised by the manufacturer but still nearly enough to justify using a heat pump. But as the thermometer fell, the bills went up. He was getting about 100 kilowatt hours of heat for each 100 kilowatt hours of electricity he used. This means that in cold weather the unlucky householder is spending eight or nine pounds a day on electricity (multiplied up, £250 a month) but, even more strikingly, he would be better off if he simply installed a few electric heaters in the main rooms. In fact, if I were advising him, I’d say he should turn off the pump whenever outside temperatures fall below about 7 degrees.

The householder has been worried about the performance of his expensive new heat pump since it was put in. He’s had the people who installed it round, as well as the main contractors for the insulation improvements, just  in case they could find out whether the house had major temperature leaks. His concerns seem warranted because his pump is costing far more than it should do. This story  is repeatedly heard across the UK – it’s now time to really find out why many of the heat pumps installed in houses come nowhere near achieving the benefits claimed by manufacturers.

A new way to store energy - liquid air

A venture capitalist idly glancing through business plans probably wouldn’t give an energy storage business a second glance. All the glamorous companies are focused on finding cheap ways of making low cost energy. Storage is down-market, and ever so slightly dull. This will to have to change. Without cheap, robust and very large scale electricity storage, electricity grids are going to find it very difficult to cope with the unpredictability of vastly greater supplies of electricity from wind, wave or sun. HIghview Power, a UK company that has operated in what private equity calls ‘stealth mode’ for several years, went public yesterday with an intriguing proposal for a new form of energy storage – air liquefaction. The energy commentators read the press release and politely yawned. Were they right?

The economics of this technology look interesting. What is even more compelling is that you could bolt together a large plant using conventional components freely available today from a variety of major suppliers. Unlike some of the really wacky suggestions for storing energy, we pretty much know that Highview’s ideas will work.  A 350 kW pilot plant alongside the Slough power station has been through extensive testing for the last six months or so.

So how does it operate? You take ambient air and put it through a liquefaction plant using electricity. (Hundreds of these plants around the world today make liquid nitrogen, oxygen or natural gas).  Liquefaction works by expanding a gas, which causes its pressure, and thus its temperature to fall. This technology is a hundred years old. The process uses substantial amounts of energy.

Allowing liquid air to expand increases its volume many hundred fold. This will produce high pressure in any sealed container. If the gaseous air is allowed to escape through a turbine, electricity can be generated. This second phase produces about 55% of the input energy, says Highview. This relatively low number can be improved to perhaps 70% by using waste heat from nearby  industrial processes, such as the hot water from the cooling processes in a nuclear or fossil fuel power station.

How does efficiency this compare? Here are some very rough figures for other means of storing electricity.

Pumped hydro 70% Water is pumped uphill to a reservoir. When electricity is needed it flows through turbines back into the lower reservoir
Lithium ion batteries 80% Lithium ion cells are used in electric cars and electronics. They are still expensive and have limited life
Compressed air 60% but perhaps more Spare electricity drives a compressor. The air is stored at high pressure in deep caves. When released it drives an air turbine.
Hydrogen 40% Electrolysis uses electricity to make H2 and O2 from water. Hydrogen in a fuel cell generates electricity.

(A previous article on Carbon Commentary assessed the economics of using stored hydrogen for electricity production).

The huge advantage of Highview’s plant, if it works as planned, is that each of the main alternative storage technologies have intrinsic problems. Hydrogen is inefficient and the equipment is expensive. Compressed air requires large amounts of storage. Lithium batteries are expensive and don’t like being discharged too often. (Other battery systems are less problematic but they have other disadvantages). Pumping water uphill is cheap and well-understood. There just aren’t many places where it can be done economically.

Highview quoted me a figure of £1,000 per kilowatt of output power. Let’s be clear about what this means. The Slough pilot plant can produce 350 kW of electricity. So the cost of a commercial plant would be about £350,000. (The cost of the pilot was much greater, of course). The Slough kit can deliver about 2.5 megawatt hours when fully charged. That is, it can work for seven or eight hours at full power. If it can be achieved, £1,000 per kilowatt of electric power is highly competitive with most other storage technologies, particularly since operating costs are so low.  A large pumped hydro plant would be comparable, but hydrogen could be four or five times as expensive.

Build an air liquefaction plant and expansion plant to Highview’s designs and what do you get? A megawatt plant would have a capital cost of a million pounds or so. To be cautious, we’ll assume £2m. This plant can be used in several different ways.

First, it can respond to short-term grid problems. Highview says it might take the plant a couple of minutes to start producing useful power to respond to a power station failure or grid problem. This isn’t quite fast enough for the real (but rare) emergencies when gigawatts suddenly disappear from the grid. But is good enough to help respond, for example, when wind farms start having to close because of excess wind speeds. The reverse situation, when National Grid has to pay wind operators to close down because of an excess of national electricity supply, can be addressed by Highview plants. They can also absorb surplus power while the generator close down other sources of supply.  National Grid pays for the small producers, such as the emergency diesel generators at hospitals and sewage farms to be available to produce electricity at less than half hour’s notice. The disadvantage is that these facilities can’t take in surplus power whereas Highview's plants can act like batteries, either taking in electricity or discharging.

Second, they can provide extremely useful ‘peak shaving’. Electricity demand varies throughout the day. Individual large customers pay both for their total usage of electricity and for the amount of capacity they are using at the times when the total UK demand is at its peak. Such a customer might invest in Highview’s system to reduce its annual capacity payments. Each time the real-time grid information indicated that a peak in electricity was being reached (usually at around 5pm in the winter), the air liquefaction plant would be switched to electricity production, minimising the peak demand of the user and hence reducing the payment for maximum capacity used. In countries such as South Africa, which have electricity grids that are sometimes unable to cope with peak demands, Highview technology could be particularly useful.

Third, the plants could use electricity when it is very cheap and sell it when it is expensive. Typically this means storing power at night and then discharging at the early evening peak. But remember that if the efficiency (input electricity versus output electricity) is only 55%, the price difference will have to be large to make this worthwhile.

What the plants cannot do - because they will never have enough capacity to work uninterruptedly for days - is to replace wind power at times when the turbines are stalled because of metrological conditions. We will always need to have gas turbines for these events. Nevertheless, air liquefaction looks to be potentially the cheapest and most robust way of adding the several gigawatts of energy storage capacity that the UK grid needs if it is to deal with the unpredictability of 10,000 offshore wind turbines. At present, I suspect the financial calculations won’t quite provide the incentive to make the investments necessary. But  the future electricity market will only work if there is a strong financial signal that encourages storage investments. It must happen eventually. Venture capital really should be interested.

 

 

Offshore wind warrants our support

Policy Exchange, a right-leaning think tank, has come out with a paper attacking the subsidies for offshore wind in the UK. Its reasoning is that offshore wind will always be too expensive and that the overseas market for British engineering is limited. Both of these assumptions are probably wrong. One credible source sees the cost of offshore wind falling to levels competitive with gas, albeit over several decades. And foreign interest in offshore wind is growing as the best onshore sites are completed. A Chinese study estimated the potential for exploitable wind power offshore is about 750 gigawatts, perhaps ten times the UK’s likely resource. Over the next few years China plans enormous investments in sea-based turbines. Similar opportunities are available in the US.

First, a couple of points as to why should the UK want to specialise in offshore wind. The country’s territorial waters are blessed with relatively high wind speeds compared to even the best onshore sites. The UK’s resources are about 40% of the total wind power available to Europe. Installation of turbines is difficult but the UK is well placed because of its expertise in putting oil and gas platforms safely in place in deep, rough water.

Early development of offshore farms has been expensive in the UK (and elsewhere) partly because of difficult construction conditions, a shortage of fixing vessels, limited competition between offshore turbine manufacturers and low levels of historical reliability of installed equipment. The push to develop larger and larger farms, usually with increasingly large individual turbines, should reduce capital and operating costs as operators get more experience. Perhaps as importantly, a large number of turbine manufacturers are in the process of introducing new models suitable for the rough UK conditions. The scope of steep reduction in costs is certainly present, a point denied by the Policy Exchange author Simon Less.

The engineering consultants Mott MacDonald provided an estimate for the recent Committee on Climate Change report on low carbon electricity. The consultancy gives the following prospective figures for 2040. Gas with carbon capture (CCS) is probably the least costly way of generating  electricity from fossil fuels without adding significantly to CO2 concentrations.

Offshore wind – £60-£96 per MWh Gas with CCS – £95-£104 per MWh

(Numbers on pages 7-9 and 7-10 of http://hmccc.s3.amazonaws.com/Renewables%20Review/MML%20final%20report%20for%20CCC%209%20may%202011.pdf

But you might well ask whether any technology that takes thirty years to get to cost competitiveness is worth backing to that point. The answer is that a large number of expensive wind farms will have been put in place before the experience gained reduces the cost to reasonable levels. (For information, the current wholesale price of winter electricity is about £60 per megawatt hour). Yes, it might take about £100bn to get to the Mott Macdonald 2040 figure but the issue we face is that no technology –other than onshore wind - is likely to be much better. And getting tens of thousands of onshore turbines across all the UK's western coasts is not looking politically feasible.

The Policy Exchange recommendation seems to be that we should spent a lot more on basic research in low carbon technologies.  However the arguments why this would achieve faster and cheaper results than a hard-nosed push for cheaper offshore wind through heavy subsidy of early turbine parks are simply not made in the think tank’s paper.

The more obvious error is to assume that no other countries are particularly interested in offshore wind.  Having opened its first intertidal wind farm just three weeks ago, China says it wants 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2020. The exploitable resources of 750 gigawatts compares to the 30-35 that the UK has plans to develop in the next decade or so.  That’s right, China alone sees a market twenty times the size of the UK.

Recent semi-official suggestions are that the cost of the Chinese intertidal farm will run at about £80 a MWh are probably highly optimistic, but show what might be achieved elsewhere in shallow waters.

The US has a similar sense of the value of offshore wind resources, with a figure of just over 1,000 gigawatts being seen as possible at sites with wind speed of more than 7 metres a second average wind speed and in water less than 30 metres deep. Total potential resource might be four times as much, approximately enough to power the whole US at capacity factors of 30%. (It should be admitted that progress in actually building the wind farms off the US coast has been lamentably slow and dogged by controversy. An excellent site off Cape Cod has been blocked by powerful local residents for years).

In Europe, the UK leads in offshore wind but other countries continue to invest in new turbines. 235 wind turbines were installed in European waters in 2011, averaging over 3 megawatts each. Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Finland all now have offshore wind farms. The German decision to abandon nuclear virtually obliges it to focus on Baltic wind farms as the most significant source of low carbon electricity over the next ten years. The European Environment Agency says total EU installed offshore wind will rise 17 fold by 2020.

The list of other countries beginning to develop wind grows by the month. S Korea has just announced its first major play, a 2.5 gigawatt farm off the south-western coast. Canada has recently announced firm plans for a pathbreaking development off Ontario.

The UK’s enviably rich offshore resources and its leading world position in the development of complex wind projects miles from a coast give the country a major set of potential advantages in exporting construction and engineering skills around the world. The relentless negativity about wind from an intelligent think-tank is disappointing.

Is wind power economic? It very much depends on your point of view.

Ruth Lea contends that onshore wind is ‘quite uneconomic’ in her report for Civitas. She says that although the direct cost of onshore wind is close to that of fossil fuel sources, this comparison excludes the impact of integrating renewables into the electricity grid. When these costs are added, she contends, wind becomes wholly uncompetitive. This assertion is entirely based on the work of Colin Gibson, a former National Grid engineer, who has made some informal estimates of the cost of integrating wind power into the electricity networks. He suggests that these costs are about £60 a megawatt hour, adding perhaps 70% to the cost of electricity from wind turbines. Ms Lea fails to mention that many, many other analysts and engineers have also estimated the extra costs of adding large volumes of wind power to the electricity system. In this note I suggest that these alternative sources support a view that Mr Gibson’s estimates are wrong by about a factor of four, meaning that Ms Lea’s contention that wind is a very expensive technology is based on shaky foundations.

The task of estimating the relative costs of electricity generating technologies is complex. The result depends critically on the assumptions we make about the cost of investment capital, the amount of bank debt that can be used, how long the generating plant takes to build, the cost of fossil fuels and a host of many other variables. The final numbers, usually expressed as pounds per megawatt hour of electricity produced are, at best, approximations.

Ms Lea uses as her source the figures produced by Mott McDonald, an engineering firm, in 2010. She should probably have the used the more tentative and up-to-date figures generated by Mott McDonald for the Committee on Climate Change in 2011. The 2011 numbers give ranges of estimates for the direct costs of all the main technologies, for both today and in the future. These figures suggest that onshore wind power is broadly competitive with nuclear power. Offshore wind is currently much more expensive but advances in technology are projected to make it competitive over the next few decades. Mott McDonald, whether in 2010 or in 2011, certainly doesn’t see direct costs of wind power as ‘quite uneconomic’ and, to be fair, neither does Ruth Lea.

Wind power is more costly to integrate into the grid than conventional power stations. There are three major types of extra charges and these incremental costs are not included in the Mott McDonald figures.

  • The impact of having to have spare capacity on hand to react to unexpected changes in the outputs of UK wind farms. (Even if the electricity network were entirely powered by large nuclear plants, the UK would still need this spare capacity, ready to ramp up to full power, because of the risk of a station ‘tripping’ and its power not being available to the National Grid. Wind farms are actually less risky than a single nuclear power plant)
  • The cost of having to construct power stations that are used only when the wind is not blowing.
  • Charges arising from having to construct new distribution lines to connect wind farms, often in remote locations or offshore, to the National Grid.

Mr Gibson’s work, on which Ruth Lea entirely relies, suggests that the cost of these extra measures is about £60 per megawatt hour.

Table 1

Spare capacity £16
Power stations sitting idle £24
Improvements to the grid £20
TOTAL £60 per megawatt hour

Other sources give very different figures for the unseen costs of wind generated electricity. From the many available, I have used two reports produced by consulting engineers and by electricity network specialists. As far as I can see the numbers in these reports are representative of the consensus view of wind integration costs.

I don’t claim that these numbers are right, but I do think that Ms Lea should have given reasons why this recent work is less appropriate to use than the rough estimates of a single individual, however competent.

Table 2

Spare capacity £5.3 (1)
Power stations sitting idle £1.91 (2)
Improvements to the grid £7 (3)
TOTAL About £14 per megawatt hour

 

(1)    Sinclair Knight Merz, Growth Scenarios for UK Renewables Generation and Implications for Future Developments and Operation of Electricity Networks, June 2008. (A report for BERR, now the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.) Page 90

(2)    Sinclair Knight Merz, Growth Scenarios for UK Renewables Generation and Implications for Future Developments and Operation of Electricity Networks, June 2008. (A report for BERR, now the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.) Page 91

(3)    Energy Networks Strategy Group, Our Electricity Transmission Network: A Vision for 2020, March 2009. This report estimates the gross cost of new transmission infrastructure to cope with dramatically increased renewables generation at £4.7bn. I turned this into a cost per megawatt hour using the calculator in Mr Gibson’s spreadsheet, thus ensuring reasonable comparability with the figure used in Ruth Lea’s paper.

 

The implication of the far lower costs in Table 2 is that we should add about 15-20% to the direct costs of wind power to properly account for the impacts of this source of electricity on the costs of the network as a whole, not 70%. This leaves wind as an entirely economic and carbon-saving technology. Did Ms Lea, a noted climate change sceptic,  use Colin Gibson's very high figures because of her dislike for the renewables policy of the UK government?

If the UK Grid can cope with today's weather, it can probably cope with everything

If the unreliability of wind power really is a problem we would have seen the evidence today (3rd January 2012). Extremely strong westerly winds were predicted to deliver about 3.5 GW of electricity from turbines during most of the last twenty four hours, over 80% of the maximum capacity from the UK’s wind farms. But as has been the case several times over the last six weeks, many of the arrays stopped as excessively high wind speeds triggered automatic shut downs. At five in the morning, Britain’s wind farms were delivering about 2.5 GW, just under 10% of total electricity need and the number was expected to go higher. The opposite happened. After five hours of steep decline as a result of unplanned closures, wind turbines managed a little over 1.0 GW, no more than about 40% of what was forecast yesterday, leaving a shortfall of about 6% of electricity supply. Did the Grid suffer? Did we come close to having the lights go out? No. As the unexpected shortage of electricity became apparent, the price for immediate delivery of power rose from about £30 a MWh to £90 and unused power stations willingly revved up to meet the extra demand.

The crucial indicator of whether the Grid was under stress barely moved: the frequency of electricity supply remained close to 50 Hertz. An unexpected loss of large amounts of power will usually result in a fall in the frequency of Grid electricity but a close look at the numbers every few seconds from 5 to 10 am shows no obvious perturbation. Grid frequency stuck to about 50 Hertz for the entire period. The electricity supply system settled down with first gas fired power stations and then coal plants from 8 o’clock meeting the unexpected gap in supply.

By ten o’clock in the morning, things had settled down. Then the next unplanned event happened. Some of the wind farms started coming back online. The amount of power generated by wind rose almost as fast as it had fallen earlier in the day. By four in the afternoon the electricity from turbines was back at nearly the same level as five in the morning. Once again, Grid stability was unchallenged. Spot prices spiked up and down as operators adjusted to the new supply but the key indicator, Grid frequency, was unaffected.

Now, at 10.30 in the evening, wind is providing about 7% of the UK’s total needs. During the last day, the country’s 3,000 turbines have averaged about 5.5% of all power. However this number has varied by a factor of three during the day, and not in any way that was remotely predictable even 24 hours ago. The average cost of electricity has probably been relatively high as spare power stations have been fired up and down to meet swings in demand but I would guess there hasn’t been a single moment of real anxiety anywhere across the UK generation and supply industry.

What continues to amaze me is that people who scorn the value of wind energy are often also the most fervent believers in free markets and their apparently magical power to match supply and demand. The UK’s electricity market is far from perfect, but it is quite robust enough to handle a near hurricane, followed by unexpected falls in wind speed. What further demonstrations that wind turbines are effective providers of electricity could possibly be required? Today’s weather might have been more of a problem had the UK had 30,000 wind turbines rather than 3,000 but as of early 2012 the freely functioning electricity market is coping very well indeed with intermittency.

The Energy Company Obligation: a pittance that will worsen the finances of the most poor

  A press release today (January 3rd 2011) from the Department of Energy and Climate Change makes the following assertion as part of the Department's response to a campaign on child poverty.[1]

‘we’re also focusing on the causes of fuel poverty – in particular poor household energy efficiency. There’s free and cheap insulation available to low income households now from energy suppliers and the Warm Front scheme, and this will be also be a core feature of the new Green Deal from the end of the year.’

This statement isn’t true. The Green Deal proposals do not have ‘free and cheap insulation’ as a ‘core feature’. The Green Deal is a mechanism for allowing householders to improve the energy performance of their homes and pay back the cost slowly using a loan from electricity companies. Helping get people out of fuel poverty – one of the most important challenges facing the UK – is nothing to do with the Green Deal.

However DECC would be right to say that the alleviation of fuel poverty is indeed a feature of the proposed Energy Company Obligation (ECO) to be introduced in the spring of next year. This mechanism will force the energy companies to spend about £1.3bn a year for the next ten years on subsidising home energy improvements. But only about 25% of this amount, or something around £375m a year, will go towards those with the lowest incomes and greatest risk of fuel poverty.

This may sound a lot. Unfortunately it isn’t. Compare it with today’s position: the government obliges the energy companies to disburse £2.4bn a year through the CERT programme. Rising prices mean that the proposed £1.3bn will achieve less than half of the old figure. Of that £2.4bn, about 40% is spent on vulnerable homeowners, or about three times what will spent under the future ECO plan for helping the fuel poor.

Separately, the government also provides funds today for the Warm Front home insulation scheme. Even after the public expenditure cuts of 2010, Warm Front disburses £100m a year to the most needy for home improvements. This help will cease entirely at the end of the year. Despite what DECC asserts, the only scheme left for directly helping the less well-off improve their homes will be ECO, and it will be a shadow of existing schemes. However one looks at it, the government is reducing its efforts to cut fuel poverty.

The small scale of the new plan can be gauged by comparing the 5 million or so UK homes classed as in fuel poverty and spending 10% or more of their income on energy, with the size of ECO support for home improvements for vulnerable homes. The ECO scheme will be spending the equivalent of about £75 a year per fuel poor household on energy efficiency improvement. ECO is only expected to remove about 450,000 homes from fuel poverty by 2022m, or less than 10% of those classified as in this position. That’s it: a one percent reduction in fuel poverty per year, even under the Department’s own estimates.

It gets worse. On average, the poorest ten per cent of households will actually see a greater proportion of their income being spent on energy in 2020 than today as a result of the government’s new scheme. The Green Deal and ECO are highly regressive, with the bottom decile, excluding those small numbers who get help from ECO, spending a greater fraction of their cash on energy than if the Green Deal and ECO did not exist.  By contrast the top half of the income distribution is expected to see virtually no change.[2]  So even under the government’s own figures, ECO is expected to take more from the poor than it gives back in free or subsidised energy efficiency benefits.

I apologise for writing again about DECC’s Green Deal and ECO plans. I do so because these proposals will both substantially reduce the rate of home energy improvement and redistribute cash from the poor to the rich. DECC must be pushed back from these regressive policies.


[1] Save The Children’s ‘No Child Left in the Cold’.

[2] Please see Figure 27 on page 88 of DECC’s own Impact Assessment.