21/10/2014
There is already a lot of excited chatter about the effect the fire at Didcot B power station will have on our electricity supply over the winter. But since this has only affected four out of 31 cooling cells, and has left the generating plant untouched, it is unlikely that there will be any long-term affect.
However, the very fact that the power station had to be shut down at very short notice adds stress to an already stressed system. However, even had we lost the 1.3GW supply, there would have been no immediate risk of the lights going out. Although it would have put posted capacity very close to peak winter demand, there is still a "
hidden reserve" of 10GW in the system, the same as three Hinkley C nuclear power plants.
Nevertheless, the fire does show how fragile the system has become, and how vulnerable it is to disruption. Didcot is the third major fire in a non-nuclear power plant this year (Ferrybridge and Ironbridge) and with two major nuclear plants out of order (Heysham and Hartlepool), there is no flexibility left in the system.
Furthermore, we should not just be looking at the UK. If the Ukraine situation bubbles over, and Mr Putin reacts even more than he had already doen, the whole of Europe could be short of gas over the winter, and competing with us for supplies.
Also France is due to close a major nuclear plant shortly, and disruptions to Belgium nuclear plants - connected in with the French system - means that there is
3GW offline there. France may, as a result, find it difficult to supply the 2GW it sends us through the interconnector.
Given these additional stresses, a prolonged cold winter could bring us to the edge, where another major incident such as Didcot could be the tipping point, with a serious risk of blackouts and even grid collapse. In the latter event, some major areas of England could be without power for 2-3 weeks.
But what is not realised is that, had the last government stuck to its original plans for electricity supply, we would be at no risk of collapse, and the national system would be much more resilient, because we should have been furnished with another 10GW from combined heat and power (CHP). But, because of successive failures in government energy policy, that safety margin does not exist.
To trace the failures to their roots we can go as far back as 1982 when the House of Commons select committee on energy visited Denmark to examine schemes there, coming back with the view that the successful application indicated that CHP in the UK, "would be an insurance policy with a low premium against a future of possibly insecure and expensive energy supplies".
Despite this prescience, it was not until the 1990 White Paper on the Environment that we saw a formal government target for CHP. This was set at a mere 4MWe of installed capacity for the year 2000 â doubling the then existing capacity. As early progress was encouraging (from a very low base) in 1993, the government announced an increase in the target to 5GWe as part of the UK Climate Change Programme.
In
March 1996, a report for the Department of the Environment followed in the footsteps of the MPs in 1982 and reported that Denmark had implemented a national plan to utilise the heat energy more effectively.
Local authorities had cooperated with utility companies to install commercial and domestic heating systems based on the use of the hot water or low pressure steam from the power plants. In 1987, for example, 46 percent of their heating had already been based on CHP or district heating schemes and had been forecast to reach 56 percent by the turn of the century.
This move has already led to the conversion of an average 37 percent electrical efficiency across the country to about 55 percent thermal efficiency. One of the utility companies made the point that if the current Danish efficiency could be applied at a stroke in China, it would save more coal than the whole of Europe currently burns. Consequently, in terms of CO2 and air pollutants, the report concluded, the key is to improve efficiency.
Only three months later, the first Government CHP Strategy was published, dated June 1996. It identified barriers to further progress in expanding the uptake of CHP and opportunities for the future. At last, the Government was taking CHP seriously, but it was not to last.
In June 2000 the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP)'s report: Energy â The Changing Climate, was published. It was this that set us on the path to a 60 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which was all too soon to become an 80 percent emission reduction target â a move which was to spell the demise of CHP.
Two years later, though, in 2002, we saw the launch of the a
draft strategy on CHP, updating previous work. Environment Minister Michael Meacher declared that the government was still committed to the future of CHP and was making changes to the Climate Change Levy worth £15m per year, increasing to £25m, to make the technology more viable.
In December of the same year, Mr Meacher was
telling MPs that his department was developing the draft CHP Strategy, which would set out the measures needed to achieve a target of at least 10GW of "good quality" CHP by 2010.
This was followed in short order by the
2003 Energy White Paper entitled: "Our energy future - creating a low carbon economy". Published in the February, it had a foreword by Tony Blair in which he reinforced the linkage between energy and climate change - "largely caused by burning fossil fuels".
The white paper, Blair said, gave "a new direction for energy policy", showing leadership by putting the UK on a path to a 60 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.
It should be noted that the target had remained at 60 percent reduction â not 80 percent as it was later to be. And to achieve this, combined heat and power (CHP) fitted into the "wider picture". The white paper also noted that the UK had reached around 5GW of CHP installed capacity.
A year later, in 2004, came the Government's
full CHP strategy for 2010, which had Margaret Beckett continuing to aim at our target of 10GWe of "good quality" CHP capacity in the UK by 2010.
By then, the Government was at last beginning to understand the huge potential offered by CHP. It was citing a 1997 report which had given a range for 2010 of between 10 and 17GWe, the latter being close to the capacity of the nuclear sector. Additional work suggested a further potential of 2GWe in community heating, bringing the total to 19GWe.
It only took three years more for another energy white paper, this one in
May 2007, Notable was the way CHP was still very much on the agenda, with eighty references to the technology in the text.
From there we finally saw an official government evaluation of technology, carried out on the behest of the European Commission and its CHP Directive. Entitled, "
Analysis of the UK potential for Combined Heat and Power", it modelled capacity reaching 16GW by 2015 â nearly a quarter of Britain's peak demand â with a further potential for 21.5GW of district heating.
This was not expressed as a target, but a potential. And it was one which was never to be realised. A year later we were see the Climate Change Act which between the second and third reading upped the ante from 60 percent emission cut to 80 and made it a statutory requirement.
And there lay the death sentence for CHP. In future plans, it effectively disappears off the map at 2030. While low-carbon CHP could have contributed to the 60 percent target, the 80 percent target rendered it obsolete. Only low-carbon renewables, nuclear and CCS-abated coal and gas were allowed. CPH didn't fit the profile.
Organisations such as
Greenpeace which were extolling the virtues of CHP in 2007 were voluble in
mid-2008, telling us in a
commissioned report that there could be up to 16GW more industrial CHP, the equivalent of 8 nuclear power stations.
There was the
occasional flutter as government support was reduced but, by and large, support has been muted since the 80 percent emissions target became law. With small-scale, gas-fired CHP, the target cannot be reached.
As a result, what could easily have become 16GWe of installed CHP capacity by the end of next year is set to be missed by a clear 10GW. Installed capacity of "good quality" CHP is stuck at 6GW, only one GW more than it had been 12 years previously in 2003. Thus we have a missing 10GW, an extra capacity which, if it was available, would have added a comfortable margin to what is going to be a tense situation.
However, readers can be assured that our masters will not be troubled by blackouts arising from their neglect. Despite depriving the nation of the undoubted benefits of CHP, No.10 Downing Street and
22 other buildings in Whitehall, including the DECC offices, the Treasury and the Civil Service Club, are supplied with heat and power from a private power station in the bowels of the main MoD building, the heat distributed via 12km of insulated piping to the departments.
Contracts were awarded in
December 1995, in the dog days of the Major government, and at a cost of £7.82 million, a 4.9MWe Altstrom gas turbine was installed, capable of delivering 8MW of heat. It was fully commissioned
in October 2005, just as Mr Blair was working up to his energy policy that was going to turn the lights out all over the UK.
This ensures that, when the blackouts come, Mr Cameron will be as warm as toast, and basking in taxpayer-funded light. And, as is their due, his mandarins can continue to sip their G&Ts in the comfort of the Civil Service Club, without having to resort to anything so vulgar as torches and candles.
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