Tough Choices for UK Energy Policy
September 17th, 2008Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
The BBC reports today that the United Kingdom may be on the verge of a major mismatch between energy supply and demand:
The UK will experience prolonged power cuts in about five years unless urgent action is taken now, a report warns.
It said a third of generation capacity was due to be decommissioned by 2020, but was not being replaced fast enough.
The report, by nuclear supporting Fells Associates, said new reactors would not be ready in time, and questioned spending on renewable energy.
Energy Secretary John Hutton said the report overstated the risks and that the issue was a national priority.
The report being referenced can be found online here in PDF. Here is how the executive summary begins:
Security of energy supply must now be seen as taking priority over everything else, even climate change. UK imports of both gas and oil are accelerating, just as the fragility of supplies from Russia and the Middle East becomes more apparent and the UK heads towards the loss of one third of its generating capacity over the next 12 years. A new energy policy must be scheduled to meet the impending energy gap with an overarching long-term vision that will ensure security of supply, protect the environment, and at the same time, be deemed feasible by the engineers, financiers and utility managers who will have to implement it.
The choices facing the UK involve a host of trade offs — Continue to depend upon coal? Rely to a greater extent on continental gas? Or repeat the troubles of South Africa? The Fells Associates report lays out a few other options, not of which are particularly palatable to some vested interest.
How energy policy plays out in the UK is well worth watching, particularly for those of us in the US.
September 17th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
[...] By Roger Pielke, Jr., crossposted from Prometheseus [...]
September 19th, 2008 at 9:54 am
I think the time scales required to implement extensive changes for a fundamental infrastructure such as electricity production and transmission have been severely underestimated.
If there was an alternative to the present systems used to deliver electricity to individual consumers, it would have long ago been invented and made somebody very very rich. The keys to the problem are that the functionality, reliability, and cost for the present methods are extremely difficult to best. We flip a switch and we always get electricity. Cost is a factor, but for such a necessity, cost is not the most important factor.
Note that this example refers to replacement / retrofitting a system with another system that provides the exact same functionality, reliability, and cost of the systems being replaced. If any proposals fall short on any of the factors, it is highly unlikely to even begin to make a dent in the market.
A recent example is provided by the cell phone. This product and associated service provided additional functionality compared to the system it replaced. Some countries have been spared the costs of installation of a land-line based system and gone instead directly to the cell phone method. Individual customers apparently were just waiting to be able to carry their telephones around with them. Plus now we have cell phones that have multiple functions.
How long did it take for the cell phone to attain wide-spread saturation of the entire potential market? From Wiki:
That would be about three decades.
And again these are products and services that provided additional capabilities and cost savings over the existing legacy systems. New products and services that provide only equivalent desirable characteristics to those of existing legacy systems have significantly longer market acceptance and penetration time scales. Retro-fitting, for example, is notoriously slow.
That would be your basic additional six decades.
The time required for deployment, that is after development to commercial-grade requirements, is measured in decades for anything you want to name. The telephone is roughly analogous to getting electricity to individual customers.
As another example, for how many years have we heard that individual solar is just around the corner; three decades at least. And the usual strawman that Big Coal, Big Gas, Big Nuclear, and Big You Name It, have received subsidies, huge obscene subsidies, and the alternatives have not, is simply not correct. All forms of production of electricity have always received subsidies. In the early days of wind power, the growth and decay of the number of operating machines at Altamont Pass could be accurately correlated with the status of the tax code relative to alternative energy sources.
No suggested alternative electricity production method can provide continuous electricity to individual customers. Additionally, as alternative sources are added into the mix on The Grid, the alternatives will begin to dominate the operational characteristics of The Grid. Not to mention that distributed power sources are going to require significant additional capital for development and deployment of the transmission systems to get the electricity to the customers. Boone Pickens plans to use his existing gas pipe-line right of ways for both construction space for wind turbines and for the transmission systems for the electricity. While at the same time advocating for increased consumption of natural gas. Natural gas that will flow through his pipelines like money into his pockets as the increased demand increases the price. Boone Pickens is a smart man.
So, what I’m trying to get to is that the time-rate-of-change of all aspects of both phase-out of carbon burners and phase-in of non-carbon burners will shortly become the dominate limiting factors in meeting any carbon-reduction goals. 2012, for example, is only four years from now; actually closer to three than four. 2020 is only 12 years out.
And I do mean all aspects; from mining natural resources and manufacturing capabilities rates for pieces parts, to labor to put the pieces parts together, to front-end design and analyses of proposed systems, to labor and time to carry out mandated various ‘impact’ studies, labor and time to gather numerous stakeholder ‘input’, … the list is very long.
Name any major construction projects, any at all, that can be completed in a time scale of the order of a single decade. Available historical data can be used to get good estimates for the time-rates of change associated with changes in basic infrastructure and these should be factored into all analyses for phasing out carbon and phasing in non-carbon alternatives.
September 20th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
ps
I ran across wecansolveit.org where they say,
“We can switch 100% of America’s electricity to clean energy sources within 10 years.”
Pure nonsense, IMO.