Lighting-up time

PROF BOB CYWINSKI, Dean of Applied Sciences at the University of Huddersfield, looks at the energy crisis facing the UK.

Almost a week after a particularly indecisive general election, and the seemingly endless negotiations between the political parties, the dust is finally beginning to settle.

We now have a new Prime Minister and a new coalition government which will probably attempt to blend seamlessly the Conservative and Liberal Democrat policies.

According to the media, the political focus throughout the interparty discussions has been almost entirely upon the economic crisis, a global phenomenon which also requires specific and urgent actions at a national level.

Surprisingly, however, a similar, if not even more important, global crisis with dire national consequences has all but been ignored. Yet this crisis could have long-term repercussions on all our lives, our economy, and our planet. It is the energy crisis.

Today each man, woman and child in the UK uses about 1.6kW of energy on transport, 1.6kW on heating and 0.7kW of electricity every day.

This may not seem very much, but unfortunately the energy for transport and heating, and 80 per cent of our electricity, is produced by oil, coal and gas, which also on average generate almost three quarters of a kilogram of carbon for every kW-hour.

Add to this the energy used in manufacturing, and the total annual production of carbon in the UK is estimated to be around 200 million tons!

What is perhaps equally worrying is that oil, coal and gas are limited, non-renewable resources for which we rely increasingly upon imports.

One way that we could clean up our total energy act would be to produce more electricity more cleanly, and then use the additional electrical energy for heating, transport and industrial processes.

This might help us to decrease our carbon production to the target of about 50 million tons by 2050, but it would also increase our electricity demand from 40GW (the equivalent of 30 large power stations) to about 120GW.

But how could we meet this electricity production target without proportionally increasing the carbon footprint?

Clearly we cannot continue to do so with oil, coal and gas.

The necessary technologies associated with carbon capture and sequestration (that is the underground trapping of carbon dioxide in geological deposits), need considerably more development. It is also unlikely that these technologies could be retrofitted to existing power stations.

Perhaps we could turn to apparently eco-friendly wind, solar and wave energy generation?

Unfortunately, simple calculations show that even with technologies beyond those available today these sources could never produce more than 20-30 per cent of our total electricity needs.

Moreover, wind and solar generation cannot be considered as a “baseload” source of electricity because of the vagaries of our British climate. Back-up generation will always be needed.

Additionally, although wave, wind and solar power certainly do have a place in a mixed energy economy, the environmental impact of these forms of energy generation, both on-shore and off-shore, could be enormous.

Realistically, therefore, that leaves us with only one serious option for baseload electricity generation. Nuclear power.

Although there is still public concern about nuclear power, particularly associated with perceived safety, the resulting radioactive waste, and the danger of proliferation, nuclear power has now achieved almost 13,000 reactor-years of operation over 32 countries with a much lower accident rate than any other method of electricity production.

Nuclear power also has by far the lowest carbon footprint (about one hudredth that of coal or oil).

At present, 20 per cent of the UK’s electricity is generated by nuclear reactors (compared with 80 per cent in France) but our reactors are approaching the end of their operational life and by 2025 the last of the present fleet will close down. Consequently, in 2009, the previous Labour government finally grasped the nuclear nettle, and committed to build up to ten new nuclear power stations in UK.

Labour’s rather belated show of enthusiasm for nuclear power as an essential part of a clean, sustainable energy economy is echoed in the Conservative manifesto.

However, the price for the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition could be a disastrous derailment of this emerging solution to the energy crisis.

The Liberal Democrat manifesto advocates a total U-turn on nuclear new build and finds no place for nuclear power in the energy economy.

We don’t yet know whether energy policy appeared on the negotiating table over this past week, but if it did the new Deputy Prime Minister’s Don Quixote-like obsession with windmills might just lead to the lights going out across the UK within the next decade.