Despite the evidence of over a generation that energy efficiency does not lead to large demand reductions, environmentalists like Porritt continue that energy efficiency is such a powerful tool, that nuclear power is unnecessary as a fossil fuel replacement. In addition to nuclear power, Porritt touts renewable energy sources.
Porritt recently criticized Green nuclear advocates by asserting:
There are all sorts of widening fault-lines on energy policy within today’s Green Movement. In the good old days, we’d just rub along together happy in the knowledge that for almost all of us energy efficiency came first, reducing the use of fossil fuels and vastly ramping up renewables came next, with nuclear (and carbon capture and storage for that matter) largely seen as a bit of a sideshow.Porritt does not offer an justification here. He simply chides pro-nuclear Greens for not following the party doctrine. What is the Green Party doctrine?
It’s becoming clearer and clearer that we’re now into a strict fight in terms of those two options. The days when people talked about “co-existence” are long gone; this is now either/or, not both/and. And disturbingly, in every single decision that the UK government has taken over the last few months, it’s clear that they’ve thrown in their lot, yet again, with the nuclear industry. Fukoshima doesn’t seem to have changed that.
Porritt has been a critic of British plans to use nuclear power as at least a partial replacement of coal fired electrical generation technology. Porritt has always portrayed himself as being opposed to nuclear power on practical rather than ideological grounds. The public would not accept nuclear, Porritt has argued, and in addition
the markets will not put up with it . . .Porritt has not justified his comments on public and market opposition to nuclear power, Yet he fails to not that a majority of the British public supports nuclear power, and numerous studies have shown that nuclear power is more reliable and less costly than renewables.
George Monbiot has recently criticized Porritt:
Monbiot demonstrates exactly how disingenuous Porritt's claim that the British Government has thrown in its lot with the nuclear industry by noting that a recent report by the British Committee on Climate Change Which called for a division of future electrical generation, I don't understand why the nuclear question needs to divide the environment movement. Our underlying aim is the same: we all want to reduce human impacts on the biosphere. . . .
The idea, on which there's also wide agreement within the movement, is that the petrol and diesel used to power cars, buses and trains, and the gas and oil used to heat our houses, should be partly or mostly replaced by low-carbon electricity. That means an increase in electricity supply, even as, with sweeping efficiency measures in all sectors, our total energy consumption falls.
So the only question that divides us is how this low-carbon electricity should be produced. I don't much care about which technology is used, as long as the other impacts are as small as possible, and greenhouse gas emissions are reduced quickly and efficiently. None of our options is easy and painless.
• 40% renewablesMonbiot points out that the committee Climate change report notes,
• 40% nuclear
• 15% carbon capture and storage
• Up to 10% gas without carbon capture and storag
Nuclear power currently appears to be the most cost-effective of the low-carbon technologies. . . . Although there is a finite supply of uranium available, this will not be a limiting factor for investment in nuclear capacity for the next 50 years.Monbiot asks Porritt to explain,
• What has the Committee on Climate Change got wrong?Porritt is said to be working on a response. However, Porritt's views have never been fact based, so what facts can Porritt offer in his response? The Real problem with the Plan offered by he Committee on Climate Change is its reliance on Renewables to generate 40% of British electricity. The committee probably knew this, but it was politically unacceptable with the pro-Green members of the governing coalition to say so. In fact not only is British wind power already impractical as a major electrical source, but the situation may get a whole lot worse during the next 40 years, due to changes that appear to already be underway in wind patters near the British Isles.
• Could you explain your contention that nuclear power and renewables can't co-exist?
• Do you believe that renewables are a better option than nuclear power in all circumstances? Or would you agree that beyond a certain level of difficulty, of cost, of visual intrusion and other environmental impacts (damming estuaries and rivers, building power lines across rare and beautiful landscapes for example), nuclear becomes a more attractive option?
• If you are to exclude nuclear entirely, what should the mix of electricity generation in this country be?
According to government figures, 13 of the past 16 months have been calmer than normal - while 2010 was the “stillest” year of the past decade. . . .Although Monbiot has adopted a reasonable approach suggesting the Porritt make lay out his case in response to a number of reasonable questions. There is not a chance that Porritt is going to make a case that will withstand Monbiot's response, and of course this means that Greens are already attacking Monbiot, again.
statistics suggest that the winds that sweep across the British Isles may be weakening. Last year, wind speeds over the UK averaged 7.8 knots (8.9mph), a fall of 20 per cent on 2008, and well below the mean for this century, which stands at 9.1 knots (10.5mph).
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17 comments:
Maybe I should try to answer some of them.
For the first one:
• What has the Committee on Climate Change got wrong?
They aren't saying ~90% nuclear.
For the second one:
• Could you explain your contention that nuclear power and renewables can't co-exist?
If you have nuclear then you won't see much need for renewables (maybe a bit of hydro for load following and blackstarts but not wind farms and solar farms).
The main reason so far that anyone thinks wind is worth having is because they want to reduce CO₂ emissions and fossil fuel usage by being able to run a gas plant less (whether it actually gets the reduction is another matter) but that isn't an issue if the wind is backed up by nuclear (which has cheap fuel and doesn't emit any extra CO₂).
In a world of changing climate, where an area once windy can become without warning a doldrums, where a river fed by melting glaciers suddenly has no more glaciers left to feed it, and where rainy seasons suddenly develop over places where the sun used to always shine, how can anyone say that "renewables" are somehow a more predictable, sure and secure source of power than oil, coal, and nuclear?
@Anon I am in complete agreement with you. I have argued for several years that if nuclear is cost competitive with renewables, reliability becomes the most important issues, and nuclear is far more reliable than solar or wind. None of the issues which renewable advocates raise, safety concerns, nuclear waste, nuclear costs, and nuclear proliferation, amount to much when compared to the effects of unreliability on renewable energy.
My new TV is 3 times as energy efficient as my old one. My old TV used 200 Watts my new about 400 but the picture is SIX TIMES as big!
zeonglow you make the point that Efficiency advocates ignore. Greater efficiency often increases energy consumption, rather than diminishing it.
Jevons paradox has a nasty habit of biting those who think we can conserve our way out of a problem created by increased energy efficiency (which made the use of coal much cheaper).
But ultimately energy is the ability to do work so if we want to be able to do more work then we are going to have to get more energy (efficiency can help but you still need energy (and I suspect that higher energy civilisations are actually more efficient at turning their energy into useful work)).
When I replaced my incandescent lamps with CFLs, I didn't always replace with "watt-equivalent" bulbs. Sometimes I would put a 100-watt equivalent in a socket where there was a 60 watt bulb before. My kitchen is much less gloomy now. Just one more example of Jevon's paradox.
There's nothing wrong with advocating efficiency, of course. The trouble is that in practice economic growth and decreasing marginal gains in efficiency will limit its effect.
Say we became 30% more efficient. That would be quite an achievement, I think. With 3% annual economic growth, how long would it be before we are back in the same position we were before?
Porritt version of sustainable development requires that total global energy output be greatly reduced while global poverty be eliminated at the same time.
Problem is, the only way to substantially reduce poverty (it will never eliminated totally) is to increase energy consumption. While making this substantial reduction in poverty does not require the energy intensity of (say) the United States, it certainly requires an energy intensity much greater than that "enjoyed" by most the world's citizens. This means more global energy production, even if the energy intensity in the high intensity nations is reduced.
donb I believe that enough productive work can be made available to virtually eliminate poverty on a global level for future generations. Poverty reduction is possible if we don't make prioritize eliminating energy consumption above the elimination of poverty. Indeed there is no reason too do so.
I would like to ask a question. When I read about the enormous cost of nuclear plant production, it's difficult for me to tell what is included in those costs. In particular, are legal costs and regulatory costs included? It seems to me that many of those costs could be eliminated through legislation. Are they significant? I would expect nuclear plant production to be expensive, but the price tag estimates you hear about are so enormously high I find it difficult to understand why.
If we had a standardized plant design, and legislative protections, how much would plant production cost?
Everything that is paid out before the nuclear plant is included in start up costs. Not all start up costs are building cost however. Perhaps meeting regulations requirements contributes more to start up costs, than any other expense. It might not be wise to lower the cost of conforming to regulations, however.
Thanks for your reply!
CharlesB,
Wind/solar advocates fear that if nuclear is allowed to compete then wind/solar will not gain significant market share. Thus nuclear has to be "off the table" for what ever reason.
Anonymous (one of them anyway): When I replaced my incandescent lamps with CFLs, I didn't always replace with "watt-equivalent" bulbs. Sometimes I would put a 100-watt equivalent in a socket where there was a 60 watt bulb before. My kitchen is much less gloomy now. Just one more example of Jevon's paradox.
Not really, a 100 W equivalent CFL probably uses a little less than 20 W steady state (about double that right as you turn it on until it warms up) so unless you are using it a lot more you won't have increased energy consumption (though you didn't get the reduction the fanatics say you would).
Jevons paradox doesn't always happen, but it happens often enough to prevent increased efficiency from being a solution to the problem we've got.
Charles Barton: donb I believe that enough productive work can be made available to virtually eliminate poverty on a global level for future generations. Poverty reduction is possible if we don't make prioritize eliminating energy consumption above the elimination of poverty. Indeed there is no reason too do so.
Not only is there no reason to do so but those people living in poverty aren't going to be very interested in helping it along and they'll burn whatever they can find to keep warm without regard for what the rest of the world thinks.
charlesH: Wind/solar advocates fear that if nuclear is allowed to compete then wind/solar will not gain significant market share. Thus nuclear has to be "off the table" for what ever reason.
True of course, though the non-hydro renewable industry is too small to really have much effect on its own (but with help from the fossil fuel industry which would like to distract people away from nuclear...).
Beware of relying on aggregate measures such as GDP for making statements that an economy is "growing". Such numbers are arbitrarily defined and full of erroneous conventions (for example, counting issuance of debt instruments and various types of consumption as productive). Presently Western economies are regressing (that is, contracting). This is unlikely to change any time soon, probably not for a decade or more. In such a situation significant reductions of energy consumption could well be expected to occur. For example, in North America an unemployed stay-at-home is not likely to consume more than a fraction of what he would have done were he to have retained gainful employment at, say, a factory. A retiree triaged into a care facility is going to consume less as he experiences a managed accelerated decline (who is going to pay to keep him alive and consuming anyway?) and termination.
The straitened economic difficulties of the Great Recession serves the green agenda (even though they studiously ignore their own contributions to bringing it on and even though their ideology is wrong).
Sione
The reason that the US government's measures for lowering emmisons have been unsuccessful is a simple cost benefit analysis. The additional profit made by a firm not changing its practices to cut emissions is greater than the tax break incentive, definitely in the short term. Also there is no guarentee of consistency of governmental policy on the issue, so it is risky to change practice. For the US government to be effective they must impliment a penalty based approach on emissions, and a strict one. However, the Republican party in particular, would never allow such a threat to business, and it would be hugely unpopular. However, in Western Europe, such legislation may well be both possible and effictive,so should not be wholly dismissed.
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