Micro generation - Real green energy

Ministers could avoid building nuclear reactors by encouraging families to fit solar panels and other renewable energy equipment to their homes, a startling official report concludes.

The government-backed report, to be published tomorrow, says that, with changed policies, the number of British homes producing their own clean energy could multiply to one million – about one in every three – within 12 years.

These would produce enough power to replace five large nuclear power stations, tellingly at about the same time as the first of the much-touted new generation of reactors is likely to come on stream.

And, it adds, by 2030, such “microgeneration” would save the same amount of emissions of carbon dioxide – the main cause of global warming – as taking all Britain’s lorries and buses off the road.

The conclusions of the report – approved and partly financed by the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR) – sharply contrast with initiatives hurriedly launched by Gordon Brown last week in reaction to the lorry drivers’ fuel-price protests.

In his most pro-nuclear announcement to date, the Prime Minister indicated that he wanted greatly to increase the number of atomic power stations to be built in Britain. And he met oil executives in Scotland to urge them to pump more of the black gold from the North Sea’s fast-declining fields – even though his own energy minister, Malcolm Wicks, admitted that this would do nothing to reduce the price of fuel.

Even more embarrassingly for the embattled Mr Brown, the report closely mirrors policies announced by the Conservative Party six months ago to start “a decentralised energy revolution” by “enabling every small business, every local school, every local hospital, and every household in the country to generate electricity”.

Yesterday Peter Ainsworth, the shadow Environment Secretary, said: “We have found that there are huge economic, social and environmental gains to be made by doing this. It is good that, at last, part of the Government seems belatedly to be coming to the same conclusion, and we can only hope that the Prime Minister can rise above his panic-stricken clutching at old technologies and grasp the opportunities microgeneration offers for clean and more secure energy supplies.”

The 130-page report, due to be launched by Mr Wicks, has been produced by a consultancy, Element Energy, after a wide-ranging survey of public attitudes on installing household renewable energy systems. It has been financed, and steered by, 14 official and other bodies including DBERR, the official Energy Savings Trust, five regional development agencies, British Gas, the Micropower Council and the Ashden Trust.

The department’s approval marks something of a revolution in itself, since its predecessor, the Department of Trade and Industry, was for decades hostile to renewable energy and microgeneration. Its mandarins hated the thought of allowing millions of ordinary people to affect energy supplies by generating their own heat and power.

As a result, Britain is almost bottom of the European league for exploiting renewables – above only Luxembourg and Malta – despite having the best resources in the entire continent. Though ministers claim their efforts have been “highly successful” in boosting these clean sources of energy, they now account for only about 4 per cent of electricity – compared, for example, with 14 per cent in Germany.

Ministers also boast that 100,000 British homes now have microgeneration, mainly solar thermal panels that heat water – but in Germany they adorn more than a million roofs.

Last year just 270 solar photovoltaic panels, which produce electricity, were put on Britain’s homes, compared with 130,000 in Germany. At this rate, David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation told MPs last month, it would take the UK 1,500 years to equal the number Germany has. Britain’s only manufacturer of the panels, Sharp, calculates that less than a week of its year-round production actually gets installed in this country, with the rest exported to the continent.

The new report shows that, unlike in Germany, government incentives to householders fail to persuade them to invest in renewable energy. It concludes that they are daunted by the high initial cost of buying and installing them and want to see returns within three years.

The Government gives grants to help with the initial costs, but these are too small and too restricted to be effective. Indeed, ministers deliberately cut them back at the very point when they looked as if they were inspiring a rooftop revolution.

When first launched two years ago, the grants – which, for example offered up to £7,500 to install photovoltaic panels – were an instant hit. Payments soared to £1.4m in November 2006 alone, exceeding expectations more than four times over. But instead of welcoming it, ministers determined to dampen down the soaring demand. First they rationed payments to just £500,000 a month – with the result that, in February 2007, this entire allocation was used up in just two hours.

When this was ridiculed, they suspended the scheme altogether, relaunching it with the grant for photovoltaic panels slashed by two-thirds, and the one for wind turbines cut in half. Demand duly slumped.

For the past year, payments have been running at just £200,000 a month, far beneath the original target. But in April ministers rejected pleas from environmentalists and the renewable energy industry to increase the grants. Statistics to be released tomorrow will show that, partly as a result, only 18,000 new microgeneration installations have been completed over the past four years.

The new report instead suggests that Britain adopt the same approach as has been successful in Germany, which pays householders for feeding the electricity they produce from microgeneration into the national grid; the rate of these “feed-in tariffs” for photovoltaic panels is especially generous, fuelling their rapid expansion. At least 15 other European countries have also adopted them.

Last November, Gordon Brown appeared to back them, indicating that it should be “made easier for people to generate their own energy through microgeneration, and sell it on to the grid”. But little has happened since, with ministers promising only to “look” at feed-in tariffs. They failed to include them in the Government’s Energy Bill, sparking the biggest rebellion of Mr Brown’s premiership, when 33 Labour MPs last month defied the whips.

A staggering 278 MPs have now signed an early-day motion calling on the Government to adopt them. Yet, last Wednesday, speaking for the Government in a House of Lords debate, Lord Jones, a junior DBERR minister, called feed-in tariffs “a regulatory nightmare and extremely expensive”. He added: “If we were to change now we would destroy the consistency and stability that business craves and private sector investors need.”

The report also gives a fair wind to a proposal by the Micropower Council to set statutory targets for household renewables, to give the industry the certainty it needs to expand.

The confusion in Government over micropower echoes the chaos of its entire energy policy on display last week. Ministers panicked at the fuel price protests, which blocked the A40 on Wednesday, just as they did seven years ago when larger protests paralysed the country.

Then Gordon Brown, as Chancellor, rapidly backed away from green taxes, despite having promised to put “the environment at the core of the Government’s objectives for the tax system”. Last week he and his ministers were scrambling over themselves to react to the new protests, contradicting each other over whether they would perform U-turns over plans to raise fuel duty by 2p, and increase road tax disproportionately on bigger cars.

The Prime Minister also increased his backing for nuclear power. Previously he had only suggested that new reactors should be built to in place of old ones as they were closed down. But on Wednesday he said he would be “more ambitious”, adding: “We are pretty clear that we will have to do more than simply replace existing nuclear capacity in Britain.”

The report offers a very different future, as do the Tories, who see microgeneration as central to their philosophy of redirecting power to individuals. David Cameron sees “decentralised energy” as “a key part of our political vision, energy for the post-bureaucratic age”. He believes microgeneration could make Britain, and individual communities, “self-sufficient in energy”.

Source - The Independent

UK gas could soon rise 40% and electricity by 20%

Fresh warnings have emerged that oil prices could go even higher than Friday’s record close and domestic gas prices in Britain may surge by 40% on the back of the trend.

Oil saw its biggest-ever one-day price jump on Friday with a leap of more than $11 a barrel to yet another all-time high of $139.12, meaning that the cost of the fuel has risen sevenfold since 2002 and doubled in the past 12 months, raising fears of both inflation and recession in oil-consuming nations.

Website theEnergyShop.com warned over the weekend that gas prices to retail customers could soon rise 40% and electricity by 20%. On Friday, forward wholesale gas prices rose 5.3%, meaning they are up 76% in the past year.

Joe Malinowski, founder of theEnergyShop.com, said wholesale prices for gas have risen above retail prices.

“The last time wholesale gas prices broke above retail gas prices was two years ago, in June 2005. In the following 18 months energy bills rose by a record 47%. A very similar thing is going to happen this time around, except that the money value of the increase is going to be even higher,” he said.

Prices look set to open higher this morning after Mohammad Ali Khatibi, Iran’s representative at the oil producers’ cartel Opec, forecast yesterday that prices would hit the $150 a barrel mark by the end of summer.

Similarly bullish comments came from Shokri Ghanem, head of Libya’s National Oil Corporation, who said there were no moves within Opec, which pumps a third of the world’s oil, to increase supplies further. “I think it [the oil price] will go higher. That is a trend that will continue for some time. The easy, cheap oil is over, peak oil is looming,” Ghanem said, referring to the theory that world oil supplies may be about to peak and start declining.

Ghanem added, however, that oil prices were rising at the moment for other reasons, such as speculation and concern over political tension in the Middle East.

Energy ministers of the Group of Eight rich nations failed over the weekend to back Gordon Brown’s demand to urge Opec to increase supplies of crude oil.

Instead the ministers, meeting in Japan with non-G8 countries China, India and South Korea, which jointly with the G8 consume two-thirds of the world’s oil, talked of the need to promote energy efficiency.

“We will continue to vigorously promote policies and measures for improving energy efficiency,” they said.

Surging oil and food prices over the past couple of years have pushed up inflation in many countries at a time when economies are slowing, preventing central banks such as the Bank of England and European Central Bank from cutting interest rates to head off recession.

Governments around the world are struggling with street protests and even riots against rising food and petrol prices. In Britain, pump prices are already at record highs, leading to pressure on the chancellor, Alistair Darling, to scrap a planned 2p a litre fuel duty rise scheduled for October - even though that would make little difference to prices. Diesel is already more than £1.30 a litre in many parts of the country.

Airlines are warning that they cannot make money with fuel prices at these levels and many expect to plunge into losses. Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary has predicted that several European airlines will go out of business and US carriers have signalled they are to start charging for baggage.

The aerospace group Boeing warned yesterday that orders for its new planes were “on a knife edge”.

However, the US energy secretary, Sam Bodman, acknowledged at the weekend that the Bush government was powerless: “There are relatively few things we can do short term.”

The German economy minister, Michael Glos, said yesterday he was worried at the rapid rise in oil prices and wanted greater international cooperation on the issue.

Source - TheGuardian

The joys of solar panels

It was with some trepidation that I went into the cellar this week to take some meter readings in order to find out how the solar panels we had fitted on our house exactly a year ago have been performing. Was the hefty sum of £8,500 we forked out last year a good investment or a waste of money?

Well, the news is better than I had expected. We, a family of four, have produced 92% of our electricity usage from the roof of a century-old terraced house in south-east London - laying to rest the idea that Britain is not sunny enough for solar power. It also disproves any suggestion this sort of technology only works in state-of-the-art, modern detached houses.

Not only will we not pay for any electricity, we should get a rebate of about £50 once a payment from the so-called renewables obligation (RO) scheme, which rewards microgeneration schemes with cash, is included.

In all, the saving for the past year will be around £500, giving a return on our investment of 6%, which is not subject to tax. Next year, when the payments from the RO scheme will double for photovoltaic (PV) solar installations, we will get about £150 back, giving a total return of 7%. That will rise further if energy prices continue to climb - which is likely after oil prices hit yet another high this week.

Source - Solar Panels UK and Earth Round up