At the other end of the scale, a review of projects supported by the European Commission under the THERMIE/DEMO programme indicated that as many as 40% were outright failures. Strategic planning was not much better: most energy supply and demand forecasts had been proved wrong so far, as Prof. Farinelli from ENEA Rome ably demonstrated.
We will be reviewing the conference papers in Renew 93. Clearly, given the vast range of topics, there was no overall conclusion. However the main topic for the conference was 'Climate Change: Energy and Environment' and there was a common theme linked to this running through many of the key note papers at the opening plenary sessions. Although greenhouse global warming and carbon dioxide emissions were very important, it wasn't the only strategic environmental or social issue. To some extent we had become obsessed with carbon dioxide savings almost to the exclusion of all else. While the DTI wants us in the UK to shift to using oil equivalent (mtoc) as the standard unit (see earlier) in practice many of us are nowadays thinking in terms of millions tonnes of carbon saved. Thats fine as far as it goes, but even in terms of global warming, what about methane emissions? And in terms of acid rain - what about SO2, NO2 etc? More generally, what about the other social and environmental issues - air quality, health, employment and local economic development?
A single minded focus on CO2 reduction could be sub optimal strategically - not least in providing the nuclear lobby with a chance to push its wares. None of this was said explicitly at the opening sessions at Reading, but these strategic issues were hinted at e.g. by Mike Grubb who felt we needed to balance the various social and environmental concerns. In general the moral seemed to be one of trying to link environmental objectives to economic concerns.
Thus Japans ambitious New Sunshine renewables programme (see later) is not purely altruistic : its part of their industrial strategy. And, more immediately, Prof. David Hall, argued that the only way to get CO2 saving going was to focus on technologies (like biomass combustion) that would lead to a commercial product - energy - rather than hope that someone would plant more trees.
However addressing the opening session, Dr Adam Brown from ETSU admitted that although the contribution could be very large, the size of the energy crop element projected in ETSU R82 report (see Renew 90) might have been a bit over the top...
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