How to play the energy game
12 Mar 2003
If, as Harold Wilson once said, 'a week is a long time in politics', what are we to make of Tony Blair's announcement last month of an initiative with a near 50-year timeframe?
Under the prime minister's proposals, the UK and other European Union states will agree to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by the year 2050 - setting targets far in advance, in every sense, of the current Kyoto protocol agreement for an 8% reduction by 2010.
If this is the statesman's dream, what is the politician's reality? The answers can be found in the government's energy White Paper, published on the same day.
As with Blair's proposals, the aspirations towards a sustainable future ring out from the White Paper. What comes out less clearly, however, is the detail of just how - and when - we shall ever get there.
According to energy minister Brian Wilson, 'if renewables and energy efficiency can prove themselves over the next five years, there will be no need for new nuclear power stations.' Now there is a hedged bet, if ever there was one.
In the White Paper the government has set a target for renewable sources of energy to meet 10% of demand by 2010, yet has downgraded its earlier target of 20% by 2020 to what is now another 'aspiration'.
Whichever way you look at the problem, it is difficult to see quite how the government's sums are going to add up. 'Renewables' have an awfully long way to go if they are ever to replace the 23% of the nation's power supply currently generated by the nuclear industry.
In fact, they have a long way to go to meet that 10% target by 2010. In spite of over 20 years of R&D effort, they collectively contribute only 3% of generating capacity - and a third of that comes from traditional, though geographically limited, hydroelectric power.
So, if the 2010 targets are to be met, the output from the alternatives of wind, wave, tidal, solar, biofuels and other renewable energy sources, will have to expand four- or five-fold in just seven years.
Admittedly, the government is making money available to encourage investment in these renewable technologies, increasing capital grants to a total of £350million over the next four years and giving an extra £70million to the Carbon Trust. But comparing these sums with the billions being spent on shoring up the beleaguered nuclear generator British Energy, investors might well wonder about the long-term future for renewables.
The White Paper has effectively left nuclear power in limbo, but has not made a sufficient commitment to the alternatives - despite acknowledging that by 2020 the country could be having to import 75% of its energy needs.
Nuclear power was, of course, part of Harold Wilson's 1963 'white heat of technology', in which a new Britain was to be forged based on scientific endeavour. Forty years on, nuclear power's continuing future looks bleak, but it's a fair bet that it will still be needed if Blair's 2050 dream is ever to become more than just that - a dream.
