Power warning as Labour dithers

The Sunday Times
March 15, 2009

Blackout fears as power station plans are put on hold
Alan Copps and Danny Fortson

BRITAIN faces being plunged into a 1970s-style era of blackouts and power cuts unless the government accelerates plans for future energy supplies. The warning, from power firms and energy analysts, comes after plans for a new £1 billion coal-fired power station — the first in three decades — were put on hold by the energy secretary, Ed Miliband.
It is the first time the companies, which rely on government support for new low-emissions projects, have been so openly critical and reflects a growing frustration at the official prevarication over the building of a new generation of power stations as well as the belief that Britain’s ageing infrastructure will be unable to cope with future demands.
The row will fuel the debate about where Britain will get its power from in the next 20 years and has caused a three-way split between power companies on one side, green campaigners on the other and the government in the middle. “The UK faces a potential energy crisis in the form of a massive gap in generating capacity,” said Paul Golby, chief executive of Eon, the company behind the £1 billion planned power station in Kingsnorth, Kent.
“Renewables could not work on the scale required to replace the coal, oil and nuclear plants due to close in the next decade.” If the gap was not closed, Britain faced the possibility of blackouts, Eon said.

Eon first applied to the government to build the new “clean coal” plant at Kingsnorth two-and-a-half years ago. The decision on whether to give the go-ahead has been postponed several times.
Earlier this month it was put back again until the autumn. The delay has provoked criticism from clean-technology groups who say the power station would have been among the world’s lowest-polluting coal burners through the use of carbon capture and storage (CCS), which buries waste carbon instead of releasing it into the atmosphere.
“We have this looming energy gap and if we refrain from building any new coal stations there are serious implications for energy security,” said Jeff Chapman, chief executive of the Carbon Capture & Storage Association.
Britain relies on a power-generation infrastructure conceived largely in the 1960s and plants supplying a tenth of all power will be shut down within the next four years, according to Utilyx, an energy consultancy. Renewable energy such as wind power is not yet mature enough to fill that gap and any new nuclear power stations will not be ready in time, say energy experts. Gas stations would leave the country dangerously reliant on imports.
Despite the fact that coal is the most polluting form of power, accounting for 40% of global emissions, it has become increasingly attractive over recent years because of its relative abundance and cheapness. To meet EU emissions standards, the government must demonstrate that CCS can work before it gives the go-ahead to the new Kingsnorth plant and similar stations.
It is running a competition under which it will award “several hundred million pounds” to fit one UK power station with CCS. Three projects are in the running, including the new Kingsnorth plant.
Next week, though, Golby is expected to demand that the government foot all of the estimated
£1 billion extra it will cost to fit Kingsnorth with CCS. In exchange, he said Eon would use the technology to capture all the emissions from the plant, rather than just a quarter of them, as currently proposed by the government competition.

Environmentalists and some MPs, however, are critical. The technology has been described as a fig leaf to allow a new generation of polluting power stations to be built and a pipe dream diverting badly needed resources and attention away from renewable technologies like wind.
One of the most outspoken opponents is James Hansen, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and a veteran campaigner on global warming. He has written to Gordon Brown, Barack Obama and Angela Merkel calling for a moratorium on all new coal-fired plants.
He wrote last month: “The dirtiest trick that governments play on their citizens is the pretence that they are working on ‘clean coal’.
“Coal-fired power plants are factories of death. When I testified against the proposed Kingsnorth plant, I estimated that in its lifetime it would be responsible for the extermination of about 400 species.”

However, Tom Kerr at the Paris-based International Energy Agency said: “If we are to decarbonise and really push through with this energy revolution, CCS is the only option that has the capability of getting us there.”
While the government wrestles with the green lobby, and launches another round of consultations, the power companies say that time is fast running out.
Dire warning of relying on imported gas
SINCE 1995 all we have built to replace old coal and nuclear power stations have been gas-fired power stations. We risk substituting an overdependence on coal for electricity with overdependence on foreign gas. All of our energy eggs are falling into one basket.
Twenty-five years ago about 1% of our electricity involved burning gas. Now the figure is 43%. As older coal, oil and nuclear plants come off line to meet EU emissions targets, and new clean coal plants such as Kingsnorth in Kent are repeatedly delayed, the situation is deteriorating.
Of all the power stations being built or in the planning stage — a total generating capacity of some 20GW — 90% is gas-fired.
In 11 years we have seen eight different energy ministers, three contradictory energy white papers and a drift in policy resulting in over-reliance on one type of imported energy to generate electricity for the medium term.
Britain started building gas-fired power stations in the early 1990s to reduce coal’s dominance and help meet new Kyoto emissions targets. This was coupled with the belief, as stated by Michael Heseltine to the Commons in 1992, that Britain’s North Sea gas reserves offered, “gas supplies for another 50 years”.
Less than 20 years later we have become a net importer of gas. To secure this gas Britain will have to pay top price. We are at the end of the supply lines from Russia and on the coldest days, as we have discovered, very small volumes can reach us as other customers come first.
There are also serious questions over Russian gas reliability. New schemes such as the Nabucco pipeline connecting Europe and the gas-rich Caspian, through Turkey, will help but they are years away and reliant on regional geopolitical factors such as future Turkish EU membership.
We can buy more gas from Norway, but new pipelines are being built to send more Norwegian gas to our neighbours. We can seek to buy more frozen gas (LNG) but again, as we have discovered, LNG cargoes can easily be diverted on the high seas to the highest bidder.
By dithering on energy and approving more gas-fired stations the government has in effect capitulated on the challenge of a more balanced and secure energy mix.
Over-reliance on coal brought the country to its knees in the last century. Over-reliance on imported gas could do the same.
Tony Lodge
- Step off the Gas — Why over-dependence on gas is bad for the UK, by Tony Lodge, is published by the Centre for Policy Studies