UK has become too dependent on imported energy

The UK should take a more “interventionist” approach to ensure new nuclear reactors are built — and in greater numbers — than currently planned, according to a report commissioned by Prime Minister Gordon Brown released on Wednesday.

The report by Malcolm Wicks, the former energy minister appointed by Gordon Brown as his special representative for international energy issues, said that “the time for market innocence is over” and that the government needs to do more to safeguard electricity and gas supplies.

The report, ‘Energy Security: a national challenge in a changing world’, recommended that the UK should generate 30 to 40 per cent of its electricty from nuclear power stations by 2030 – up from the current 13 per cent.

Mr Wicks said that the UK has become too dependent on increasingly imported natural gas for its energy needs and argues that state intervention is needed to accelerate plans to build a new fleet of nuclear power stations.

“The era of heavy reliance on companies, competition and liberalisation must be re-assessed,” he said. “We must still rely on companies for exploration, delivery and supply but the state must become more active: interventionist, where necessary.”

Other recommendations from the report include:

- Prioritizing Norway, Qatar and Saudi Arabia as the most significant bilateral relationships to UK energy security. Relationships built on a broad base including diplomatic, development and cultural collaboration will provide a firm basis on which to pursue the UK’s energy security goals.

- The UK should remain at the forefront in developing and demonstrating CCS technology.

- The UK should continue to ensure that energy efficiency is at the heart of energy dialogues with its global partners.

- The Government should do what it can to support EU work to promote diversification of routes and sources of gas supply into Europe including through the use of EU diplomacy to influence third countries where they are better placed to do this than the UK bilaterally.

The Government should do what it can to support EU work to promote diversification of routes and sources of gas supply into Europe including through the use of EU diplomacy to influence third countries where they are better placed to do this than the UK bilaterally.

The future is looking greener for investors as ambitious government targets for generating renewable energy are providing fund managers with new opportunities.

More than 30 per cent of the UK’s electricity could eventually be derived from renewable sources, according to the latest estimates, compared with just 5.5 per cent today. This would be twice the government’s legally-binding target of 15 per cent by 2020.

Much of this is expected to come from wind power but other sources, including biomass and tidal power, will also increasingly be drawn upon. The government plans to invest £100bn in the renewable energy sector, which could involve the creation of as many as 500,000 jobs. It has also set out new plans for reducing carbon emissions to help tackle climate change.

Fund managers say this increased commitment, together with a similar focus from the US, plus stronger moves towards clean energy from China, is welcome news for an industry that has been slow to take off – and has suffered more than others in the recent downturn.

Edward Guinness, one of the managers of Guinness Asset Management’s Alternative Energy Fund, says green energy companies were trading at a premium to the market before the downturn but were hit hard last year, particularly as funding dried up.

His fund lost 40 per cent in the year to the end of June, according to total return figures from Lipper.

A number of other renewable energy funds, most of which have been set up in the past couple of years, have had an equally difficult run. Lipper’s rankings show that, over the same period, BlackRock’s New Energy Investment Trust, the Premier Renewable Energy trust and the Jupiter Green Investment Trust all saw negative returns of at least 30 per cent.

But new opportunities now look to be arising, particularly in wind power .

“The area where government policy is really having an impact on our investing is on the wind side,” says Guinness. “The UK has much better resources in this area than in solar, and the government wants to make it easier to get planning permission.”

His fund typically invests in companies that derive at least 50 per cent of their business from either the manufacture and development of renewable energy generation or the improvement of energy efficiency.

Guinness says solar stocks performed well last month as demand started to pick up following a difficult 18 months, in which the prices for solar panels halved. The lower prices should trigger stronger growth, he says, while providers should also receive a boost from cheaper raw materials, lower manufacturing costs and improved subsidies.

Luciano Diana, portfolio manager of the Pictet Clean Energy fund, says wind power is more attractive than solar because it is much cheaper. He claims that, for the first time, there is a real push to new energy around the world.

“For a long time, it has just been Europe supporting it but now there is a big push from the US and also Chinese packages dedicated to cleaner energy,” he says.

Fund managers say much of the new government investment will be captured by the large utilities.

The Association of Investment Companies argues that moves to combat climate change should prove beneficial to some of the big utility and infrastructure investment companies.

John Murray, chairman of Ecofin, which invests in the utility and infrastructure sectors, says utilities have been largely oversold in recent months as investors have moved back into cyclical and recovery stocks. As a result, some companies in the sector are looking the cheapest they have been since 2003.

But, he points out: “Unlike in 2003, the fundamentals of the global utility sector are generally sound. Balance sheets are in relatively good shape and the utilities are proving that they are able to access long-term capital markets.”

Source - Power Engineering

UK’s energy shortfall

The government fired the starting gun today for the rebirth of Britain’s nuclear power industry, announcing the names of eleven sites earmarked for construction of new reactors.

Each of the new stations will cost £4.5 billion to build and will be powerful enough to supply as many as 2 million homes with electricity for up to 60 years.

Energy experts warned that the first one would not be ready before 2017 at the earliest — too late to avoid a yawning gap opening up in Britain’s energy supplies with a string of ageing coal and nuclear stations set to close over the next few years.

Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, said that the list of new sites — all of which are located at or close to existing nuclear stations and which span the country from West Cumbria to Kent and Somerset — represented “another important step towards a new generation of nuclear power stations”.

“Nuclear power is part of the low-carbon future for Britain. It also has the potential to offer thousands of jobs to the UK and multimillion-pound opportunities to British businesses.”

The public now has one month to respond to the list of sites, including Hinkley Point in Somerset and Sizewell in Suffolk, considered the frontrunners for the first two stations to be built by the French power giant EDF.

Other sites thought to be among the first wave of new reactors include Wylfa in Anglesey; Oldbury in Gloucestershire; and Bradwell in Essex.

The list also includes Dungeness in Kent; Hartlepool in Cleveland; Heysham in Lancashire; and three separate sites in West Cumbria at Sellafield, Braystones and Kirksanton.

Craig Lowrey, head of energy markets at EIC, an independent consultancy, pointed out that the new plants would arrive too late to help Britain avoid a dangerous slide towards an unhealthy dependency on electricity produced from gas-fired power stations.

This was an unwelcome development because of the carbon emissions associated with burning gas and because the UK was running short of its own supplies in the North Sea,forcing it to import more and more of the fuel from countries such as Russia, Algeria and Qatar, Dr Lowrey said.

Britain’s current fleet of power stations — including coal, gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind and biomass stations — have a generating capacity of about 83.5 gigawatts. Roughly a quarter of that (22-23 gigawatts) is set to close in the next few years as ageing nuclear plants are retired from service, while a big chunk of coal-fired generation is set to close by 2015 to meet tough new European rules on the use of coal and oil-fired power stations.

The announcement of the nuclear sites also triggered a wave of protest from environmental groups, which argue that the high costs involved and the waste produced by nuclear stations do not justify the contribution they will make in cutting UK carbon emissions.

“We urgently need to end our addiction to fossil fuels, but breathing new life into the failed nuclear experiment is not the answer,” said Robin Webster, energy campaigner for Friends of the Earth. “Nuclear power leaves a deadly legacy of radioactive waste that remains highly dangerous for tens of thousands of years and costs tens of billions of pounds to manage.

Source - The Times

Solar plant yields water and crops from the desert

Vast greenhouses that use sea water for crop cultivation could be combined with solar power plants to provide food, fresh water and clean energy in deserts, under an ambitious proposal from a team of architects and engineers.

The Sahara Forest Project, which is already running demonstration plants in Tenerife, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, envisages huge greenhouses with concentrated solar power (CSP), a technology that uses mirrors to focus the sun's rays, creating steam to drive turbines to generate electricity.

The installations would turn deserts into lush patches of vegetation, according to its designers, and do away with the need to dig wells for fresh water, an activity that has depleted aquifers across the world.

Charlie Paton, a member of the team, and the inventor of the Seawater Greenhouse, said the scheme was a proven way to transform arid environments. "Plants need light for growth but they don't like heat beyond a certain point," he said.

Above certain temperatures the amount of water lost through leaves' stomata rises so much plants stop their photosynthesis and do not grow. The solar farm planned by the project runs seawater evaporators, pumping damp, cool air through the greenhouses. This reduces the warmth inside by about 15C, compared with the temperature outside.

At the other end of the greenhouse from the evaporators, water vapour is condensed. Some of this fresh water is used to water the crops, some for cleaning the solar mirrors.

"So we've got conditions in the greenhouse of high humidity and lower temperature," said Paton. "The crops sitting in this slightly steamy, humid condition can grow fantastically well."

The designers said that virtually any vegetables could be grown in the greenhouses. The demonstration plants already produce lettuces, peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes. The nutrients to grow the plants could come from local seaweed or be extracted from the seawater.

Michael Pawlyn, of Exploration Architecture, based in London, worked on the Eden Project for seven years and is now part of the Sahara Forest team. He said that the Seawater Greenhouse and CSP provided substantial synergies for each other. "Both technologies work extremely well in hot, dry, desert locations. CSP produces a lot of waste heat and we'd be able to use that to evaporate more seawater from the greenhouse. And CSP needs a supply of clean, de-mineralised water in order for the [electricity generating] turbines to function and to keep the mirrors at peak output. It just so happens the Seawater Greenhouse produces large quantities of this."

Paton said the greenhouse produced more than five times the fresh water needed to water the plants inside, so some of the water could be released to the outside, creating a microclimate for hardier plants such as jatropha, a crop that can be turned into biofuel.

The cost of the Sahara Forest Project could be relatively low as both CSP and Seawater Greenhouses are proven technologies. The designers estimate that building 20 hectares (nearly 50 acres) of greenhouses combined with a 10MW CSP scheme would cost about €80m (£65m).

Paton said groups in countries across the Middle East, including in UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait, have expressed interest in possibly funding demonstration projects.

He said use of Seawater Greenhouses could reverse the environmental damage done by the glasshouses already built in places such as the desert region of Almeria, southern Spain, where, constructed over the past 20 years to grow salad crops, they now covered more than 40,000 hectares.

Paton said: "They take water out of the ground something like five times faster than it comes in, so the water table drops and becomes more saline. The whole of Spain is being sucked dry. If one were to convert them all to the Seawater Greenhouse concept it would turn an unsustainable solution into a more sustainable one."

Pawlyn said: "In places like Oman they've effectively sterilised large areas of land by using groundwater that's become increasingly saline. The beauty of the Sahara Forest scheme is that you can reverse that process and turn barren land into biologically productive land."

Neil Crumpton, an energy specialist at Friends of the Earth, said the potential of these desert technologies was huge. "Concentrated solar power mirror arrays covering just 1% of the Earth's deserts could supply a fifth of all current global energy consumption. And 1 million tonnes of sea water could be evaporated every day from just 20,000ha of greenhouses."

Governments should invest in the technologies and "not be distracted by lobbyists promoting dangerous nuclear power or nuclear-powered desalination schemes", Crumpton added.

The International Energy Agency estimates that the world needs to invest more than $45 trillion (£22.5 trillion) in new energy systems over the next 30 years.

Source - The guardian

Future of UK’s energy supply is bleak

With every week that goes by it becomes clearer that, within a few years, Britain will face an unprecedented crisis, thanks to the shambles the Government has made of our energy policy.

After years of dereliction, when only a crash programme of measures could keep our lights on and our economy functioning, our policy has become so skewed by blinkered environmentalism and diktats from the EU that we are fast heading for the worst of all worlds - a near-total dependence on foreign sources of energy which will not only be astronomically expensive but which can in no way be guaranteed to supply all the electricity we need.

What are the hard facts?

Between now and 2015 we shall lose 40 per cent of the generating capacity we currently require to meet maximum demand (still rising), due to the phasing out of almost all our obsolescent nuclear reactors and the closure of nine of our major coal- and oil-fired power stations under an EU “anti-pollution” directive.

Gordon Brown talks about building a new generation of nuclear power plants, for which we would have to rely on the French - having two years ago sold off Westinghouse, the only British-owned firm capable of constructing them.

But even if the French play ball, which seems less likely since the collapse of Brown’s plan to sell off British Energy to France’s EDF, the new plants could still not be built in time to plug the gap.

The only short-term remedy will be to build yet more gas-fired stations, at a time when we are fast running out of our own gas supplies and when gas prices are shooting through the roof, reducing us to dependence on countries such as Mr Putin’s Russia or Qatar, both of which have recently announced caps on future exports.

Our best bet might seem to invest urgently in a dozen more coal-fired power stations, which still supply more than a third of our electricity.

But own coal industry is so run down - though we still have more than 100 years of reserves - that barely a quarter of the 62 million tons of coal we used last year was British.The rest had to be imported, including 22 million tons from Russia and 12 million tons from South Africa.

At a time when rocketing world demand for coal has already doubled prices in a year, we should again be dependent on unreliable foreign sources, to generate electricity by means which excite almost as much fury from environmentalists as nuclear power - as we saw with last week’s demonstrations against plans by German-owned E.On to build a new “clean coal” station at Kingsnorth in Kent.

With this colossal crisis fast approaching, our ministers are still lost in the cloudcuckooland of Mr Brown’s £100 billion “green energy” plan, to meet our EU target of generating a third of our electricity from renewables by 2020.

Not an energy expert in the country says this is remotely feasible. Our present 2,000 wind turbines supply just 1.5 per cent of our power, and even if Mr Brown’s 7,000 additional turbines could in practice be built, we would still be more than 200 per cent short of our EU target.

Worse still is the fact that our electricity investment market is now so skewed by the various subsidy and “carbon savings” schemes adopted to meet our various EU targets that these are now uselessly soaking up more than £5 billion a year which should otherwise be urgently invested in proper generating capacity.

Our major power companies can now make so much money from “renewables” subsidies and other “planet saving” schemes that they have much less incentive to risk capital on those which might keep our lights on.

Our energy policy is now so constrained and distorted by EU requirements that, even if we had a government with the knowhow and will to sort out the mess, we should soon be breaking EU laws all over the place.

Tragically, no one seems to remain in more blissful ignorance of all these harsh realities than our Conservative opposition which, when the crisis arrives, may well be in power.

Not only will those at the top of the Tory party, on present showing, have no idea why the lights are going out, but they will have even less idea of what to do about it - because by then it will be too late.

Source: The Telegraph