Wind, sea, coal and nuclear power. Yes please

The Times
April 27, 2009
As climate change ministers gather in Washington today we must try every energy option to shift to a low-carbon world
Ed Miliband

To crash an SUV into a Toyota Prius is the ultimate environmental faux pas - and in a memorable episode of The West Wing, the President's adviser, Josh Lyman does just that. He organises a low-carbon summit to atone, but finishes demoralised. His summit participants all find reasons to attack each other instead of uniting around low carbon.
Too often, the energy debate in the UK feels the same. There is a temptation for people to justify opposition to each form of low-carbon power, but the truth is that on grounds of energy security and climate change, we cannot afford this luxury.
Everything we know suggests that there can be no comfort any more in a high-carbon energy policy. If we pursue this course, we risk finding ourselves unable to meet our climate change commitments and facing a more difficult and painful transition to low carbon in a world where prices have been pushed up, by both global demand and agreements to put a price on carbon. And as if that wasn't enough, we would also miss the huge low-carbon industrial opportunity for Britain.
So as well as improving energy efficiency, we need to pursue the trinity of low-carbon technologies: renewables, nuclear and clean fossil fuels. On renewables, we are already the country with the largest offshore wind generation in the world. More capacity is being built. But if we are to win the prize of low-carbon diversity, we need to look at other technologies too: tidal power, solar and wind power on land as well as at sea.
Of course, wind turbines will change the look of parts of our countryside. People are right that wind farms need to go through the proper planning process. But the truth is that the biggest threat to our countryside is not the wind turbine, it is climate change. Biodiversity, our coastline, our land - all are under threat from dangerous climate change.
That is why we need to examine our attitudes to onshore wind. Many local communities are taking a lead, and they should have a stake in local projects. That is why we are introducing a guaranteed price for people to feed locally produced renewable electricity back into the grid.
We also need to take on the arguments that people make about renewable power. To all those who scoff at the idea of wind making a difference, my reply is that last year enough power for all the electricity for two million homes came from wind power.
Similarly on nuclear. It's safe to say that I did not grow up in a household that was enthusiastic about nuclear power. Few people were in the 1970s and 1980s. Energy companies, not taxpayers, should pay the costs of clean-up - and that's now in legislation. But with safeguards on cost and safety in place, I believe, like many others seeing the threat of climate change and the need for a solid base of low-carbon power, that we should support new nuclear energy.
In Scotland, the Nationalists still repeat “no thanks”, refusing to contemplate nuclear and insisting on a one-club energy policy. They are putting roadblocks up to low carbon, even as Scottish voters appear to support new nuclear power.
From some people, however, even those keen on both renewable and nuclear power, the low-carbon power that receives the most scorn is, in fact, the one I believe to be the most important still to be developed: clean coal.
Consider this: the rich world must act first, but that won't stop dangerous climate change unless we help the poorest countries to act too, not to abandon growth but to move from high-carbon growth to low-carbon growth. In China and India, for example, coal provides two thirds of their power, and as their economies grow their coal use grows too. The problem of coal, the most polluting fuel on the planet, is a global one that needs a solution.
Even in the UK, a future without coal would most likely not mean more renewables, nor more nuclear, it would mean more power stations burning imported gas. Energy security comes from diversity, and coal provides an important part of that diversity.
That is why the most important technology the world can develop is the technology to capture carbon emissions and store them permanently deep underground.
Last week I had a surprising exchange on the radio with the leader of the Green Party. Most economists think that government should support R&D, where the market fails. The Greens took the opposite view and said we should leave clean coal to the energy companies alone.
Large, risky, projects, able to help save the planet and seed a whole new potential industry in Britain creating up to 50,000 jobs, cannot be left to the market alone - and that's why we are now going to support up to four big demonstration projects, each one ten times bigger than the largest currently running in the world. There will be a cost to this, but it is far better to prepare now for the low-carbon future, rather than being left behind in a high-cost, high-carbon alternative.
The Government has a role to play too in making sure that while the new technology is developing, the old technologies don't get locked in. That's why I proposed new rules to ensure that no new coal-fired power station can be built without capturing a proportion of its carbon from day one, and 100 per cent of it when the technology is ready.
Back in the fictional West Wing, summit completed, penance done, Josh Lyman took the view that low-carbon technologies “are the future... and they always will be”. Always for the future, never now.
The biggest barrier to preventing climate change is no longer denial, but defeatism: the technologies are at our disposal or within our grasp. In Washington today, President Obama is hosting negotiators from the major economies, preparing for the global summit on climate change in Copenhagen in December. With international co-operation and political will, we can make the shift to low carbon, protect our energy security and make the world safe from dangerous climate change.
Ed Miliband is the Energy and Climate Change Secretary