Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260
- 265)
TUESDAY 17 JUNE 2008
Professor Gordon MacKerron
Q260 Lord Lawson of Blaby:
It would be wind and nuclear but you think it would most unlikely
to be wave, tidal or solar.
Professor MacKerron: It would not be
wave or tidal and it absolutely would not be solar photovoltaics
because, although they are technically very exciting and getting
cheaper, they are still very expensive.
Q261 Chairman:
Can I just move to heating for a little and perhaps ask you the
same question about the best buy in terms of renewables. What
is the best buy against fossil fuels or gas central heating?
Professor MacKerron: Heat has been a
sector which, whether you are dealing with renewables or anything
else, has been much neglected. Energy policy has been all about
electricity for a very long time in a way that I think has over-emphasised
the importance of electricity. For heat there are a number of
established small scale technologies that are, by some definitions,
renewable but work very well. There are various forms of waste
combustion which raise political difficulties but are actually
normally cheap and in my view a rather effective way of managing
a good deal of waste. Although not much widely used in the UK,
biogas from agricultural waste is actually a very effective form
of generating potentially heat and other by-products, but probably
not a major source for a country like the UK. Then one comes onto
the difficult question of biofuels and the obligations for renewable
transport fuel obligation and wider European Union obligations
which I think realistically are too taxing for us to meet whether
it is 2010 or 2020. Nevertheless I think there are real prospects
and again in the area of second and even so-called third generation
biofuels there is a very great need for substantially greater
efforts in research and development because in these newer generations
of biofuels the plant matter will almost certainly not compete
in the same way with food uses of land because using cellulosic
and other materials may allow us to use marginal land in quite
productive ways. I think for heat biofuels as a longer term bet
have some real prospects. Beyond that it is very difficult to
know.
Q262 Chairman:
As you suggested governments have not spent as much time or attention
as they have done on power generation. How would they tackle promoting
heat in a way that was comparable to the Renewables Obligation
in power generation? How would one approach this if you really
wanted to get at heat? What would they do?
Professor MacKerron: There have been
suggestions about imposing various kinds of heat obligations not
unlike renewable energy obligations. That is not impossible but
I do not think it has been thought through in any way as to make
it potentially at the moment a coherent issue. There is clearly
significant scope for combining heat with power or combined heat
and power at various scales ranging from the household to the
industrial to the municipal and so on. To be commercially viable
you need a reasonably good spread between the various different
prices, in particular the probable gas input price and the electricity
output price. When gas prices rise too high it becomes commercially
unattractive, but in the long term I suspect that we could get
a lot further than we currently have by judicious expansion and
incentivising on combined heat and power at various scales. However,
that has not been a matter of enough policy interest nor has there
been enough governmental work or, for that matter, academic research
to enable us to say with confidence that we can get very far with
technologies like combined heat and power, but I would say that
is probably, because well established technically, a very fruitful
way forward.
Q263 Lord Lawson of Blaby:
In another context you pointed out various kinds of collateral
advantages you saw in various different renewables. There are
also sometimes disadvantages. In the case of biofuels is it not
the case that biofuel production requires the use of inordinate
quantities of water and is that not something of a problem and
indeed a cost in the real sense?
Professor MacKerron: You are absolutely
right and it is very important to say that biofuels are far from
the same thing in different agricultural and other regimes. Brazil,
the pioneer, happens to have a form of biofuels based on sugar
cane which does offer very large carbon emission reductions compared
to the equivalent volume of fossil fuels. The use of maize in
the American Mid-West does not at all and on some calculations
is a net carbon emitter compared to fossil fuels, so one has to
be extremely careful to specify what kind of biofuels in what
environments. Your point about water use is a very serious one
in water short areas. Biofuels is a very diverse set of technologies
and we should be very careful not to talk about it as if it were
a single thing, but in many circumstances it has real problems,
I agree.
Q264 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston:
I would like to ask a quick question on nuclear cost. We are told
in some of the more recent developments the costs have been escalating
in an unexpectedly aggressive fashion. Why is this happening when
it is an old and apparently stable technology in places like France?
Are people striving for some particular gain that is producing
all this uncertainty and undermining the economic model?
Professor MacKerron: Some of the recent
escalations are, as it were, the backwash effect of world commodity
prices which affect nuclear construction as they do others, but
the other thing to say is that virtually all the nuclear technologies
that are now under commercial construction in the world—that
includes both Finland and France, the two prominent EU recent
examples—although they are based on historic technology
and the nuclear core is really very similar to technologies that
are now 40 or 50 years old, nevertheless they have been substantially
improved with more passive safety systems and improvements of
one kind or another. However, unfortunately, none of them has
ever been built at full scale until the first commercial order.
As most engineers will tell you, even if it looks like it is familiar,
if it is new and you have never built it before you are very likely
to run into first of a kind—sometimes second and third of
a kind—problems. That has certainly occurred in Finland
where there has been difficult interaction between the local safety
regulator and the French leading constructor. Even in France some
difficulties are emerging. Although officially the design of reactor
in France, the so called EPR (European Pressurised Water Reactor)
is in the same family as the one in Finland. The French design
is not the same as the Finnish design, maybe because the safety
regulatory systems in the two countries differ. It is very difficult
when you play around with technologies like that to control the
cost, especially when you have not built them in very large scales
anywhere before.
Q265 Lord Layard:
Do you think it is going to be possible for us to meet the target
by 2020 of 15 per cent from renewables?
Professor MacKerron: It is possible but
I would say low probability. I think if we do meet it it will
be potentially at quite high costs, taking costs in their stand
alone sense. We have every possibility that as we build more renewables
and we learn and we get economies of scale we will come down some
cost curves but we are also likely to move to less and less favourable
locations given that renewables, especially in the form of wind,
are very location dependent for their economics. It is imaginable
but I think it is fair to say that within Government and perhaps
behind closed doors most of the officials are exceptionally worried
about the feasibility of the target. I do not think we are currently
in a position of planning for it. When Government, for example
announced the possibility of the 33 gigawatts of offshore wind
it does not seem to have done any serious work on the huge industrial
and logistical implications of such a vast programme, whereas
it does seem to be a bit more interested in the logistical implications,
for example, of a nuclear programme. I think we would only realistically
be getting towards that 15 per cent if we pay a lot more attention
to some of what we used to call indicative planning back in the
1960s because markets are jolly good things but they do not actually
solve all the problems. When one has a huge industrial project
of this kind we do need a bit more of what we used to call planning
if we are to get somewhere near meeting the target.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed, Professor
MacKerron. You have been very helpful.
| 
