Q
150Albert
Owen: Sorry, can we concentrate on electricity, which is
important for
industry? Tom
Burke: Yes, but as I explained earlier, the
generation gap, as it were—I am a bit reluctant to use that
phrase—that we have because of the phasing out of existing
provision must be filled long before new nuclear can come in, even
under the most optimistic assumptions. If we have a
carbon-neutral coal
option—
Q
151Albert
Owen: I have heard this, Mr. Burke, with
respect, and I have read your evidence, but I am talking about
countries that are looking at extending the current fleet. Does that
not help to bridge the gap?
Tom
Burke: This country is talking
about—
Albert
Owen: So does
Canada. Tom
Burke: If you let me finish, there is a lot a of talk
about a nuclear renaissance. Looking around the world at what people
are actually doing gives you a slightly different picture. There are
not a lot of real commitments. I noticed as I was listening to the
previous panel that not many people are actually putting in orders to
Japan Steel Works, which is the only place at the moment that can
produce the forgings for new reactor vessels. Not many people are
actually paying up the 30 per cent. that Japan Steel Works is asking
for to get into the queue. That is what I am looking at—what
Governments are doing. Mr. Bush offered the nuclear industry
in the United States essentially to pay for the first six reactors that
—
Q
152Albert
Owen: With respect, my specific question was about the
fact that others are going down the nuclear road and also looking at
extension. You may be against nuclear build on principle, but what
about extending current power
stations? Tom
Burke: I am in favour of extending the life of
existing nuclear reactors for as long as we can. I do not want to stop
that. I think
that—
Albert
Owen: Thank you. If others could answer it as well,
please. Benet
Northcote: In one of your exchanges you said
“Let’s stick to electricity, please, if we can, as
opposed to energy, because that is important for industry”. I
agree that it is. Clearly it is essential, but you cannot decouple
electricity from energy, which all the debate is framed on. That is the
misreading that is going on. You cannot say, “Oh, I just want to
focus on the electricity gap” and then talk about energy
security, gas prices and oil prices. Those things are integrally
linked. How do we have a sustainable economy that moves forward and
continues to employ people and provide what we need for our quality of
life without trashing the planet? We need to do that by solving all
those things together. That is why we talk about a solution in a
positive way—an achievable solution built on decentralised
energy, renewable energy and energy efficiency. Those three things come
together.
Q
153Albert
Owen: I appreciate that. What about extension of existing
nuclear power
stations? Benet
Northcote: Extending the life of existing power
stations?
Benet
Northcote: We are talking, what, five years max? Five
or ten years. It is not something that will solve our energy problems
as an issue going
forward. Robin
Webster: I was just frowning to myself, because I was
trying to work out how many questions you have asked me. On one of
them, Benet has just said it: the Government have rather presented
nuclear as winning an argument, saying “We are presenting a
package that is just one of many solutions.” The idea of a
package is important, and Benet has just said it; they teach us to say
it on our line manager’s knee or whatever, and to
think about what solutions are out there: decentralisation, energy
efficiency, renewables. Those are the three solutions that we have to
be thinking about in the energy system. Decentralisation is thinking
about fossil fuel and more efficient use of the fossil fuel resource
that we are currently using in a completely profligate
way. On the Severn
barrage, I slightly misunderstood what you said. Did you say that
communities are seeing the Severn barrage as a structure of wind
farms?
Q
154Albert
Owen: In my community of north Wales, they see windmills
as a distraction. They want to go with other options, because whatever
option people come up with, they seem oppose it. Many people in the
Cardiff bay area oppose the barrage. I was wondering whether Friends of
the Earth still opposed the barrage in
principle. Robin
Webster: We are opposed to it not in principle but
for pragmatism. Again, it is on the same sort of principle as nuclear:
what is going to work best? We have considered tidal lagoons and think
that they would have a far less negative environmental
impact.
Q
155Albert
Owen: Sorry to push you on this. So is the barrage, in
your opinion, a
distraction? Robin
Webster:
Yes. Russell
Marsh: On the nuclear question, there is a lot of
evidence to show that the electricity generation gap that we have is
not actually as big as we may think it will be. We were looking at some
numbers recently and if you include our renewable electricity target,
which could be about 40 per cent. of our electricity by 2020, and
everything currently coming through, we will not have an electricity
gap, so nuclear does not come into that equation. We need to look at
the numbers and get a good sense of what is out there and what we mean
by an electricity gap, which I think was the only question that you
directed to me about the crowding out.
Albert
Owen: I have had my
response.
The
Chairman: We are now going to have four doctors in a
row.
Q
156Dr.
Ladyman: I shall start by commenting on the idea
that—I am paraphrasing Mr. Northcote—the fight
against climate change is one of trajectory and that the effort put in
to develop technologies, such as CCS, up to 2020 will allow us to make
that trajectory up to 2050. However, that is exactly the argument that
you used to reject nuclear power, which cannot make a contribution up
to 2020 and, therefore, can be ignored between 2020 and 2050. My first
question is: can you explain that
contradiction? Secondly,
if you are going to convince me of your arguments, you will have to use
figures. The assertions that I have heard from the four of you today,
and in material that your organisations—Friends of the Earth and
Greenpeace—have put out, contain no hard estimates of what the
alternatives to nuclear power and the energy mixes of today can
produce. You have not given me figures such as, “20 per cent. of
this by 2020, or 20 per cent. of that by 2020.” Will you do that
now? Will you tell me what those are? Greenpeace just sent
us a DVD, which I have watched. It suggests a string of alternatives to
nuclear power as reasons that we do not need the latter. What
proportions of those alternatives do you envisage in our energy mix by
whatever date? When we were thinking about a 60 per cent. carbon
reduction by 2050, Friends of the Earth had a set of proposals for our
energy mix. However, I have not seen you revise those since you started
your campaign for an 80 per cent. reduction. How are you bridging that
20 per cent. gap without having produced a new energy
plan? Benet
Northcote: On trajectory, we are calling for a
fundamental change in our energy system. Be in no doubt about the
ambition that we are calling for. The analogy that I use is with
electricity privatisation—the second time we have talked about
Margaret Thatcher in the Committee. If you had walked into the CEGB in
1983 and said, “I have this great idea. We should privatise the
electricity system and hand it over to a small bunch of oligarchic
companies in a market operating a little like an oligopoly of largely
foreign-owned companies,” people would have told you that you
were completely barmy. But that is what happened, and I think that we
are looking at a similar transition in our energy system. When I talk
about
trajectory—
Q
157Dr.
Ladyman: Are you arguing that we should do something
barmy? Benet
Northcote: No, I am saying that people would have
said in 1983 that the prospect of a privatised electricity system was
barmy, but it did not turn out that way and is now being defended
vehemently by DBERR. My point is that we need to go through another
transformation, starting now, to take us up to 2020 and beyond, as
opposed to sticking with the system that we have got and looking for
technical fixes. You
asked about figures and hardcore numbers. I shall point you towards two
documents: the work coming out of DBERR right now on heat, which I have
referred to already, and the Office of Climate Change report on the
potential of heat and a heat strategy. We could go through the numbers,
but I am not sure that that is the best use of the Committee’s
time. However, I am happy to cheerfully circulate the latest figures to
you. For ease of
reference, I point you to the White Paper on the
future of nuclear power, which is a useful document to look at every
now and then. I could talk to you about some of the alternative
scenarios proposed by DBERR if we did not have nuclear. Paragraph A20,
on the market allocation model—I have been waiting to use this
quote—states that
“when new nuclear power stations
are excluded, electricity generated from renewable sources would have
to play a significant role in electricity generation, constituting over
40 per cent. of the generation mix by
2050.” Stop me if I am
wrong, but we are committed to about that generation mix from
renewables under the EU target by 2020. The very models that the
Government are using in their market allocations show that we can do
this.
Q
158Dr.
Ladyman: Those models were rejected because the Government
do not believe that they are achievable. I am asking you to give me a
picture of
what our energy mix will look like by 2020 and by 2050, which I can test
with people who might invest in it to see whether it is
achievable. Benet
Northcote: Well, I think that I have answered that.
As I see it, we will meet our EU 2020 target of roughly 40 per cent. of
electricity generation coming from renewable sources. It is such a
shame that we cannot ask the Minister his opinion on whether the EU
targets are achievable. There is no doubt that the Prime Minister
thinks that they are because he is on the record as saying so. He said
very clearly that he thinks the targets are achievable. In saying that
you do not think that they are achievable, you have to challenge the
word of the Prime
Minister.
Q
159Dr.
Whitehead: I had a go recently at doing precisely what we
are talking about in a pamphlet that I produced, but I will not
advertise it to anybody.
What becomes evident
immediately is that we have two planning cycles up to 2020, roughly
speaking. On the electricity generation gap, we have to replace 20 or
25-odd GW of our installed generator capacity by that
time. We know that none of that generation will be
nuclear, whatever one thinks of nuclear energy ultimately. Therefore,
we are talking very big numbers. Presumably we will go down a
predominantly renewable path with a number of transitional
technologies, such as combined heat and power, which might include coal
and gas. There will be various mitigating factors, such as
CCS. In
terms of your general view of how energy progresses, what compromises
do you think will be necessary to get us to those big numbers by 2020,
on the basis of the sort of scenario that I have set out? I think that
that vision is probably fairly widely shared. We may have to
use renewable fuels, the Severn barrage or gas with combined heat and
power. Do you regard those as compromises or as part of the big energy
picture? I know that we have not talked about the Bill too much.
However, is it your view that some of the devices in the Bill might at
least give a positive lead towards those numbers being
achieved? Tom
Burke: Let me add more to your problem before
answering it. If we want to arrive at a carbon-neutral global energy
system by 2050, which is what the scientists are telling us we will
need to do if we are to avoid not just the 2°, but the 3°
and more that are predicted, we will have to move to electricity for
all of our heat, cooling, power, communication and mobility needs.
Essentially, that is what a carbon-neutral energy system will
mean. Whatever
forecasts there currently are for electricity demand, they will go up
if we are to move in a direction that will really solve the climate
change problem. We might not go in that direction. Just to be clear
about this point: there will need to be a lot more electricity in the
system. A scenario that does not take you in that direction is not
taking you towards a stable-climate
world. Let me
illustrate that point. If you want to have a carbon-neutral energy
system, you cannot use gas for all domestic boilers. You cannot have
hundreds of millions of domestic gas boilers. One thing that the Bill
could do that would be very helpful would be to make regulations so
that you do not put gas supplies into the 10 new eco-towns and the 3
million new houses. You
will then not have to pay all over again to take them out. That would be
a way of getting ahead of the curve on that
issue. I will move on
to how best to meet the electricity demand that will be created if you
increasingly move to electrify your system. I have been trying to offer
you an answer about renewable sources. As Benet said, the renewables
target of about 40 per cent. will be difficult and expensive to
achieve. There will have to be a fair amount of public money in the
infrastructure—not necessarily in the deployable
technology—to get access to that potential. The rest of it will
come from centralised and essentially largish gas and coal-fired power
stations with carbon sequestration and storage. That is it—about
40-odd per cent. from renewables and a bit more over time as we go
towards the 2050 thing, but the bulk coming from carbon-neutral gas and
coal. We need to get on with that very fast because it is 42 years away
and, as we all know, the life cycle of energy investments is very long.
The danger with things like Kingsnorth, as we lock ourselves into a way
of using coal for electricity, is that we will have to go back later
and pay a lot to make it carbon neutral. It is better that we realise
now the kind of world we will be living in in the next 40 years, and
start now with what we have to
do.
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