From The Sunday Times, May 23, 2010:
My fellow protesters were rather heartened by the coalition’s “programme for government” announced on Thursday. We are protesting about National Grid’s plans for a line of pylons marching towards London, across our rural part of Suffolk and Essex, carrying the extra power that is to come from wind farms in the North Sea and a new nuclear plant at Sizewell.
More pylons are the Orwellian downside to the low-carbon future. And this is just the beginning. Here and in the Mendips in Somerset, the path of the pylons lies through areas of outstanding natural beauty, which celebrated their 40th anniversary as protected landscapes last week. We have been writing letters and going to meetings trying to persuade National Grid to put the cables underground for the whole route. As you do.
So when our eyes lit on a line in the programme for government that promised to “deliver an offshore electricity grid in order to support the development of a new generation of offshore wind power”, we cheered. An electricity grid under the sea means fewer power lines strung across the countryside. You just go underwater from Scotland to London via the Thames Estuary. Come to that, you can link wind farms and nuclear power stations all around the coast on a giant offshore ring-main.
There is a lot to recommend this idea, promoted by our resourceful local group, Stour Valley Underground, and considered, in part anyway, by the deeply conservative engineers of National Grid. They accept that some of the western route, from Scotland to south of Liverpool, would be no more expensive than a conventional upgrade. The whole offshore grid would undoubtedly cost a packet — hundreds of millions a year for the foreseeable future, a significant hike on customers’ bills. Steep, yes, but the new grid wouldn’t just save my view — important as that is — it would, in theory, also enable us to trade electricity across Europe, recouping our investment in wind energy. If we are going to expand offshore wind, which is the only form of energy the Conservatives and Liberals seem wholeheartedly agreed on, then why not be strategic about it?
Further tacit support for this idea came last week from the climate change committee and various industry bodies, which said offshore wind, wave and tidal power could generate the same amount of electricity by 2050 as 1 billion barrels of oil a year, matching the amount of energy generated by North Sea oil and gas. In other words, we may soon need the offshore ring main simply to avail ourselves of all that offshore energy.
Irish politicians are calling for the European Union to subsidise a European offshore grid. Germany also likes the idea.
It would be the giant infrastructure project of our day, rather as Sir Joe Bazalgette’s London sewers were for the Victorians. This is a time of heady new possibilities. And we are all rather enjoying it while it lasts.
Now for the reality check: the constraints on the costly green aspirations published by the two parties last week. The first of those realities is that almost a third of Britain’s coal and oil-burning power stations will have to be phased out under European Union pollution laws by 2015 — the end of this government’s fixed term. If we don’t get an extension for those old coal plants, which is unlikely, Ofgem, the regulator, has warned that lights could start going out by 2017.
More power will undoubtedly have to be found fast as a result of Labour’s 13 years of inaction. The coalition knows it. Since its first draft, the coalition’s energy policy has acquired telling references to establishing security of energy supply, suggesting civil servants have briefed both parties on the urgency of the situation. Offshore wind, however green, does not increase security of supply — because the wind does not blow all the time. That is the contradiction at the heart of the coalition’s new programme. Nuclear would increase security of supply but won’t — indeed, can’t — be built fast enough.
So security of supply is likely to come from (non-renewable, non-green) gas, because a technological breakthrough has opened up “unconventional” gas from shales in America and other diverse sources. This is reality number two. Gas, which has half the carbon burden of coal, is the fossil fuel of the next five to 10 years, whatever the coalition’s long-term ambitions. And for now it looks like the cheapest way to keep the lights on.
I’m afraid we will have to take the coalition’s well-meaning and admirable promises on energy — an increase in renewables, feed-in tariffs that allow your home to become a power station and new coal-fired stations with carbon capture — with a large grain of sea salt. And although I would love an offshore grid, I fear it will not come soon enough to save us from more pylons.
For while the coalition’s green promises are mostly to be paid for through our energy bills, and not directly through the exchequer, the reality is that it’s the Treasury that makes decisions about any real-term increases that will stoke inflation. And it will be wary of pushing up our bills while squeezing us harder to fill the gap in the public finances. Green ambitions are all very well; it’s paying for them that hurts.
Charles Clover.
Article online here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7133848.ece
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