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6.
Throwing caution at the wind
Wind
power
is currently the most successful of the new renewables. According to
a study Risoe National Laboratory in Denmark, reported at
the recent Conference on technology for dealing with Climate
Change held at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in
London, wind power will become
competitive with conventional gas and coal power plants in seven to
ten years. And Tom Delay, chief executive of the Carbon Trust, a joint
organiser of the conference, said that offshore
wind plant would be especially competitive, creating enough power for
domestic use and for export. However, there were some calls for caution
about a rapid a shift to new technology. Nebojasa Nakicenovic of the Vienna
University of Technology, who is the former head of the UN Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change’s scientific team, predicted that, globally,
some conventional coal-fired plant was still likely to be in operation
until 2055, especially in countries like China where there was huge demand
and lots of coal. He added that premature deployment of new technologies
would be costly. And nearer to home, this note of caution has been
paralleled by comments from Scottish Power, one of the UK’s largest wind power developers.
According to a report in the Guardian (Nov 5th), Ian Russell, chief
executive of Scottish Power, felt that Britain “needed to be careful”
as it moved from old sources of energy to new. Although he believed
that there were enough developments under way to meet the UK target of producing 10%
of the country’s electricity from renewables by 2010, Britain should not “shut old
stations before we have got new ones ready”.
A review by Standard & Poor, the
investment analysts, added further fuel to the widespread belief that
actually, the U.K. renewable energy industry
may not reach the government-set target of
10% by 2010. It suggests that windpower, which is expected to be the main means of reaching
this target, may suffer from under investment. “The Renewables Obligation
scheme, introduced in April 2002, may not provide
sufficient incentives for investments in renewables. The U.K. scheme appears less supportive than in other EU countries.
This and other factors mean that the U.K. lags considerably behind countries such as Denmark, Spain, and Germany, despite having a greater abundance of windy weather.”
Matters have not been helped by the
economic caution exhibited by investors. Japan’s Nichimen Corp recently
pulled out of wind power operations abroad, including those in the UK. Evidently it does not
anticipate sufficient profits in the area. It will dissolve four UK-based
companies, including Ecowind Ltd.
However, in its new report ‘Power
Switch: Impacts of Climate Policy on the Power Sector’ WWF suggests
that power companies that don’t engage with renewables could miss out
on considerable profits and could face costs equivalent to over 10%
of 2002 earnings as they are hit by global and national climate policies.
The most-affected companies in the European Union were seen as E.ON
and Scottish Power, with possible cost increases of up to 9% of their
2002 earnings.
Although it is clearly not doing too
well at present, with symbolically, Germany, shutting down the first
nuclear plant in its closure programme in
November, the nuclear industry is still positive about the future- and
seems to see its fate and that of renewables as being linked. At the
RIIA conference, Richard Mayson, technology
director for British Nuclear Fuels, claimed that after 2020, nuclear
energy would make a major comeback at the expense of traditional gas
turbines. From 2030 onwards, nuclear energy and energy from renewables
would dominate, he said. ‘Nuclear power is already exceeding the
Kyoto Protocol carbon targets,’ and newer, safer plant was
under development and would be commercially deployed from 2010.
Sources: RIIA, Utility Week, Standard
& Poor, AFX-Focus, WWF
WWF report downloadable from: www.panda.org/news_facts/newsroom/other_news/news.cfm?uNewsID=9750
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