Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200
- 207)
WEDNESDAY 12 JANUARY 2005
MS GAYNOR
HARTNELL, MR
PHILLIP COZENS,
MR JOHN
STRAWSON AND
MR MARK
CANDLISH
Q200 David Taylor: I know it is,
but we have tended to keep the two in separate categories. You
are suggesting that we should not.
Mr Cozens: Exactly; it is a resource.
Q201 Chairman: One question area
that I would like to close with in a moment is about security
of supply, but I want very quickly to go through your evidence
and ask whether you could write to me on one or two points. On
the second page, there is a terminology "NGT Seven Year Statement".
Can you drop me a note and explain what that means and likewise
explain to me what the table under "Lifecycle emissions from
renewables" is supposed to tell me. It would be very helpful
if you could perhaps write a paragraph or two on the payback for
domestic use of solar panels. It strikes me that there are some
pretty high up-front costs for that and also photovoltaic equipment,
which means the uptake at the domestic level is very limited.
Under "Key recommendations for RO" you have a paragraph
entitled "Keep the quotas rising". Could you please
write a bit more and explain what that means to me? The question
I wanted to ask is: in the United Kingdom at the present time,
we have a declining share of CO2-free electricity generation
from nuclear. It seems to me at the moment that the renewables
sector is taking the place of some of that lost nuclear, so we
are not getting a net gain of new CO2-free sources
of power, we are getting a replacement. The second proposition
I should be grateful for your comments on is about just how seriously
we can take the actual 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week, 365-day
availability. In the case of something like hydro, you have a
summer shutdown for maintenance. In the case of the United Kingdom,
you only need a UK-wide high pressure system and you have knocked
out most of wind. So we are left with one or two things you can
burn and store as, if you like, the absolute core of a renewables
proposition. Therefore, if you are going to be able to call on
100% of what you need at any one time, you have a lot of potential
redundant CO2 producing capacity that you have to keep
there. It does draw into question whether in fact, shall we say,
benevolent as we might feel towards your technology, we could
brutally say "Is it worth the trouble?" What we ought
to be doing is going to make the other sources better, picking
up Mr Drew's point about nuclear, perhaps having some more of
that and not bothering with all this bitty stuff that you are
talking about because we cannot count on it. Now, rebut that contention.
Ms Hartnell: To start with, the
very bittyness is actually what often does provide the security.
At the moment, we need to have about 1,000 megawatts of what they
call "spinning reserve" which is coal-fired plant which
is kept part-loaded to cater for when the electricity, going onto
the system suddenly goes down. We need that spinning reserve at
the moment to cater for the very largest power plants, in case
they suddenly trip, or for the interconnector, were that to trip.
As the penetration of wind increases, you are going to need eventually
to have some extra spinning reserve to cater for the wind. The
cost will be very small. So much research has been done on this
in the lead-up to the White Paper and even since then, which I
can send you references to, but the costs are minimal. It is because
of that bittyness, the fact that the wind is dispersed all over
the country and you never really get the whole place totally becalmed.
There are endless studies on the statistics of it. That in itself
is an advantage for energy security. You mentioned the summer
shut down for hydro. Again, there are many hydro plants in the
country; they do not all shut down at the same time. I have never
even heard that raised as an issue for energy security before.
Q202 Chairman: Well you ask the Italians;
that is part of the problem they faced, but anyway we will not
go into that.
Ms Hartnell: They choose to shut
down all their plants at one time, so that is not very clever
management on their part. It is not an issue here in the UK at
all.
Q203 Chairman: In terms of where
the potential for renewables lies, where can you pitch it, where
you can say day-in, day-out, we can count on X% from renewable
sources as being, if you like, a renewables contribution to base
load? Are you ever going to be able to deliver that?
Ms Hartnell: We have an inter-connected
electricity system. It works because it is totally inter-connected.
Q204 Chairman: I know it works, but
you can count on nuclear, coal, those are here, now.
Ms Hartnell: You can count on
a certain amount of renewable production, even it is intermittent.
You can always rely on that being there, in the same way that
you can rely on a certain thermal plant being there.
Mr Cozens: History tells us that
we can also rely upon a certain amount of waste. It is difficult
to prove, but it just keeps coming and the composition does not
change much either. There is a huge resource.
Q205 Chairman: We have a huge public
relations battle to convince people, taking up the points Mr Taylor
was making earlier.
Mr Cozens: It is a battle, but
it is very convenient for the same people who would complain about
energy from waste to be myopic about their own profligate consumption
patterns.
Q206 Mr Drew: What is the total capacity
of renewables if we have the rate of increase in energy use at
the moment or perhaps even slightly less? In other words, if we
lock into this replacement of nuclear renewables, which has to
get you to somewhere about 25%, what is the capacity beyond that,
that renewables will fill?
Mr Strawson: In my experience,
looking round at other countries which are doing renewables to
a far greater extent than we are, I would put that figure—and
Gaynor would have her own idea—easily, given time, probably
10 years, at 30% from renewables and 10% of that could be, with
the land area that we have at our disposal, from energy crops.
I think it is right for renewables to play a major role and it
is quite right for a hybrid of renewables to be the right approach.
On continuity of supply; energy crops and electricity from biomass
and what we are doing as well are obviously not intermittent and
just as secure as coal.
Mr Candlish: A couple of points,
one on the intermittency. National demand is hugely intermittent,
if you go from day to night; we have vast amounts of capacity
summer to winter, which vary. So that is not unfamiliar to our
system. It is also easy to say "The wind is not blowing so
the turbine has stopped", but those are generally very small-scale
examples across what would be a very broad network of a large
number of schemes. You do not often get problems with the large
500 megawatt generation sets, but when you do, you really know
about it. It was too warm in France last summer, so they could
not cool their nuclear reactors and we were bringing on oil-fired
plant here to back those up. You only need to look at the trips
on the East Coast and West Coast of the United States last year
to see what happens when networks of these, fantastic when they
work, very large power stations, but when they go down, it is
absolutely catastrophic. There are downsides there to the super
grid, the 1950s model of power generation. What was the other
point?
Q207 Mr Drew: What is the figure
that renewables can reach?
Mr Candlish: I think the number
is high and the one critical point to get in here is that renewables
is not just electricity. It is also heat and heat has a massive
contribution to play here. It is not represented in any government
department at the moment. It is not lobbied for, because it does
not have a multi-billion-pound industry representing it and it
is a fantastically efficient use of the sort of resources that
we can indigenously develop. Right now in Slough, we operate a
biomass combined heat and power plant, but we do not operate it
in combined heat and power mode, because there is no incentive
for us to give the trading estate renewable heat. The lobbying
is constantly focused on electricity production to the extent
that when you are talking in committees like this and so on, throughout
the government departments, if you mention the word "heat"
people say "Oh, you mean combined heat and power" which
is the electricity version of heat. Nobody is talking about the
incredibly valuable local small-scale grassroots projects which
can deliver a vast capacity in a very short timescale.
Chairman: Upon that very positive note,
may I thank you all for your contribution. I look forward to your
further written evidence and thank you very much indeed for stimulating
us with some interesting thoughts this afternoon. Thank you.
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