Alan Whitehead

Labour Party | Southampton Test

Renewable energy - do we need it?

Last year the Governments Performance and Innovation Unit (in effect an in-house Government think-tank) published an important report on the future of energy up to the year 2050. It was an important report and it covers many different issues, but two stand out.

Firstly, it says energy policy has to be centrally informed by the reality of global warming. It is really happening, the report concludes, and if we do not reduce radically our outputs of Carbon dioxide (the main ‘greenhouse gas') life will be very different for us within the lifetime of many people reading this. What do they mean by ‘radically? They mean a reduction on present outputs by some 60% if we are to have any chance of stabilizing the environment. And even if we don't want to do it, it is likely to become such an international imperative soon that we will be subject anyway to international obligations to act.

60% is a huge reduction; especially since with all the measures already underway, we will have trouble reducing our CO2 levels from a 1990 start point by 2010This means very serio9us action on transport and industrial emissions, as well as the use of domestic energy. . We will, in reality have to plan comprehensively for a ‘low carbon' economy.

Secondly, we are not building any new nuclear power stations currently, and none are planned. This means that the present zero emission contribution such power stations makes to our energy economy will have disappeared by 2020 as they are decommissioned. The 10% this represents is almost exactly the projected share of the energy market projected fro renewals (energy from wind, the tide, the sun, biomass etc.) by that date. Furthermore, by 2020, on present projections some 70% of our energy will come from gas, much of it imported from Russia and the Middle East. It is probably a bad idea to be so de [pendent for our energy on one source, and an even worse idea to rely on sources that may not actually supply it to us, if political conditions change.

So what should we do? One option is to restart a nuclear power programme. This would be an equally bad notion, since we do not know how to dispose of the waste it generates, and in any event, the cost of generating nuclear is deceptively high, if the full life expense is taken into account.

We clearly need to develop hydrogen power for vehicles, and some promising developments are on their way. It is likely that hydrogen cells for vehicles will be commonplace by 2020. But this will not provide for industrial heating and power, and even so, needs electricity to crack water to provide hydrogen in the first place.

All this leads up to a very substantial progrramme of renewable energy that I believe we must invest in urgently. The technology is now there – renewable energy is no longer the experimental ‘fringe' small-scale option it once was. In our part of the world we could benefit greatly by developing solar energy, or photo-voltaics as an urban contribution to a renewable programmed. PV is uniquely useful for our overwhelmingly urban patterns of living in the UK – you simply install it on the roofs of houses and commercial buildings. Building regulations in future that ‘embedded' PV on roofs would make it no more exceptional than switching on the light.

In Hampshire generally there is great scope for the development of energy crops – crops that can be directly burnt in power stations and simply recycle carbon, such as coppiced willow or elephant grass, or which can be made into low emission fuel, such as ethanol from sugar beet or biodiesel from oilseed rape. We currently have in the UK 800,000 hectares of land ‘set aside' from agricultural production under the EU common Agricultural Policy. The boost to rural jobs and the domestic energy economy would be enormous if even a fraction of this land became used.

Just a parting thought. If we do nothing on carbon dioxide emissions, it is predicted that sea levels will rise by between 0.8 and 1.2 metres by 2050. But that doesn't tell the whole story: changing weather patterns and higher tidal surges will make the defensible shoreline up to five metres higher in the South of England. In Southampton that means goodbye to Freemantle, St. Denys, the whole of the docks and the Millbrook trading estate along with part of Millbrook itself. In short, our city would cease to function. I think I prefer the renewable alternative.