The Guardian's energy policy is neatly summed up in the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone's plan for the future energy supply of London, which relied on CHP and wind power. But the contents of the plan reflect the banal and impractical thinking that characterises the green movement and ensures that the proposed ‘carbon savings’ will be illusory.
Every London neighbourhood will have a municipal waste incinerator, a couple of sawdust-burning furnaces or a gigantic sewage reservoir bubbling methane and other flammable gases. Roads and parks will be dug up to lay an entirely new system of hot water distribution to homes and offices that, in turn, will be re-plumbed. Thousands of combined heat and power plants – each the size of a small block of flats – will take over from central gas and electricity as the main suppliers of energy to the city.
This extraordinarily ambitious plan (perhaps verging on megalomania) was former London mayor Ken Livingstone’s misty-eyed vision for the capital’s ‘decentralised energy’ future to meet the challenge of climate change. And it is still the way the Green Party and green groups want London to develop – in fact Livingstone’s energy plans were drawn up with Greenpeace his Action Today to Protect Tomorrow: The Mayor’s Climate Change Action Plan was endorsed by the Green Party.
The top priority for greens is to build combined heating and power (CHP – or, with cooling, CCHP) stations. Proponents claim that CHP power plants are ‘sustainable’ because as they generate electricity, unwanted heat is transferred into water rather than released into the air. This heated water is pumped to nearby buildings to substitute for central heating and hot water. Depending on the size of the CHP plant and the density of housing, it can supply hundreds or thousands of properties – but the rapid cooling of water in pipes means that it is only useful for infrastructure fairly close by – hence the need for localised plants.
Greens say CHP plants will burn domestic and industrial waste, biomass (in the form of pellets manufactured from sawdust or dried plants), and sewage (dehydrated solid sludge or gases released by microbial digestion).
In fact, the vast majority of CHP plants burn gas – not as polluting as coal, but a high-carbon fossil fuel nonetheless. Using waste (either rubbish or sewage) as a fuel is still experimental and inefficient. Biomass is, essentially, wood burning and not only produces carbon dioxide but also dioxin. Ironically, dioxin is usually the greens’ scary (if much exaggerated) poison of choice, the mere mention of which is expected to seal any eco-argument - but such fears seem to have been forgotten in the push for sustainable energy.
CHP plants can operate at 80 per cent efficiency (the rate at which the energy potential of fuel is converted to heat or power) compared with 40 per cent for coal stations. But the original energy content of, for example, biomass is tiny. Small biomass plants simply cannot generate the high-pressure steam of a large fossil-fuel furnace. For electricity generation, biomass plants operate at only 10 per cent efficiency. ‘Decentralised energy’ and CHP are assumed to be ‘renewable’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘low carbon’. This fiction – common in environmental circles – is believed because it coincides with other fairytales about the moral superiority of recycling. Surely it is better to use waste, sewage and biomass for energy generation rather than landfill?
Only nine per cent of Britain’s waste is domestic (which puts the greens’ enthusiasm for recycling household rubbish into perspective); the vast majority of waste - 91 per cent - comes from industry, agriculture, construction, mining and so on. The most efficient method of disposal would be landfill. This method can also produce a small amount of energy, through the burning of the methane that is produced as the organic matter decomposes. But EU regulations now require member states to institute expensive landfill taxes. So there will soon be huge mountains of waste to dispose of somehow.
But since greens have lways opposed incinerators, they have to convince the public that that incineration is not the noxious polluter it one was, but is really a ‘sustainable’ source of energy.
Actually, these ‘sustainable’ sources of fuel are simply a method of sending carbon dioxide back into the air without the inconvenient delay of storing it in the Earth’s crust for millennia. The energy used in collecting the fuel, processing it into a usable form, transporting it to CHP plants and disposing of solid waste is simply ignored. And until some practical form of carbon-capture and storage is developed, carbon dioxide will still be released into the atmosphere. The whole process will really increase CO2 levels in the atmosphere – less than coal burning, certainly, but it will not reduce CO2 levels as would nuclear power.
The experience of Denmark suggests that wind power and decentralised energy – especially with CHP – are highly incompatible. Wind undermines both the economics and energy efficiency of CHP and it is doubtful whether the Danes have saved any carbon emissions at all as a result of their massive investment in CHP and offshore wind power. Denmark’s ‘sustainable’ energy strategy results in the country having to import at least 10 per cent of its electricity from neighbouring Sweden, where half the electricity supply is nuclear.
If greens truly wanted to reduce carbon emissions quickly and significantly, they would propose a carbon-free ‘nuclear tariff’ for consumers to sign up to, suggest that all gas boilers be replaced with electric one – and follow the example of the Israeli government in planning to roll out an electric car scheme with battery-replacement stations instead of petrol stations.
An all-electric Britain supplied by nuclear power stations would reduce carbon emissions from transport and heating to, as near as damn it, zero - an effective, achievable and affordable way to make Britain the world’s first carbon-free. But in the anything-but-nuclear world of environmentalism, that kind of thinking is taboo.
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