Ashden Awards

The Met Office is going to be publishing its detailed projections for the impacts of climate change on the UK today – in unprecedented geographical detail. It’s not going to be pleasant reading.

So I’ve been cheering myself up by reminding myself, all over again, of the power of positive thinking. Just a week ago, the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy held their annual bash at the Royal Geographical Society, with the Prince of Wales handing out the Awards and giving a stirring speech.

For me, this event is one of the highlights of the annual calendar – it’s just incredibly uplifting to hear about the kind of cutting-edge success going on around the world from the people who are actually making it all happen.

In the context of climate change in the UK, I just want to highlight two of the 2009 winners. First is Kirklees Metropolitan Borough Council – one of the unsung heroes of local government who have been doing their "sustainability bit" for the last 20 years. But their current home insulation initiative has really made people sit up and listen as it has succeeded in achieving real scale – where so many of the current measures are just picking around at the edges. Here’s what the Award citation said:

"In 2007, Kirklees Council committed £10 million to providing free loft and cavity-wall insulation for every home in the borough where it can be used. The scheme targets one council ward at a time, using the local Councillor and local advertising, then individual home visits by assessors. By May 2009, 66,000 out of the 172,000 households in the borough had been assessed, 54,000 referred for surveys, 26,000 surveys had been completed, and 21,000 had insulation installed. This avoids an estimated 18,000 tonnes a year of CO2. 140 jobs have been created by the scheme."

In my view, every Local Authority in the country is going to have to introduce schemes along those lines over the next couple of years. That’s the consequence of the ambitious targets that have now been adopted through the Climate Change Act.

But, for many, "seeing is still believing", and there are lots of people who are not yet persuaded that doing full-on home insulation actually makes much difference. And that’s where the Sustainable Energy Academy comes in – by persuading those who’ve already done it to demonstrate how they did it to those who’d like to do it.

"The Sustainable Energy Academy has set up a network of homes, mostly built before 1919, whose owners have installed measures to reduce carbon emissions by 60% or more. Measures include roof, cavity-wall, solid-wall and under-floor insulation; triple-glazed windows; draughtproofing; heat-recovery ventilation; solar and biomass heating; efficient lighting; and solar electric supply. The SEA provides training and support to enable owners to open their homes to the public, providing real demonstrations of how to achieve significant carbon savings. To date, 25 homes belong to the network, and over 36,000 people have visited them. SEA wants to increase the network to 200 homes across the UK so that people can easily visit one."

Kirklees Council
Phil Webber
Kirklees Council
Civic Centre 3
Market Street
Huddersfield
HD1 1WG
www.kirklees.gov.uk/warmzone
phil.webber@kirklees.gov.uk
01484 223568

Sustainable Energy Academy
John Doggart
National Energy Centre
Davy Ave
Milton Keynes
MK5 8NG
www.sustainable-energyacademy.org.uk
john.doggart@s-ea.org.uk
020 7431 9314

By the way, the International Awards are equally, if not more inspiring. Check it all out on the Ashden Awards website

Posted on June 18, 2009 2:22 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Nuclear comes clean

The Cheltenham Science Festival is now in full swing, and on Wednesday I went along to listen to Jeremy Leggett of Solar Century. Great talk.

However, we didn’t get the full value of Jeremy’s insights, as the festival organisers had stuck him on a panel with four other people, one each for nuclear, coal, wind and Energy from Waste industries. The last two did well (yes, there really is a good sustainability case for the kind of Energy from Waste technologies), but our friends from the coal and nuclear industries were just dreadful. They'd clearly been sent on media training courses, which produced a weird amalgam of the patronising, the banal and the downright dishonest.

But at least we know where we are these days. Not so long ago, the nuclear industry would disdainfully acknowledge that there was a role for renewables alongside nuclear. Not a big role, but at least something to add to the overall supply picture. In the last few months, however, they’ve decided to move into full battle mode, on a "them or us" basis. As Jeremy puts it:

"Those reluctant to abandon the nuclear and fossil-fuel status-quo have been reacting to all this with a fresh candour. In March, both EDF and EON advised the UK Government to cut back on renewables in favour of nuclear. The energy giants declared efforts to get 35% renewables into the UK’s electricity mix – as the Government intends – to be not only unrealistic, but damaging to nuclear plans. They said additional carbon-generating plants would be needed because of the intermittency of renewables."

I’m sorry, but this is truly pathetic. Little more a year ago, these nuclear zealots were telling the world (including any prospective investors who would listen) that any new nuclear in the UK would require zero public subsidies. Hardened anti-nuclear campaigners such as myself and Jeremy fell about laughing – not one kilowatt-hour of nuclear-generated electricity has ever gone onto the grid, anywhere in the world, over forty years, without some kind of public subsidy. So why does anybody suppose that it’s going to be any different this time round?

At least the big energy companies have now had the decency to come out and tell us at least part of the truth about their nuclear ambitions.

Posted on June 5, 2009 9:33 AM | | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Good times, bad times

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m finding it mighty difficult trying to work out whether these are good times or bad times for the renewable energy sector here in the UK.

On the one hand, all the ‘big boys’ (Shell, BP, Scottish and Southern, and so on) have more or less given up and exited the country, and Vestas (the UK’s largest wind manufacturer) sent shockwaves round the markets last week by announcing that it was going to be closing its factory on the Isle of Wight.

On the other hand, the British Wind Energy Association is full of confidence at the prospects for industry (particularly offshore wind), and not just for ‘big wind’. Its latest press release trumpets the conclusions of a new study from America demonstrating major growth in demand for small wind technologies (less than 50 KW). By all accounts, the UK is the world’s biggest exporter of wind turbines in this division, doubling its revenues in 2008 and creating 500 new jobs in the process.

The recent Budget must have strengthened the hand of the renewables optimist, with an additional £500 million for offshore wind to be made available between 2011 and 2014, and £70 million to revive the Low Carbon Buildings Programme and provide new support for community heating schemes.

That particular announcement must also have been very welcome to the UK photovoltaics (PV) industry. Back in March, DECC (the Department of Energy and Climate Change) went temporarily bonkers by axing funding for its solar PV programme – ostensibly on the grounds that it was proving “too popular”, depriving other technologies in the programme of their anticipated share of support.

This is the kind of stop-start idiocy that has characterised the UK’s support for renewables (and PV in particular) going back over many, many years. Some have hypothesized during that time that this is all the proof you need of genuine conspiracy, not cock-up, engineered by a succession of senior civil servants in thrall to the fossil fuel and nuclear lobbies. I, of course, couldn’t possibly comment on such scurrilous hypothesizing, but the intensity and frequency of the cock-ups do rather play into the hands of the conspiracy theorists.

Perhaps that’s now all over? DECC has guaranteed a proper level of ongoing funding for PV, with “no more stop and start”. We’ll see.

In the meantime, if I was an investor, I’d still be very wary. Incoherence in public policy plays straight into scepticism and ambivalence in capital markets. And that’s exactly the problem we still have here in the UK, on both the big stuff and microgeneration.

Posted on May 5, 2009 3:59 PM | | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

UK is right to trial carbon capture

Whatever you may feel about Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), at least we now know where we are here in the UK. Ed Miliband’s statement to Parliament yesterday announced three things:

1. that the Government has signalled its support for up to four
demonstration plants, of up to 300 Mega Watts each, at about a billion pounds each;

2. that these will be paid for via a levy on our energy bills, amounting to around 2% on the average bill;

3. that, assuming the technology is demonstrated to work, CCS would
have to be retrofitted to any coal-powered power station approved from this moment on. This would be mandatory.

As the Energy and Climate Change Secretary put it, “the era of new, unabated coal has come to an end”.

After years of dickering around, coming up with one half-baked proposal after another, to the growing fury of those companies most closely involved, the Government has now nailed its CCS colours (or most of them) to the mast.

That won’t reassure those who hate the very idea of CCS any more than the dickering around did. And their arguments are strong: these are not completely proven technologies; it’s a very costly way of abating CO2 in comparison to investment in both energy efficiency and renewables; it’s a very energy-intensive process; there are many unresolved liability issues, and so on.

They’re largely right – but still wrong, despite that, to oppose the full-scale trialling of CCS to see what the real strengths and weaknesses are in practice. The reality is that the implications of having to get to an 80% cut in greenhouse gases by 2050 are unforgiving. Globally, countries like China, India and even the US (with very high dependence on very large coal reserves) just can’t do what they have to do without CCS, and CCS could be making a big difference in that respect just ten years or so from today - far quicker than nuclear power.

That doesn’t necessarily make it right for the UK, but it does make it a big potential market for UK engineering.

I can’t say I feel much enthusiasm for CCS. Its arrival will be testament to humankind’s utter folly in ignoring the build-up of greenhouse gases over the last twenty years, and a signal of desperate policy measures still to come. The imminent climate crisis means that there are a lot of things we’re going to have to do that we won’t be very keen on. Which makes it right for Ed Miliband to get this particular ball rolling.

Click here for the full statement.

Posted on April 24, 2009 12:10 PM | | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

The budget - green vs sustainable

There’s a world of difference between a “Green Budget” and a “Budget for Sustainability”.

On the “green front”, it could have been a lot worse, but it could have been better too. (See yesterday’s press release from the Sustainable Development Commission below). Not exactly the mega-recovery package that has been called for but not insignificant either: £525 million for offshore wind; £435 million for additional energy efficiency measures; £405 million for green technologies; encouragement for CHP; and new support for carbon capture and storage – with more details on this coming from Ed Miliband today. And all of that backed up by the new Carbon Budget – with a target of a 34% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020.

The papers today have good coverage of this. On the broader sustainability front, however, there’s been much less coverage. But both the new 50p rate of income tax and the projected levels of debt have highly significant sustainability implications.

Fairer taxes (I would argue) are a critical part of any sustainable economy. All the evidence shows that more equitable societies (i.e. with lower levels of income disparities) are more contented societies. The data on this has been compellingly brought together in a new book called “The Spirit Level”, which makes the case that almost all the worst socio-economic problems in society today can be traced back to chronic poverty. So, being very obvious about it, better-off people should pay higher taxes – and that’s as much a part of a sustainable society as very low carbon.

On the debt front, the bottom line couldn’t be clearer. We have indeed been living way beyond our means; levels of public debts are going to have to rise dramatically to bail us out of that mess; it will take many, many years before our public finances are back in balance – and the pain of that will be spread over the next generation of tax payers as well as this one.

Not good from the perspective of intergenerational justice that lies at the heart of the concept of sustainable development.


Sustainable Development Commission PRESS RELEASE:

BUDGET FOCUS ON LOW CARBON TECHNOLOGY AND ENERGY EFFICIENCY TO BE WELCOMED – BUT MUST BE PART OF LONG-TERM STRATEGY

The Sustainable Development Commission welcomed the Budget announcement of £495million of additional funding for low carbon technologies and energy efficiency over the next two years, and called for this to be part of a committed, long-term strategy to facilitate the transition to a low-carbon economy.
But the Commission questioned the announcement of a £2,000 discount on new cars for motorists scrapping cars over 10 years old, arguing that under such a scheme, the cost per tonne of CO2 saved is very high. It also criticised the fact that no emissions requirements are attached to new vehicles.
Jonathon Porritt, Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, said:
“The transition to a low-carbon economy is the most urgent challenge facing the government – both economically and environmentally; and achieving this calls for a long-term commitment. While we welcome the investment announced in today’s Budget, this spending ceases two years from now, and its scale not going to put us on track to achieving the extremely ambitious targets of the Climate Change Act and its associated carbon budgets.”
The scale of green spending announced today falls far short of the £30bn a year for the next three years called for by the Sustainable Development Commission in its recent Sustainable New Deal. The report argued that only a commitment on this scale can ensure a globally-competitive, low carbon future for the UK. It argued that more than 50% of such a package would generate significant financial returns within two to three years, and could create at least 800,000 jobs.
Jonathon Porritt said:
“An investment strategy of the kind we have called for would create appropriate incentives for both the private and public sector, and would demonstrate the kind of unequivocal leadership that UK citizens are now ready for.”

Posted on April 23, 2009 12:37 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Transport and the budget

I skimmed the newspapers this morning to pick up on any unexpected ‘green vibes’ around the Budget. Every indication is that there isn’t going to be any big “New Deal” brought forward, as part of a larger recovery package, although lots of ‘green lollypops’ will no doubt be there in the shop window.

And almost certainly a number of them will cover transport. A £5,000 subsidy for purchasers of electric cars has been widely flagged plus a few tens of millions to subsidise charging points. Hopefully, we’ll also see some details around the Government’s earlier commitment to promote electric vehicles through the Low Carbon Vehicles Procurement programme.

On the whole, this would be a good thing. The Committee on Climate Change has been very clear in its advice to government that the wholesale electrification of transport (apart from aviation!) is a precondition of meeting our long term targets on CO2 and other greenhouse gases. A lot depends on where that electricity will come from, but its good to see at least one little government toe in the water.

And then there’s the whole debate about a possible scrappage scheme – with motorists getting up to £2000 to hand in their old cars and buy new ones. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders has been lobbying ferociously to get this through, simply as a support mechanism for hard-pressed car companies. (Car sales in March were down 30% on last year). They argue it has worked in January in terms of new car sales, so why shouldn’t it work here?

It might. But there will be zero sustainability benefits arising from such a scheme even if it does. Even if people buy slightly ‘greener’ models, there will still be very high emissions arising because of all the CO2 embedded in the manufacture of those cars. So the cost per tonne per CO2 saved is very high.

Environmentalists have argued that a much better use of taxpayer’s money would be for the Government to support the establishment of low-carbon car clubs – reducing congestion, reducing emissions, and reducing costs for those motorists smart enough to realise they can get almost all the benefits they want from the use of a car, without the hassle of actually owning one.

All of this will be a big test of Darling’s “seriousness of intent”, helping move transport policy just a little bit further down the road to its inevitable low-carbon destination.

Posted on April 22, 2009 1:44 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)