Renault’s Zoom concept electric car. Image source: Auto Express.

Most major countries in Europe have decided to focus on one or two technologies to reduce carbon emissions. By making concentrated investments in one or two promising areas these countries are likely to achieve substantial cost reductions and rapid increases in deployment. By contrast, the UK is dabbling ineffectually in several areas and achieving little. Despite having large resources of renewable energy sources, the UK’s effort is diffuse, trivial in scope and clearly insufficient. We have almost the lowest percentage of our energy coming from low-carbon sources in the EU.

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Here is a brief list of just some of the main programmes in other European countries. In each case, the nation is likely to acquire a world-leading position in a technology which can be expanded to save tens of percent of national emissions, provide large numbers of jobs and stimulate a successful export industry. (More details of each of these can be found in Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, just published by Profile Books.)

Portugal – electric cars and wind power
Portugal has just announced a programme to install charging points for electric vehicles across the country. In a deal with Renault-Nissan, it will encourage the transition to battery vehicles by reducing taxation on electric cars and giving income tax breaks to the purchasers of Renault’s new cars. This is a world first.

Portugal’s subsidies for wave technology meant that the world’s first commercial wave farm was installed on the Atlantic Coast. It also has a large and growing percentage of its electricity from wind.

Germany – a major push into eco-renovation of all older buildings
Many people know about Germany’s feed-in tariffs for small-scale renewables. This has substantial disadvantages, but has kick-started the world’s solar PV industries. It has also made parts of Germany self-sufficient in electricity through the rapid growth of wind turbines.

Fewer people understand the vital importance of Germany’s active support of eco-renovation. Three hundred thousand housing units (flats and houses) will benefit this year from improved insulation and climate control. Soft loans and other subsidies are proving hugely popular and help cut the emissions from older buildings by up to 85%. This is a systematic, coordinated programme that will eventually upgrade all Germany’s older residential buildings to better insulation standards than are currently being demanded for new housing in the UK.

Spain – massive investment in wind and in new solar power technologies
On some nights in February 2008, 40% of Spain’s electricity came from wind. Active support for wind farms has meant that Spain was the fastest growing market for turbines in the world.

It is not just wind. Spain is also the world leader in using the power of the sun to create electricity. Installations such as the Seville solar tower and the Andasol concentrated solar power farm are outstanding innovations that enable Spanish companies to sell their technology to the US and to North Africa.

Denmark – low-carbon district heating and enzymes for making fuels from agricultural wastes
Denmark has built a world-leading industry through its sustained and intelligent support for wind turbine manufacturing. Two of the world’s biggest manufacturers, Vestas and Siemens, build their products there and India’s fast-growing Suzlon does its European marketing from there.

Less well known is that Denmark is also ahead in the use of large-scale shared heating plants powered by wood and other biomass. Increasingly these plants also produce carbon-neutral electricity. Denmark’s enzyme industry, which controls over half of world production, is also in a leadership position in the production of chemicals for making usable liquid fuels by cracking the complex molecules in wood and agricultural wastes.

Sweden – a real commitment to a low-carbon economy and a vital role in carbon capture
Sweden’s resources of wood and its access to the electricity from Norway’s huge hydro-electric power plants make it likely that it will be the first country to become a genuinely low-carbon economy. And state-owned energy company, Vattenfall, is leading the world in research into carbon capture at large coal-fired power stations. Its new installation at Schwarze Pumpe in eastern Germany is the only large-scale example of the implementation of this critical technology anywhere in the world.

Where is the UK in all of this? Despite having 40% of Europe’s wind power, its record in installing turbines is way behind many other countries with much lower average wind speeds. Many wind farms with planning permission cannot obtain connections from the National Grid. Small knots of inventors and entrepreneurs are scrabbling for the tiny amounts of available capital to develop the UK’s vast tidal power reserves. But, once again, it may prove impossible to connect tidal power farms to the Grid.

In Smith Electric Vehicles and Modec we have two of the world leaders in electric vans and small lorries but the government has given almost no support. It doesn’t even use its vast purchasing power effectively. Efforts to help electricity generators develop biomass sources for power have been halting and inconsistent. As a result, most biomass burned in power stations today is being imported from Asia. Plans for a single trial carbon capture plant are proceeding painfully slowly and the finance does not even appear as a line in government budget projections. Research into low-carbon liquid fuels is not supported with consistency or substantial amounts of cash.

To an extent simply not understood in this country, the world now has the technological capability to rid itself of the dependency on fossil fuels. UK government policy has been woefully slow and halting towards those industries which could give Britain a world lead in ten or twenty years’ time. As the national unemployment figures begin their long rise upward to three million and perhaps beyond, now is the time to start an active programme of support for the technologies in which the UK has the potential for the creation of real, important and durable jobs.

Ten Technologies to Save the Planet was listed as one of the Financial Times Science Books of the Year 2008.

The UK government has announced an intention to allow offshore wind farm development around most of the UK. John Hutton suggested that about 33 GW capacity could be added by 2020. This would provide about 25% of current UK electricity demand (which is itself rising by 1 to 2% per year).

Simple calculations suggest that this change may add about 15-25% to UK electricity bills. Offshore wind is more expensive to construct and operate than onshore wind farms. The announcement may suggest that the government believes that offshore wind can be pushed through but that onshore farms are likely to be successfully opposed. The big push for offshore wind seems to mean that the government is losing faith in nuclear.

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The UK continental shelf is a good place to build wind farms. Wind speeds are high and the UK’s oil and gas industry has given us the capacity to work in harsh regimes. After a period of experimentation with smaller offshore wind projects, the 300-turbine London Array, shortly to be constructed, will become the largest marine wind farm in the world.

The government has given increasingly clear signs that it viewed offshore wind as a renewable technology of choice. It increased the proposed support from one ROC (currently worth about £45) to one and a half in the 2007 Energy White Paper. It now seems also to be willing to over-ride the Ministry of Defence’s concerns about the impact of wind farms on military radar. The worries over the turbines dicing small wading birds have been pushed aside.

The basic numbers
The government wants another 25 GW on top of the current 8 GW in various stages of planning. These figures refer to the maximum output of the turbines on a windy day. The actual output is likely to be between 30 and 35% of this figure. (Data from Scroby Sands, an early offshore farm, suggests a lower figure, but the turbines have suffered from reliability problems which have depressed the output.)

33 GW of offshore wind capacity will provide about 100-110 TWh, or perhaps 25% of total UK demand. This approximately equates to the electricity demand from households today.

When the wind is blowing hard, the total offshore capacity envisaged by Mr Hutton will almost match the minimum total demand during a winter’s day.

Total UK electricity demand (MW) in the 24-hour period to noon on Tuesday 11 December 2007

This chart is copied from National Grid real-time data. The y axis is MW. A GW is 1,000 MW. So the minimum demand on 11 December 2007 was reached at about 5am with a total demand of about 35 GW, about 10% more than would be generated on a very windy night all around the coasts.

If – and this is a very big if – the existing value of ROCs is maintained, then the possible subsidy from all electricity users to offshore wind if all 33 GW capacity is built is about £7bn. Over a year, this would raise the price of each kilowatt hour of electricity by about 1.8p, compared to the current retail price of about 10p. In addition, there will have to be substantial payments to other generators to incentivise them to build and hold ready gas-fired capacity for use when the wind isn’t blowing.

Offshore wind is expensive because its construction cost is high. The British Wind Energy Association mentions a figure of £2m per MW of capacity, compared to less than £1m for onshore wind. The total investment required to build 33 GW might therefore be as much as £64bn, about 6% of UK GNP. The BWEA figure looks a little high to me and the actual cost might be somewhat lower at perhaps £50bn.

The problems
The government’s announcement was broadly supported by the other main political parties. It is the easiest source of renewable energy to back, even though it is expensive. The ROC subsidy system disguises the true cost of switching to wind and other sources, so politicians must assume that the extremely heavy expense of wind will not be obvious enough to be politically dangerous.

The problems for offshore energy lie elsewhere:

• Turbine supply: only a small number of suppliers make marine-ready turbines. Vestas and Siemens, both based in Denmark, have made most of the ones already supplied. The worldwide shortage of top quality turbines is likely to persist for some years. New manufacturers will be enticed into the market if government support looks robust, but this could take the best part of a decade. Some of the existing turbines have severe problems with gearboxes (as at Scroby Sands) but we can expect these issues to be overcome eventually.
• Grid connections: powerful arrays of turbines must be located close to points on the high voltage transmission network. It is no good putting a hundred turbines 50km from the nearest point of interconnection unless you can be sure to get planning permission for the National Grid to run pylons. (I think I am right in saying that the substation to handle the electricity coming onshore from the London Array was the last part of the infrastructure to get planning permission.)
• Skills: the UK has offshore skills as good as most other countries, but getting 7,000 turbines built by 2020 is an extremely challenging task.
• Intermittency: offshore wind is reasonably predictable and strong. Below is the wind map from the BBC on the afternoon of Tuesday 11 December 2007:
  
  
  
  In the southern portion of the UK coastline, wind speeds will be low because of the prevailing cyclonic weather. But further north, the west coast is seeing reasonable wind speeds. Days of real quiet are surprisingly infrequent. Nevertheless, if we are to generate 25% of our electricity from offshore, we will need substantial back-up capacity. Very approximately, the UK has about 8 GW spare capacity. By ‘spare’ I mean unused generating capacity above what is likely to be the peak on a very cold December day at about 5.30pm. We will need to have much more when we have 33 GW of offshore power. I haven’t yet seen an estimate, but I suspect that it will be at least 12 GW more than we have at the moment. The capital cost of the gas plant to deliver this is likely to be over £4bn.
• The interaction with nuclear: it hasn’t been picked up by the press, but a 25% target for offshore wind is not easily compatible with a large nuclear industry. Nuclear needs to run all the time as baseload. If the wind is blowing strongly when demand is lowest (about 5am on a summer’s day) then the UK will run the risk of having too much electricity supply. Either nuclear or wind would have to be disconnected or the UK would have to invest in more of what is called ‘pumped storage’. Surplus electricity is used to push water uphill into reservoirs. The reservoir can be discharged later, turning hydro-electric turbines when demand is higher. It is difficult to encourage large amounts of both nuclear and wind, and the government’s new wind policy must mean that it is losing interest in nuclear.

The conclusion
Offshore wind is expensive and still somewhat untried. The government’s apparent decision to allow rapid development around a large portion of the UK coast is path-breaking. Most observers think that getting to 33 GW is an extremely optimistic target for 2020. However, industry people think that it may be possible to get as high as 20 GW, probably generating over 15% of UK power.