We must cut our emissions without cutting energy supply

Chief executive of Britain's single biggest source of electricity – and carbon – calls for safety net in energy policy
Dorothy Thompson, chief executive, Drax Group
guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 May 2009 17.46 BST

How Britain meets its ambitious carbon reduction targets while ensuring the lights do not go out is one of the biggest policy challenges for this government and the next. We do not want the credit crunch to be succeeded by an energy crunch, with equally destructive consequences for individuals and the economy.
For the near future, coal will play an important role in escaping an energy crunch, and now we have a better understanding of how the government plans to achieve this without compromising its goal of cutting carbon emissions by 80% by 2050.
Drax is Britain's biggest carbon emitter because it is Britain's biggest single source of electricity, meeting about 7% of total demand. But it will not become a demonstration plant for carbon capture and storage (CCS).
This is not to say that we are not supportive of CCS, or indeed that this technology is not potentially the long-term solution to carbon emissions from fossil-fuel electricity generation. The reality is that CCS may not prove to be the answer we are all looking for and, even if it does, it remains a long way off. CCS is unlikely to make much contribution to the UK's target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 34% by 2020, and it will be expensive. A modern coal-fired station fitted with CCS today would need to generate 25% more electricity just to power the equipment that will remove the increased carbon it is emitting. Additional costs will be incurred in CO2 transportation and then its storage in the UK's offshore depleted gas fields.
So we need a safety net if CCS turns out not to be a panacea, and we need one that works now. If we, as a nation, are serious about abating carbon from coal and ensuring security of supply, then we need to do two things. First, look hard at what can be done today to cut emissions through strategies such as co-firing (burning renewable biomass alongside coal). Second, we need to raise generating capacity in this decade, as well as in decades to come.
That is why our focus, and our investment, is on the here and now, and why Drax has the most developed biomass strategy of any energy producer in this country. As with CCS, there are challenges. Having carried out trials with more than 60 types of biomass, we are confident that we can scale up to that level of output, and that we can get sufficient, sustainable supplies of raw material. But we also need to be sure the economics stack up.
The same, of course, applies to any low- or zero-carbon technology – be it CCS, wind, tidal power or nuclear. There is a trade-off between how much carbon we want to remove from the atmosphere, how much capacity we want to retain to safeguard security of supply, and how much we are prepared to pay to achieve those two goals.
A sustainable energy policy has to marry the short-term imperative of keeping the lights on with the long-term objective of achieving our climate change targets. No one will thank us if, in planning for the future, we neglect the present.