Renewed Hope

BRITAIN HAS ONE OF THE WORST RECORDS IN EUROPE ON RENEWABLE ENERGY USE, BUT THE OPPORTUNITY TO TRANSFORM EXISTS.

A FRIEND OF mine was cycling in Ireland. She was pedalling straight into a heavy wind, and it was tough going. A passing motorist saw she was in difficulty and stopped to ask what the problem was. When she explained, he replied 'Sure, why don't you go the other way then?'

The question may seem absurd, but maybe the man was talking sense. Sometimes it's helpful to ask why a body is so determined to go in a particular direction in the first place. Environmentalists and others have been making this kind of challenge to the world economy for several decades, often to be dismissed as cranks.

Since at least the 1980s, when the potential seriousness of man's impact on the climate became apparent, there have been calls for a 'Manhattan Project for the Environment'. The analogy is with the tremendous application of talent, money and material made by the UK and US in World War Two to develop an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany did. Today, the challenge is to develop peaceful technologies to massively reduce society's environmental impact. Renewable energy technologies like wind, solar and wave power are seen as a key part of this transformation.

At last, it seems, governments and parts of industry are not only listening but hearing and even acting. Few are the politicians today who do not claim to have at least a vision of a 'low-carbon economy'. And wind power is one of the world's fastest growing industries.

But there's no guarantee that the baby steps being taken in Britain will be sufficient, and there's a real danger of the baby being thumped on the head unless sustained popular pressure is mobilised.

RENEWING BRITAIN

Britain has a target to deliver 10 per cent of its electrical power from renewable resources by 2010. And despite what you might hear from some quarters, superb natural and technical resources already exist that could make this possible. All that is lacking is the political will.

At present, 'new' renewables (such as landfill gas, wind, solar, wave power and small - [emphatically not large-] scale hydro) contribute around one per cent to the UK's electrical generating capacity. Generating power from landfill gas is already fully economic, but has limited scope for growth as the country moves away from landfilling waste. Energy recovery from waste is highly controversial and also limited in capacity (it takes a lot of power to burn the rubbish in the first place). So if Britain is to meet its interim target of five per cent by 2003 and 10 per cent by 2010, it must look to other renewables for growth.

WINDS OF CHANGE

Most bets are on wind power, especially offshore. 'The priority has to be offshore wind. That's where all our efforts should be' says Steven Byers, the newly-green Secretary of State at the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI).

And some of the headlines look good. Last October, Britain's first offshore wind site was completed at Blyth in Northumberland. This [pound]4mn project features two of the world's most powerful wind turbines, rated at 2MW each (one megawatt is equal to a million watts), providing enough power for 3,000 households.

Nevertheless, once you look beyond such high profile cases, Britain is the wind pygmy. Less than one per cent of the 3GW (1GW = 1 billion watts) of wind power installed across western Europe last year was in Britain. In one year, Germany installed almost 1.6GW of new capacity - five times the entire capacity installed in the UK over the last decade.

And yet Britain's potential wind resource is vast - estimated at between 2GW and 4GW onshore and a further 4GW to 30GW offshore, depending on the extent of deployment. The DTI says that there may be $6bn worth of commercial potential for offshore wind farms. A potential growth industry if ever there was one.

And wind technology gets better all the time. New turbines are significantly more robust and efficient than the models of just two or three years ago. Larger in size (many with blade spans of over 70 metres), they generate between 1MW and 2MW each (enough power for 750 households or more), greatly increasing the power density of a wind farm. Designs nearing production stage will double this capacity again. The result is rapidly shrinking costs.

Some of the first detailed and reliable surveys of public opinion show that most people in Britain are now decisively in favour of more wind turbines. A study for the Scottish Executive last summer found that the great majority of people are 'generally positive about wind farms', and that those living near a wind farm were 'more likely to provide positive responses than those [further away]'. Overall, '74 per cent of respondents said there was nothing they disliked about wind farms. Only 11 per cent said that there was nothing they liked'.

Evidence suggests that Scottish attitudes are increasingly shared elsewhere in the UK. A 70 metre wind turbine in Swaffham, Norfolk, designed by Norman Foster, is now the town's biggest tourist attraction with disappointed visitors being turned away because the queue for the viewing platform is too long. And in Gloucestershire a poll last autumn found that eight out of 10 residents supported the aim of supplying 10 per cent of the county's electricity from local wind projects. On the strength of this, a company called Next Generation has submitted a planning application to build four new wind turbines near the picturesque Cotswold town of Stroud.

LANDSCAPE ISSUES

On the national scale, the British Wind Energy Association argues that the impact on the landscape would be surprisingly small. In England, says BWEA, a quarter of the 10 per cent renewables target could be met on under 0.2 per cent (419 [km.sup.2]) of the nation's total land area. This would require around 2,500 1.5MW turbines spread evenly across the regions on land that could also be used for grazing, crops and other purposes -- not just in those places with highest winds -- so that every part of the country benefits. There are currently about 800 wind turbines onshore in the UK.

Even some observers without an environmental agenda or a vested interest in the wind industry are now saying that wind could even overtake combined cycle gas turbines (CCGT) as the preferred new source of power generation in the second decade of the 21st century. Recently, Greenpeace and the German Wind Energy Institute suggested that the North Sea's 400 oil and gas platforms be replaced with offshore wind farms, providing power for Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark. All it would take, they suggested, was a little political will.

But here's the problem. Offshore wind does not quite pay for itself when judged by conventional economic measures which take virtually no account of the impact of climate destabilisation and other forms of environmental destruction caused by conventional energy generation. It is coming pretty close, but the pump still needs to be primed.

And while the government gives in to corporate and political pressure to 'pick winners in some areas like aerospace -- allocating [pounds]500 million of public money for a new jet fighter, for example -- it remains more cautious when it comes to popular types of technology that could help save the world.

OBLIGATIONS

At present, official hopes are pinned on the Renewables Obligation, and funds made available from the Climate Change Levy and elsewhere. The Renewables Obligation guarantees a market for those renewables systems that are closest to economic viability on a 'conventional' definition. The Obligation provides an incentive for power companies either to generate 10 per cent of their power from renewables by 2010 or to buy 'green credits' from others who exceed this target.

Also, in the short term, offshore wind projects will receive a [pound]39mn grant from the DTI, and a share of [pound]50mn from the new opportunity fund derived from the National Lottery. Alan Moore, Managing Director of National Wind Power, says the grants should be sufficient to enable the construction of five or six 'reasonable size' offshore wind farms, each generating around 50MW from 20 to 25 turbines.

This is certainly an excellent start, but it is not enough. At very best, the measures will help to deliver 10 per cent of electricity from renewable resources by 2010, without touching energy use in the rest of the economy.

So what can be done to boost renewables further?

First, dismiss the naysayers and those with links to the nuclear industry (the third-born of the original Manhattan Project, after tissue and thermonuclear weapons) who ridicule even the government's modest target. Meeting it would mean installing two large turbines every day, says Ian Fells of the University of Northumberland -- implying that such a feat would be well-nigh impossible. In 1999 in Germany an average of six 1MW turbines were put up every working day. So much for that.

Second, continue to press for a wholesale transformation of the economy, including the transport sector. Greenpeace offers one model. The campaigning group proposes a [pound]500mn green fund, to kick-start the uptake of compressed natural gas and biodiesel as vehicle fuels, plus a network of electric buses in areas of worst air quality -- both of these as interim steps while a national hydrogen distribution network is installed.

True, [pound]500 million is a lot of money. But consider the bill for that shiny state-of-the-art jet fighter to put it in perspective, and then the comparable cost of offering a new vision to the world.

Greenpeace may not have all the answers, and it's important to be clear-eyed about the scale of some of the challenges.

'A solar industry supplying just two percent of primary energy by 2025 would probably be producing some 4,000 [km.sup.2] of photo-voltaic panels a year -- six times current European production of plate glass,' says Mark Moody-Stuart of Shell, that favourite of environmentalists and human rights workers. Thanks, Mark. We need forecasts like this to help us understand the scale of the challenge -- and then to go ahead and meet it.

Caspar Henderson is a freelance journalist.

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