Extracts from the Sept-October 2001 edition of Renew
These extracts only represent about 25% of it

2. New Energy Strategy?

Windpower Monthly say the future ought to be ‘windpower mostly’

The Government has announced a new PIU review of energy strategy (see later), including nuclear strategy. But its support for renewables still seems strong - it’s even allocated £1m to tidal stream work, and seems keen on wave energy.

However this may not be welcome by all. ‘Siphoning off money that could be used to accelerate the uptake of wind power into technologies which have yet to prove themselves feasible does not appear to be a rational use of public money’. So said consultant David Milborrow and editor Lyn Harrison in the leader article in Windpower Monthly (WPM) in May, noting that ‘wave energy is enjoying a sudden renaissance in Britain, but there seems to be no detailed technical justification for why wave power is getting money instead of a renewable like small tidal barrage that has already proved itself viable’.

Clearly WPM weren’t just attacking wave in favour of wind Instead, they called for ‘hard headed’ analysis of the technical and economic pros and cons of all the options, so as to help governments decide ‘on support priorities for bringing the most commercially viable options to market’. In particular they say there is a need to decide on ‘how that support should be split between research, development, demonstration and market stimulation’.

Fair enough, but their view seems to be that the emphasis should be on the later stages of helping technologies to reach the market, whereas one would think that R&D is where governments should really focus most. Since R&D is long term, commercial outfits are less interested, and it’s relatively cheap, compared with later stages in the innovation process, so it wont break the Treasury. But Milborrow and Harrison say ‘it is not the job of governments to pick technologies for funding which they think might become winners: research and development must money must be allocated across the whole spectrum, using priorities evolved from sound technical argument’.

Well, maybe, although inevitably there are priorities - and for example wave, tidal streams and PV solar have been given very low priority until recently. And quite right too, seems to be the view expressed in the leader article, which is backed up by an article in the same issue in which Milborrow and Harrison argue that, although the resource is large, wave technology is still in its infancy and faces many problems, not least survival in the hostile marine environment. So they say it shouldn’t get R&D support! They say tidal stream technology is better, since it's based on wind turbine technology, but the resource is small. Geothermal is OK, but the resource is small in the UK. Similarly for small hydro and small tidal barrages. They add that, although solar technologies receive more R&D funding than windpower, solar thermal is in decline, while the ‘output from PV is about a half to one third of that of wind from the same capacity’. But they do put PV alongside wind as ‘the only energy source with unlimited potential’. Finally, the EU is chastised for seeing a ‘far greater role for biomass than for wind’, when in reality ‘biomass will mainly only be competitive in Europe if linked to subsidies connected with agricultural land’.

If this sounds like a pretty partisan pro-wind, anti-almost everything else, analysis, then, they would no doubt reply, that’s because wind is genuinely the best option, with only a few rivals. Well, maybe so. PV is certainly expensive and has low load factors, and the economics of biomass are still very uncertain. But wave and tidal turbines have the advantage over wind turbines since they use a medium of much higher density than air, so they can be much smaller for the same power output.

Whereas it is useful to carry out technical analysis on this sort of level, and they do raise some interesting points, underlying at least part of the WPM critique is a hostility to subsidies - a familiar editorial line in that journal. Obviously it would be better if coal and nuclear did not continue to enjoy massive subsidies in many countries, then renewables could begin to compete on a level playing field. But for the moment that’s not the situation, and, without environmental externalities being reflected in the prices paid for electricity, it is difficult for them to lift off purely by virtue of their own economic power. They need help. If, after having been heavily subsidised, on - land wind has now reached the point when it doesn’t need help, that’s fine - it can step out into the open market. The others will hopefully follow in time - including offshore wind, wave and tidal and then PV and biomass. Pushing the ladder of support away after you’ve benefitted from it is not very charitable or wise - we’ll need them all to deal with climate change.

Really it's a matter of timescales. Wind Power Monthly sometimes argues editorially that renewables will not be best served by continuing subsidies. Obviously that’s true in the longer term. But the question is surely when will they be able to stand on their own feet. That’s a particularly important issue for new technologies. Milborrow and Harrison argue that ‘there must be ‘decision points’ when R&D is stopped if the prospects for new technologies look poor’. But doesn’t the whole sad wave power saga in the UK illustrate the folly of killing off new options, on the basis of inevitably rough estimates of future costs, before they have time to show what they might be able to do?

All that said, the WPM analysis does remind us that there is a need to look critically at the claims being made by proponents of each option. In particular, it notes that some of the rhetoric surrounding ‘micropower’ is overblown and confused- a point made well by Milborrow in Renew 130, reinforcing what we said in Renew 129. Small is not always beautiful, and small turbines or fuel cells, run on fossil derived fuel, are no great shakes in environmental terms. WPM puts it like this ‘wholesale replacement of of large power stations by numerous small units will increase, rather than reduce, greenhouse gas emissions’, and ‘large combined cycle gas turbines, far dirtier than wind, generate lower emissions than fuel cells’.

Clearly it might look different if we are talking about using renewables sources for these devices, but as WPM note, there are economies of scale, and many renewables will be best operated at the larger scale. Distributed / dispersed power may play an increasingly important role, especially if it uses renewable sources. But that’s not necessarily the same thing as off-grid power - there is also a need, at least in in most places in most industrialised countries, for grid links, to deal with the imbalances between local supply and demand, and to feed in power from larger renewable sources. Quite so. But it would be a pity if all WPM end up saying was that ‘only big wind is any good’.

We’ve invited David Milborrow to reply in Renew 134.