It can be done but what is it we are doing?

The Times
April 30, 2009
Carl Mortished: Analysis

"Oh Lord, make me carbon-neutral, but not yet.”
If St Augustine were in charge of UK energy policy, he might utter such a prayer. The sheer scale and cost of putting Britain on the path towards zero carbon is only beginning to become apparent.
In its report, published on Thursday, the UK Energy Research Centre suggests that a carbon price signal of £200 a tonne, 15 times the present level, is needed if we are to reach the Government's target of an 80 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050.
Small wonder, then, that the centre is dismissive of the Government's aspiration of generating a third of electricity from renewables by 2020. That we have barely started — wind accounted for about 1 per cent of power generation last year — is reason enough to be sceptical. What is more important, however, is not whether we match some politically inspired timeline (always just beyond a minister's career horizon) but whether the practical steps that must be taken to get even halfway towards the desired goal are affordable.

Recessions have a way of concentrating minds over the nitty-gritty price tags that must now be stuck on policies dreamt up when we thought we were rolling in clover. We are almost a decade away from 2020. In the energy industry, a decade is the lifespan of one big project.
The notion that Britain has the engineering capacity to build 30 gigawatts of wind power in the time available is fanciful. It is highly doubtful, even after the recent increase in the value of the renewable obligation, that the private sector has the appetite to commit resources to such a gargantuan objective.
More relevant is the rarely asked question whether the public wants the British power industry to undertake this challenge, when the costs are fully understood. If we are to go down this road, we are more or less saying goodbye to a free market in energy. At present, power companies selling electricity generated from nuclear, coal or gas bid their capacity into the grid but must buy a certain amount of wind power — the renewable obligation.
Such a massive increase in wind-generated power is causing headaches for National Grid as it seeks to ensure that all those off-shore turbines have equal access to the system as the power stations sitting close to the economic centres in southeast England. To make matters worse, wind often does not blow, so the investment in expanding the grid is hugely inefficient. On average, wind turbines operate at 20 per cent of capacity, so we still need all those coal and gas power plants to fill the gap on cold, still days.
The solution, suggested by some, is to have a clever system that can prioritise wind. When it blows hard, the proposed 30GW of wind-generated power would become the base load. Every electron from every whirligig would be used — nuclear, coal and oil would pick up the slack.
That would make best use of the resource and it would cut out more carbon, but it would turn the market on its head. Instead of a system that rewards the most efficient and cheapest source of power, we would have a command to buy the most expensive and unreliable. By government diktat, the stuff that powered your fridge would be gold dust, not coal dust.
We can do these things, slowly, but must understand we are doing more than just building windmills. We are moving from a market economy to a planned economy. It will be hard to go back.