Renewable energy is nothing without the atomic option
By Graham Searjeant, Financial Editor
GERMANY could hardly have chosen a better week to host a four-day international conference to promote renewable energy. Half the world seems to be panicking about the price of oil and gas, and the other half about security of the imported supplies on which nearly all industrialised nations depend.
Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, could pat himself on the back for his foresight. The conference was promised as a follow-up to the ludicrously unfocused Johannesburg sustainable development summit of 2002.
America, Japan and Australia had kiboshed a plan at that to impose targets and timetables for shifting to wind, sun and wave power. Herr Schröder, Tony Blair and the European Commission want to revive it. Although this seems unlikely, the atmosphere is now more conducive to rethinking energy policy than at any time in 25 years.
Economic fear of energy shortage has come together with the environmental fear that burning natural fuels will pump out too much carbon dioxide and change the climate alarmingly. Self-interest and earth-caring virtue coincide.
Mainland Asia, the world’s most populous continent, is taking off into rapid economic growth, making projections of a 75 per cent rise in global electricity demand by 2020 seem credible. China alone is already the world’s second-biggest generator of electricity and the second-biggest user of oil, even though output per head is still little more than 5 per cent of Britain’s. India will not be far behind. On current technology, almost every extra car bought by a worker, manager or trader who becomes rich enough to afford one will also raise global oil demand.
The conference has featured some inspiring ideas. Schott, the glass manufacturer, is exhibiting parabolic trough sunlight receivers designed to enable a chain of giant solar power stations to be built round the world’s hot deserts. In Northern Germany, one company has just built the world’s tallest prototype wind generator and a rival is planning to go bigger and higher.
Naturally, Germany has its own self-interested agenda. When Herr Schröder made his parliamentary pact with the Greens, part of the price was to phase out Germany’s atomic power stations. He and Jürgen Trittin, Germany’s Green Environment Minister, are on a mission to prove that wind power is a realistic alternative, that it will allow cuts in carbon dioxide emissions and that Germany can profit and create jobs by developing the technology and exporting it.
This laudable aim remains just an aim. Three hundred of the prototype world’s largest whirling mast turbines, each 600ft tall and many times bigger than anything yet seen in Britain, would be needed to produce the same wattage of electricity as Sizewell B nuclear station. More than a thousand of the monsters would be required to deliver as much as Yorkshire’s Drax station does from coal, assuming the wind blows. You would still need some Draxes as back-up.
Germany has installed more wind generation than any other country, a third of global capacity. Partly because it does not deliver fully all the time, however, it satisfies just 6 per cent of Germany’s electricity needs. If the giant windmills march north, mile upon mile into the sea, Herr Trittin envisages wind power providing a quarter of Germany’s electricity by 2030. Because wind will mainly replace nuclear, however, even that ambitious aim would have no discernible climatic benefit and little effect on oil demand. Germany has contributed far more to the global environment by its decade of economic stagnation.
Britain’s wind power programme is far less significant than Germany’s. It depends on imports, is already destroying in-shore fishing grounds and is unlikely to reduce UK carbon emissions by a single ounce, again because it is replacing nuclear power.
Already, however, the International Federation of Industrial Energy Consumers, speaking for most of Europe’s heavy users, is complaining. It claims that premium prices charged to subsidise wind power, typically up 15 per cent, are making some of its members uncompetitive. Any significant source of energy needing permanent subsidies from customers distorts trade.
Wind, wave and sun can all make sensible contributions to diversifying energy supplies, some perhaps more than we yet realise. Conservation can help to cut imports and emissions, especially in America, where per capita energy use is twice that in Europe. To suggest that windpower or conservation can solve energy problems is not just silly, however. It is globally condescending and unintentionally racist.
China is keen on renewables, but only to bring electricity to the distant outposts of its empire. In this way, alternative energy can help poor communities round the world.
To accommodate a world-scale economy growing at 9 per cent a year and save hundreds of millions of citizens from frequent brownouts, however, China is building more new generating capacity than Britain’s entire stock over the next two years. Much of this will be coal-fired, as in India.
A report by North America’s Commission for Environmental Co-operation rates coal-fired power stations the worst polluters. Coal provides half of world energy needs. Oil comes next for pollution. It provides two fifths of world energy.
No amount of fastidious Western conservation, no substitute windpower, and no promotion of collective transport will allow the vast poor nations to improve their standard of living without bringing global warming nearer and raising demand for fossil fuels.
While Germany phases out nuclear power and America continues its 25-year hiatus in building plant, China is poised to order four more atomic stations. It plans almost to treble its nuclear capacity within six years. Yet this will still provide less than a tenth of China’s electricity, against three quarters in France, the ozone layer’s friend. Japan is likely to build ten more nuclear plants, Korea is still expanding and India, starved of Western commercial technology, is building many small plants. None is building enough.
Nuclear power is not good enough for the British or Germans, it seems. Fortunately for the climate and for oil prices, it is thought good enough for Asians. To stop carbon dioxide emissions and demand for oil and gas rising, however, Europe and America would have to aim to replace most of their fossil fuel power with nuclear stations, allowing renewables to cope with extra demand.
If Bonn’s conference had promoted atomic power alongside renewables, it might even have changed the world. As it is, it will change nothing.
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