Charlemagne: the Economist’s view on renewables as snake oil

Every week the Economist magazine has a column about Europe under the name “Charlemagne”, who was the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire stretching across Europe, which was neither holy, nor Roman nor an Empire, as Voltaire pointed out. So Charlemagne the Journalist in the Economist is not quite what he or she infers by using the name of an Emperor crowned by the Pope and later canonised. 

Last week’s offering “Let them burn snake oil” (the Economist 19 January 2008 page 37) calls renewable energy snake oil and seems to be written from the viewpoint that the European Union’s renewable energy policies will offer some of everyone’s favoured snake oil, to placate all the differing members of the Union. 

It is quite astonishing that Charlemagne designates renewable energy as snake oil. Snake oil was sold by travelling salesmen in the west of America as a cure all remedy; it would not only cure every disease that you had but would also make you attractive, live much longer, shoot straighter and ride faster. Usually it contained nothing more than alcohol and herbs for flavouring, although some concoctions also had arsenic inside. 

In fact renewable energy makes no such claim; generally all renewable energy does what it says on the tin. Solar panels provide heat, PV provides electricity as do wind turbines and none of this is in any way “snake oil”.  

Charlemagne complains that countries determined to subsidise “expensive” forms of green energy will be allowed to carry on. I am afraid that this modern journalist emperor is looking at things through the wrong end of the telescope; it is fossil fuel energy that is expensive, not renewable energy.  

The truth is those of us that who fossil fuel do not pay the true cost of it. We only pay the cosy of extracting the stuff and using it. We do not pay for the dirt and climate change problems that burning creates, because these are mostly suffered elsewhere. Anything for cheap energy is Charlemagne’s mantra.

I suppose that all emperors have a tendency to believe that the world revolves around their empire and anything outside it that they cannot lay their hands on is irrelevant, foolish and wrong. 

Charlemagne also criticises the way in which all types of expensive snake oil (as he sees it) will be encouraged by the European Union. I have news for Charlemagne; it is about time he came out of the first Millennium and into the third. If we are to alleviate climate change problems we need as many weapons as possible.

Armies do not have just one weapon with which to fight – they use many different weapons in many different situations. So must it be with energy policy. We have one set of weapons for microgeneration, another set for mass generation and many strategies in between. We do not know yet which are the most effective – there are doubts about biofuels and bio mass, for example, but we do know that solar panels (as Charlemagne claimed “much beloved by Germany” are also much beloved by Austria, Greece, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Italy and Spain in Europe, and not to mention Australia, South Korea, the United States of America (need I go on?).

Does Charlemagne think that these countries are simply indulging in a local technology to favour local industry? I think that he should have a grown up attitude to solar panels. I also think he should learn the difference between real medicine and snake oil. 

He (why do think I think Charlemagne is a “he”?) also criticises the fact that the European Energy package will have a long wish list and multiple goals, which he regards as “muddled”. I have explained why we need many weapons and if many different European states develop them, so much the better. We ought not to waste time looking for a mythical silver bullet when we need plenty of real weapons.  

Of course Charlemagne should understand that energy policy will always have multiple goals – one is the provision of energy, another is the alleviation of climate change, another is the reduction of pollution and another is energy security. Somewhere in the list of goals affordability should also appear, but it is not number one on the list.  

I am afraid Charlemagne’s advice to Europe “leaders really need to agree which objectives matter” is out of date and out of touch. European leaders ( I hold no candle for them but we have to write the truth) know what matters and they are trying to address the difficult and complex task of figuring out how to do it across many member states with conflicting national interests and who start from differing places. The debate now is about the detail, and rightly so; I think most of us in the third Millennium understand the principles involved.  

Electric cars which you can use for electricity storage

Sometimes you need vision to identify a solution to a problem and the hardest thing is to think laterally to solve the problem. Storing electricity is hard to do, especially in large quantities. In the home you store heat in your radiators and in your hot water cylinders and tanks but you do not usually store electricity save in the batteries of a few hand held devices. 

If we could easily store electricity we could save a great deal of energy. Electricity power stations operate most efficiently when they run at constant rates, but the demand fluctuates greatly. So we waste a lot of fossil fuel is generating electricity that no one uses and which we cannot store. If we could store it we would generate less of the stuff, thereby emitting fewer pollutants and less carbon dioxide. 

To store electricity on a large scale is very hard. You can build highly inefficient large batteries but these have their own environmental problems. You can build a dam and create a lake below the dam. When you have surplus electricity you wish to store, you can pump the water up to the dam. When you want to use the electricity you can let it flow back to the lake through generators which feed current back into the grid. There is actually one of these storage sites in North Wales, but they use land, a scarce resource close to urban areas, and flooding land has several bad environmental effects including the release of carbon dioxide and methane from rotting vegetation. 

There  might be other ways of storing electricity but no one could think of them until eleven years ago when Willett Kempton of the University of Delaware and Steven Letendre of Green Mountain College thought about electric cars.  They reasoned (eleven years ago), before a single electric car was available for sale, that if every car in the United States was powered by electricity the battery storage capacity of all those cars would have much greater capacity than all the US  electricity generating utilities.

They also knew that all cars spend much more time idle and not being driven than they spend being used. In fact cars spend 95% of their time doing nothing with their engines turned off. Why not use the massive batteries in electric car for storing grid electricity when the cars are not working and draw out the power if necessary when the cars are idle? The critical part of this thinking was to recognise that electric vehicles are not just a load but also offer storage possibilities. They also recognised that instead of renewable electricity export to the grid (which often is inefficient and often happens when the grid does not need the current) the batteries of electric cars can be used to store domestically produced renewable electricity from your PV system or your local wind turbine. 

In 1997 there were no commercially produced electric car and the computer software and hard ware industry was a lot less sophisticated and a lot more expensive than it is today. There was no broadband. Now in 2008 researchers at the University of Delaware (Willett Kempton again) have found a way to use electric cars and hybrid cars as an intermediate store of electricity. A prototype has even been produced by a Californian company, A C Propulsion, whose car has an inboard computer using broadband over the plug in electric cable that connects the car to the mains.  

When you have several thousand vehicles so connected there is a critical mass which can store electricity generated when no one wants it, and put back the current in peak times, provided the car is not being used. It saves a lot of wasted electricity, and prevents carbon emissions and enables generating stations to operate more efficiently with lower baseloads. 

If we can get past the prototype stage and if we can get broadband sent over electricity cables with sockets created specially for electric cars all over London, we can significantly reduce emissions using fleets of electric cars. I should say “might” because we have to understand the down side (there are always down sides); we have to factor in the environmental cost of batteries, for example.  

If it works it might well help transport be significantly less carbon intensive and in the very long term reduce the need for so many fossil fuel or nuclear power stations. 

To prevent catastrophic climate change we must to use all available technologies appropriately and devices, modify behaviour, act imaginatively and think laterally. I have never been convinced of the environmental benefits of the electric car, which I fear simply moves emissions from city centres to power stations. If we can use electric cars as electricity stores then the argument in their favour is compelling.

Cards of Identity

In November personal information of 25 million people was “lost” by the Government. Since then there have been many cases of personal information being lost. The most recent case involves the personal information of 600,000 people, which has been lost by the Ministry of Defence. 

As well as the loss of data, stored in computer readable format, there have been cases of personal paperwork being dumped or lost in public places and found by people. Hundreds of documents relating to benefit claims have been dumped at a roundabout near Exeter airport in Devon, not once but twice, and found by the same person each time. Medical files have also been dumped and found.

It is necessary to provide personal information from time to time and it is necessary for those who receive it to store it, analyse it and use it. In most cases the information is used for the benefit of those who provide it, such as with medical records.No one really likes to have strangers know personal things about them. You expect when you provide personal information to your doctor or your lawyer then it will be kept safely and securely, and if the police come asking for it they will not disclose it without your permission or in extreme cases without the supervision of a Judge to ensue that the information is actually properly required.

Despite all these cases of confidential information working its way into the public domain, the Government still seems still intent of building an overly expensive database in order to create a system if identity cards. They argue that identity cards will make us all safer, somehow, but I fail to understand how.

I can see the need to check people you come into the country, to hold unique data about their identities for the benefit of the security of the state, but I fail to see how holding such data for those of us born here will help public safety, unless it is to cow us all, and to make us all think twice about putting our heads above the parapet.If the government explains how identity cards will make us all safer can they explain how they can devise a secure system?

The Government’s record of holding confidential data securely is appalling. Giving them control of a database of the whole of the United Kingdom’s population’s confidential information is a bit like asking a politician to answer a straight question. It cannot be done..

The Government goes to great lengths to preserve their own confidentiality and the confidentiality of their own affairs. All governments in the United Kingdom have prosecuted people for disclosing “secrets” where there was no element of state security involved. There main motivation in some cases is pure spite. 

Governments are careless with our secrets though, and that is rank hypocrisy. Perhaps the Government should be concentrating on more important matters. Yesterday in the south of England it was the warmest January day on record. That might be indicative of a problem worth looking at.  

Energy Statistics – statistics of a climate change policy failure

Are we creating fewer carbon emissions? This can be very hard to discover. If you want to look at the world as a whole you have to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere scientifically. The last most accurate measurement was 381 parts of carbon dioxide per million parts of the atmosphere. Various official bodies want to stabilise this at 400ppm, although 450ppm is thought by some to be the lowest achievable level. Some think that anything above 450ppm sends the climate into catastrophic change.

These are opinions, not facts; we do not really know what figure, if any, constitutes a tipping point beyond which the planet can never recover.One good way of looking at how we are doing as a country is to look at the quarterly statistics for energy collated and published by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. As that name is not only a mouthful but indicates the diverse and curiously mixed responsibilities that the department undertakes.

They shorten it to BERR, although they went through a phase of calling themselves DBERR.

When you look at energy statistics take into account that at least 98% of the energy we use comes from fossil fuel and nuclear. Seeing whether we increase or decrease our energy use tells you whether we are likely to be pumping more carbon dioxide into the air or not, and by how much we are increasing the amount of nuclear waste we have to stockpile.

Once you make seasonal adjustments and adjustments for the weather it looks like we consumed 1.6% more energy than we did in the third quarter of 2006. That is not good.

Taking the fossil fuel sources individually, coal production is up but coal imports are down; 2.6% less coal was used to generate electricity in power stations, so that is good. Coal demand is marginally down. Oil is virtually unchanged, in terms of production and consumption. The UK is now a net importer of oil by more than 2 million tonnes a quarter. Gas production is down by 11.2% a year. Gas exports are down by 25% and imports up by 31%. Gas used for electricity generation is virtually unchanged. Taking a year on year view, gas consumption overall is up by 5%.

Making electricity is a big generator of emissions. As a country 25% of the electricity we use comes from highly polluting coal, 36% from gas and only 15% from nuclear. Nuclear usually accounts for around 20% but two nuclear power stations have been undergoing some much needed maintenance work, so the nuclear share is down this quarter.

Households account for 23.6% of the electricity used. I will not give price information for domestic gas and electricity because the statistics issued do not take into account the very high price rises recently announced. I can tell you though that an average home used £552 worth of gas and £383 worth of electricity in 2007, making a total energy spend in the home of £935. Recent price rises will take the average to about £1200, so start saving now.

Most people will have to earn £2000 in order to pay £1200 out of their wages for energy. If you earn £22,000 you will pay just under 10% of what you earn for energy, thus falling just outside the definition of being “fuel poor” and therefore you will not be entitled to any government help with the energy bills or measures.

If you decide to shop around for your electricity and gas in the hope of saving money you will need to know your energy consumption each year in kilowatt hours to get the best deal. You can find this out from your bills which show this consumption, but only if your meter readings are up to date. It is always worth reading your meter and send in the readings.

In case you cannot do this and you might find it helpful to know that the average home is thought to consume 18,000 kWh of gas and 3,300 kWh of electricity.

Cheap energy is now gone for good. Quite apart from the pressing environmental reasons, you need to save your wallet by switching off lights, turning the temperature down and unplugging appliances when not in use.

By mid December 2007 unleaded petrol was 17.2% up on last year and diesel 15.3% up on last year. Cheap car fuel has also gone for ever, so drive carefully, with a view to conserving as much fuel as possible, and if you can, stop taking the car for those very short journeys. Drive gently.

Overall, there is nothing in the figures to make me think that our carbon emissions are fallen; if anything the rate of emissions is probably marginally rising.Clearly the policy of the government of reducing carbon emisisions is failing completely.

These energy stats are very important but the way that I have presented them is I know not compelling. I will try to think of a way to remedy that, so we can keep track of prices and use at a glance.  

Zero carbon homes – what a gas!

Natural gas is used to heat around 80% of the United Kingdom’s homes. Most of the homes that are use gas to provide heat also use it to provide hot water, although I would guess (I have not be able to find any statistics) that a small proportion of gas users switch off their boilers in summer and get their hot water from an immersion heater in a cylinder. That means that 20% of the homes are off the natural gas network.

These homes  – around four and a half million of them -have to use electricity, heating oil or liquid petroleum gas, all of which produce around three times the amount of carbon dioxide and many more times the amount of particulate emissions than natural gas. If you have a top of the range gas condensing the boiler the quantity of emissions produced for heat per kilowatt hour is even lower. 

According to the latest energy statistics, the average home paid in the 12 months ended September 2007 £552 for gas and £383 for electricity. I think that these figures include value added tax. recent price increase will add around 16% to thie bill.

Clearly the four and a half million homes not connected to the gas network are the biggest polluters, as far as dwellings are concerned. They will also pay the biggest fuel bills, because electricity and oil and LPG is, per kWh, much more expensive than natural gas. In addition oil and coal and LPG have had larger price increases than gas and electricity.

What is the Government’s reaction to this? You would expect that it would develop a program to provide incentives to people off the natural gas network to use renewables, like solar panels and PV and turbines for heat and electricity, and possible also to extend the natural gas network. 

Well unfortunately we cannot expect things to be logical, can we? Mr Alistair Darling, (I expect he finds some time to look at these things when he is not being distracted by the Northern Rock crisis) has set out criteria to provide an incentive in the form of Stamp Duty relief for zero carbon homes. I have written about this before and make no apology for doing so again. 

The terms of getting the relief recognise that a “zero carbon home” cannot be zero carbon all the time so it must be zero carbon over a period of time, taking account of the export of locally generated electricity back to the grid.

Measuring electricity going in and out of a home is very different from the home being zero carbon; you have to take account of the overall position including transmission losses and the fact that sometimes the renewable electricity generated will be generated at times when it cannot be usefully used because the grid’s base load is adequate. 

Of course all these measurements and statistics and details are set theoretically at the start, when the home is built. Once you have got your stamp duty relief what is prevent the home occupier using more electricity than he or she generates? Er…nothing. They can have dozens of powerful appliances, leaving them on all day. There will be no device to limt the electricity that they can consume. 

If you have a zero carbon home it must not be connected to the gas grid. Under the rules a “zero carbon home” qualifying for stamp duty relief cannot be connected to the gas grid. This will make some interesting scenarios if anyone does actually try to build these in numbers because we all know that there are times when renewables cannot generate energy (including heat energy) and you have to have a back up. What will be the back up heat for a zero carbon home? Why – electricity and biomass, both of which produce much more carbon than …natural gas.

 It makes you question why people like Gordon Brown in his 2007 budget and Alistair Darling muddle incompetently in things that they do not understand and waste their time and our money devising nonsensical schemes. It would have produced much greater carbon savings to devise a special renewables scheme of those of the gas grid network, but the spinning opportunities would be much fewer than those under a grandiosely misnamed scheme called “zero carbon homes”. 

I can think of no more powerful demonstration of why we need an Energy Minister of Cabinet rank, advised by civil servants with the knowledge and intellectual capacity to get these things right.

Peter Hain, donations, gifts and weird scenes inside the goldmine

Gordon Brown’s latest comments about Peter Hain look to me a bit like the dreaded “vote of confidence” that a manager of a football team receives a week or two before getting his P45. 

Peter Hain is a curious politician. He is South African by birth, was chairman of the Young Liberals in the 1970s when they were at their most active and radical. He probably demonstrated out side cricket and rugby grounds where South Africa was playing while I was watching the matches on television.

In 1975 he was accused of armed robbery, tried and found not guilty. He wrote a very moving account of that experience, which he followed up with a book called “Political Trials in Britain” in which he showed how many people were only accused of crime to serve an underlying political objective. His own accusation was subsequently blamed on the South African security services.  

In 1977 he converted himself to the Labour Party and was in 1991 found the incredibly safe seat of Neath, in South Wales, where he has remained MP ever since, serving in junior posts in the Labour Government since 1997, after embracing the dogma and doctrines of New Labour.

The most important work he did was in the Anti-Apartheid movement, well before he became an MP. At the time of writing he is Pensions Minister and Minister for Wales, the latter a somewhat redundant post, surely, in the light of Wales having its own elected assembly. In his website he claims that in a short stint at the DTI in 2001 he was responsible for prioritising green renewable energy “in a way not done before.” I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about. I would like to know.

I wonder what his views are about the proposal to build the biomass power station in Port Talbot. Does he understand the potential harm it will cause? He is in danger of being sacked because of some problem with money. That substance, the love of which is the root of all evil, has always caused the recent caste of professional politicians more than a little local difficulty.

Hain wanted to become Deputy Prime Minister, which post was up for grabs after Gordon Brown became Prime Minister. There were five other candidates. There was an election amongst labour party MPs members and the Trade Unions. Each of the candidates spent some money campaigning – for leaflets, letters and the like. Each candidate was required by law to declare his or her expenditure. 

Mr Hain came fifth in the election but spent a mind boggling £200,000 on his campaign. I say mind boggling because at Genersys we publish brochures, send them out and market our solar panels so I know what things cost. No other candidate spent more than £100,000. Mr Hain came fifth in the election. He says that was given £185,000 from donations to fund his campaign and borrowed a further £25,000 from a diamond dealer. 

However he did not, on his own admission follow the law about declaring his expenditure. He says he was too busy running his Government Department but obviously not to busy to stand for the office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Some of the donations he received come from an unknown “Think Tank” that does no published thinking, called “the Progressive Policies Forum”. I would be very interested to learn of their ideas.

Mr Hain’s offence of failing to declare these donations in full and on time and the loan has been called “incompetence” by the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown; Mr Hain says that he took his “eye off the ball”, a cricketing metaphore. When a batsman takes his eye of the ball he is usually out bowled.

There are a couple of weird points about Mr Hain and his donations which I do not understand and I hope that someone reading this reading this web log can help my poor brain figure it out. The first strange point is that some of these donations were given after Mr Hain lost the election.

I can understand why people want to donate money to someone for a campaign for high political office. They may feel that the candidate has genuine qualities that are far better than any other person standing; they may enjoy playing kingmaker; they may hope for a commercial advantage after the successful campaign, and accordingly regard this as a commercial investment. 

I cannot think why someone should give money to a candidate after his campaign has failed, except possibly for future commercial advantage or a genuine close sympathetic relationship with the losing candidate. In that case it is not a political donation but a personal gift to him to help out with his debts.

Should members of Parliament be accepting personal gifts? I do not think they should. They get paid enough already.  The second weird thing arises from the Labour Party rule that if you get a donation as an MP you have to pay 15% of it to the Labour Party. Peter Hain registered a payment to the Labour Party of £11,550 on 18^th September 2008.

However he raised a total of £185,000 so he owes the Labour Party another £16,200. He, of course, still has to repay the £25,000 interest free loan; presumably he has to pay 15% of the notional interest he saved to the Labour Party too. 

I expect that Mr Brown will soon deliver the knock out blow to Peter Hain’s political career. Having fought a good fight against apartheid in your youth does not guarantee a political career for life. You are most harshly judged on your own mistakes; the good you have done is gone.

It seems to me that the ideals of Peter Hain have changed as he has grown older. Robert Frost’s words come to mind:-  “I never dared to be radical when young, for fear it would make me conservative when old.” 

Playing with Whales

Right now somewhere in the ocean there are Japanese “scientific” vessels that aim to catch around a thousand whales for “scientific research” and there are some environmentalist vessels aiming to stop them, some by fair means or foul.  

Of course the capture and killing of whales for scientific research is simply a pretext. The International Whaling Convention was signed in 1946 to conserve whales and to develop the whaling industry. The convention set up the International Whaling Commission to regulate whaling. Countries retained the right to issue whaling permits, though, and this proved to be a problem. 

In 1982, with great worries about declining whale numbers, a moratorium on whaling was agreed and all nations except Iceland, Norway and Japan stopped whaling. Those countries issued permits to kill whales for scientific research. Norway last issued permits in 1994 Iceland in 2005 and then for very small numbers. Throughout recent times Japan as sought to disguise a whaling industry as a scientific industry. 

I am not sentimental about animals. If you want to be a vegetarian or a vegan or if you want to leave all your money to animal charities, that is fine by me, it is just not what I would. I do believe that preserving biodiversity is important and that whales are a critical part of the ocean’s bio system, the maintenance of which is critical to a comfortable human existence. In the words of the song “You don’t know what you’ve lost till it’s gone.”  

In 1998 I swam with wild dolphins, in a supervised Dolphin sanctuary in Key Largo, in Florida. I found that a profound experience in a way that is difficult to write about, because I sensed that I was not swimming with dumb animals, but smart animals, smarter than a dog. 

Last February I attended a conference in Big Island in Hawaii. I travelled thousands of miles from London to get there. At the same time as I got there many whales had also travelled thousands of miles to get to Hawaii, where they mate and then give birth to calves. I could see in the distance from time to time big hump back whales blowing their spouts, slapping their huge pectoral fins and sometimes slapping their tails against the ocean.  

I stayed at a resort which tried to leave as much as possible in the natural style – and they did a good job. I took out a canoe from time to time, and could go several kilometres out into the ocean hoping to get a closer look at the whales. 

On one canoe trip I did get a closer look than I expected. About four hundred metres from shore a hump back whale breached no more than 30 metres from my canoe. It used its tail to launch itself out of the water and propelled its body into the air. It landed on its back with a huge splash which soaked me and flooded the canoe. I was quite safe, but scared. As I paddled away from it, heading for the shore it surfaced and slapped its long pectoral fin on the water, a if to wave goodbye.

No one knows why hump backs “breach”. Some think it is a means of communication – others that they are playing. So the hump back might have been trying to tell me something or simply playing with me. It was an experience that I shall never forget. And I am sure that you will forgive me if I suggest that you look at a petition which seeks to stop whaling and sign it on http://www.whalesrevenge.com/ . As well as signing the petition you can play a game on line, in which whales blow bubbles to sink the Japanese whaling fleet (no whalers are harmed). 

Microgeneration and the Energy Savings Trust’s Report

The Energy Savings Trust has published a useful analysis of the “interventions” that they see as being necessary to achieve more widespread take up of microgeneration. It is called “Generating the Future” but may be better called “Microgenerating the Future”.

The Energy Savings Trust (EST) say that microgeneration is important because it helps to reduce carbon emissions, diversifies supply reduces wasted energy and helps tackle fuel poverty.

The analysis contains a number of errors in relation to their comments about solar thermal technology and some misconceptions but it is nevertheless the most accurate and important piece of work published on microgeneration by the government or by any quango.  

At the moment in the United Kingdom there are around 100,000 microgeneration installations. Of these installations 80% (by number) are solar water heating systems which are usually the least cost option. Looking ahead forty or so years they expect to see over 53 million microgeneration installations – nearly two installations per dwelling house.  

The report says that solar thermal is cheapest “but has one of the lowest returns in term of carbon saving assuming it continues to be used primarily for water heating in gas connected homes”.

I think that this statement fails to take into account a correct view of “payback”. The models used for calculating payback are simplistic and fail to take into account some factors and take into account some costs of improvement which should not be part of the calculation.   I think that statement is a gross over simplification and is also false about carbon savings.

First, the poorest return in carbon terms is biomass. It simply does not save carbon, it saves fossil fuel. I have written about this and given my reasons elsewhere. Secondly if you use solar thermal to heat water the more water you heat (or the more you and your family wash) the better the carbon savings are; your fuel will be carbon free daylight. Thirdly, at Genersys most of our panels are installed in rural areas displacing oil or electricity, where the carbon savings are more than three times displacing gas. Fourthly, I doubt if the Energy Savings Trust’s estimated carbon savings fully take into account the inefficiencies of existing water heating systems; even in more modern installations of condensing gas boilers you have boilers that do not condense.  

It is interesting that the State of California has recently thought it worthwhile to tax natural gas by 13% with the intention to hypothecate the whole of this tax towards incentives for solar water heaters. California has only marginally fewer people that the United Kingdom.  

I did not intend to dwell on some minor inaccuracies (but I could not resist it) because the report as a whole is extremely valuable and has some very important recommendations, many of which I have wanted to see taken up by the Government for many years.

As I said, this is the first time that we are getting some clear thinking from a governmental body about microgeneration and it is important that we praise it and encourage it.  

The analysis is partly based on a survey of public opinion. Almost everyone (well 80% of those surveyed) thought that renewable energy should be subsidised and 73% thought that renewable energy should be compulsory on new homes.

The Energy Savings Trust points out that scaffolding is a high proportion of costs of install thermal solar and if the panels are fitted as a new building is put up there would be substantial savings of installation costs. Generally installation costs more than the equipment.  

The survey also revealed that the public expect the government to legislate to require renewable energy as well as subsidise it. The government is presently dithering on legislation and has made a big mess of subsidies and incentives for renewable energy. If you look at the present effect of the Low Carbon Buildings Programme, it is not encouraging take up of renewables and does not provide any real incentive.  

The Energy Savings trust identified “key barriers” to the take up of microgeneration. They say these are:- 

• Cost – mass markets are focused on cost savings
• Too much of the wrong sort of regulation (planning permission, difficulties with reselling legislation etc)
• Lack of incentives in the long term for renewable heat that solar thermal brings
• Lack of information and awareness
• Inadequate skills base
• Lack of a framework for positive investment (I am not quite sure what that means)
• Lack of long term rewards and a price for carbon.

  All this may be true; however, with microgeneration you are selling something that delivers cost savings over the long term – in the case of solar thermal it may take somewhere between eight and twelve years to get your money back, and although the gas or electricity company never give you your money back not every consumer has the mindset to part with his or her hard earned cash for a future benefit.

Everything that the modern consumer is taught, on television and radio programmes, in newspapers and magazines, is buy things for the least possible cost. Never mind the quality, or the long term position, or the harm that is done, always get stuff as cheap as possible. That is why from time to time clothing suppliers are surprised to have it pointed out to them that a factory in the third world making their goods is employing what is tantamount to slave labour. We don’t really car becasue the goods are cheap.

The exception to this rule that you get things as cheaply as you can lies in the purchase of really luxurious goods. A luxury watch will be sold at a huge profit margin, and will not tell the time as accurately as a cheap quartz watch, so the consumers make exceptions for “luxury” or “lifestyle” items.  

The EST concludes that microgeneration is a “lifestyle” choice at the moment, because of its high cost people who want to live a “green” lifestyle adopt it. Well, this is news to me. According to this, Genersys is selling a lifestyle product like a Rolex watch.

Renewable heat, whether for water or space heating, is a commodity technology and that is how it should be regarded. Energy will become so scarce, so precious that renewable heat will be the only way to get heat in the future. We are on a step by step journey to that future.  There are some valuable suggestions in the Energy Savings’ Trust’s report. I am pleased that they are examining most of the suggestions of the renewable microgeneration industry including many that I have made.

I hope that the Government has the strength to make the hard decisions to require, for example, the installation of solar panels on new homes, their installation when a home is re-roofed, their installation when a boiler has to be changed and many of the other suggestions in the report.  Making those hard decisions would bring the government up against vested interest groups – house builders, utility companies and also into conflict with some voters who would question why the government was forcing them to spend what they regard as extra money. This is a harder decision than permitting soem nuclear power stations. I fear that this will be a hard decision that the government will not make, becasue it is a far harder decision tan permitting soem nuclear power stations where the cost to the public is not immediate or apparent.

The report states that it is probably too early to impose compulsion on the householder, in the way suggested. I fear that it may be too late.  

The Energy Savings Trust’s report has done some really valuable work on estimating the level of support or incentives that would lead to high take up of microgeneration and according better energy security lower pollution and lower carbon dioxide emissions. A 30 per cent grant encourages both solar thermal and wind by 2020.  

 “With a £200m cap, over 180,000 units of solar and almost 120,000 units of wind would be installed by 2020. A much higher cap of £1 billion is not used up, because the limiting factor is the number of consumers willing to buy at that price. EEC grant levels do encourage some uptake, particularly of solar thermal.”  

We should put those figures into context; £200 million is just a bit more than Members of Parliament spend on their expenses each year. £1 billion would keep the BBC working for about ten weeks.  

The EST also looked at my favoured ways of providing incentives – tax breaks. They conclude that annual subsidies in the form of a council or income tax reduction are an effective mechanism. Quite modest tax breaks – not more than £200 per annum, are enough to stimulate uptake very significantly. Their own research shows that tax incentives are more popular with the public than direct grants. The EST recommends that Council Tax savings be introduced for those who install microgeneration.  

There are some very valuable recommendations about renewable heat. Renewable electricity gets several subsidies through the renewable obligation and renewable credits. Heat does not have these benefits. The report suggests and recommends a way to put renewable heat on a more equal footing with renewable electricity. This would reduce the price of solar thermal systems by around 30%, according to the Energy Savings trusts’ calculations.  

They also suggest that a new Microgeneration Obligation should be put in place to allow fossil fuel energy suppliers to claim the value of Renewable Credits that their customers install. This type of scheme works well in many parts of the United States, where the incentives provided are significant, and where they apply to both renewable heat and renewable electricity.  

I must say that I am rather impressed with the Energy Saving Trust’s work. It is research based, provides some excellent recommendations and we now seem to be in a place where the Energy Savings Trust and I are singing off the same Hymn sheet. It makes me have hope for the future and I have to hope that the Government will start implementing their recommendations without delay. You can read the report at http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/uploads/documents/aboutest/MICRO.pdf

Tata Nano and the new car owning population in Asia

India’s population is not only growing but prospering. The Indian economy is booming, and jobs are better paid than they ever where, and there are better paid jobs than ever. In these circumstances it is not surprising that more Indians can afford cars and that one Indian car manufacturer, Tata Motors, will be introducing a very cheap car for the mass and popular marker, which they have called “the Nano”.  

The car will reach the market in three years time, when it is expected to be sold for $2,000, or just over £1,000. The makers expect to reach these costs by using less metal and more plastic on the car (avoiding expensive welding and gluing the plastic together instead), and by selling direct to the public, eliminating the dealer’s margins.

The car will have a small engine and fuel efficient, providing over 50 miles per gallon, it is expected, with a two-cylinder 623cc petrol engine and an electronic engine management system.  The fuel efficiency of 50 miles per gallon is roughly the same as the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight, which are both much larger cars with hybrid engines. I guess that the average new car in Britain operates at over 30 miles a gallon. 

Tata already make a car that they sell for about three times the cost of the Nano, but the Nano will be priced at levels which will enable millions of families in India to buy cars for the first time. Although this vehicle it is claimed will pollute less than the two and three wheelers being made in India at present there is no doubt that the prospect of hundreds of millions more of Asians owning and driving cars, such ownership now being affordable, will have an impact on climate change and on oil prices. 

We should not be surprised about a car being sold in India for around £1,000. The market knows that there is a demand for such cars and Mr Tata’s company is simply logically trying to fill the demand. No doubt we shall see similar developments in China and in other parts of Asia as prosperity increases. 

There are reports of environmentalists being “dismayed” and “horrified” at the prospect of hundreds of millions more cars on the roads of the planet. Of course, in developed nations we have been driving cars in millions for fifty or more years, and for most of that time the cars we drove were highly polluting, emitting not only carbon dioxide but also carbon monoxide and lead and particulates into the atmosphere.

We have in many western countries not just the one car family (to which Indians presently aspire) but two and three car families. If you project Asian prosperity and assume, quite reasonably that they will want to live like we live when they become as wealthy as we are you end up with some frightening projects of emissions and pollution. But none of this should be surprising in any way. 

This is the heart of the problem with climate change it lies in the hands of the devloping world. Of course, if the half a billion people in the developed world all agreed to limit the size of their car engines to 632cc and to only manufacture highly fuel efficient cars we might be able to criticise the developing world.  

The Tata Nano is still three years away from being available to buy. I wonder what proportion of the developed world’s cars will have small engines doing more than 50 miles per gallon will be in the developed world in three years time. This is an area where we can make a difference.

I do not think that being able to run a car that uses huge amounts of petrol or that is designed to travel from zero to fifty in six seconds, or has a top speed vastly in excess of the lawful speed limit is a matter of right or choice, except in so far as it is everyone’s right not to be poisoned. 

 It is therefore important that we continue not only improving fuel efficiency in cars but also start a process of limiting their size, the size of their engines and the pollution they create, so at least when we see the Tata Nano selling in millions, we will can reduce some of the carbon emissions that India will create by our own behaviour in the developed world.     

Gas bills – time to change the pricing structure

My gas bill came through the letterbox yesterday, and I thought I had better look at it.

My bill told me how many “units” I had used. Units are the measurement of gas at your gas meter. These are converted into kilowatt hours by first finding out how many cubic metres of gas your units represent. More modern meters already show readings in cubic metres; if you have an older meter you will have to multiply the units by 2.83. Once the volume of gas used is established from the meter reading, the utility company establishes how many kilowatt hours of energy this constitutes.

They have to do this because the energy contained in natural gas varies and to find the actual energy you have to take into account temperature, pressure and calorific value. My gas supplier multiplied the cubic metres by 1.02264, then the resultant figure by 39 (the calorific value) and the divided by 3.6 which gave the kWh I used. I was then charged for the kilowatt hours that I have used, after value added tax at 5% is added to the bill.

The value added tax rate is exactly the same for gas and electricity as it is for buying a installation of soalr panels, or PV or a wind turbine. Reducung it to 5% is one of the great triumphs of Gordon Brown’s chancellorhip – puting microgeneration on the same footing as fossil fuel energy.

There are many different gas tariffs but in my case I pay a higher rate for the first 1303 kWh used each quarter, and a lower rate thereafter. In my case the higher rate is 4.339p per kWh and the lower rate 2.39p per kWh. Some tariffs provide for a standing charge before you consume any gas at all. 

I think that tariffs that charge less per kWh as you use more gas penalise the people who pollute the least and that must be wrong. Consumption of any item is encouraged by offering a cheaper unit price for that item. If you go to your local supermarket you will see offers such as “two for the price of one”, “buy one get one free” but if you only want or need to buy one you rarely see it offered at half price.  

The idea behind this “bogof” marketing is to encourage more purchasing and in the case of a supermarket it does encourage us to buy more than we planned. Unfortunately a significant portion of the food special offers that we buy are thrown away, unconsumed, to add to the piles of land fill rubbish for supermarket’s increased profits and at the impoverishment of our environment. 

There are over 2 million pre payment gas meters in the United Kingdom. These service the poorest people.  Those who use the most gas can usually get the best deals. Those who can only afford to use a little gas get the worse deals. If you live in a mansion you can buy your gas at bargain basement rates, but if you are poor you pay the highest rates. 

We do not need to encourage the use or gas or electricity. We should not offer 2000 kWh for the price of 1000 kWh. Quite the reverse, we need to discourage the use of all fossil fuel energy. If we fail to do this we add to the climate change problems that we will invariably face at some time in the future, we add to the depletion of fossil fuels before we have found viable alternatives and we add to atmospheric pollution. 

So, it would make much more sense if all gas tariffs were at a very low rate for the first, say, 2000 kWh per quarter and a higher rate at the next 5,000 kWh and so on, charging more per unit of energy the more energy that you use. This will also encourage the take up of thermal solar systems (like those that my company Genersys sells), and if adopted for electricity tariffs as well as gas tariffs would encourage all forms of microgeneration. 

It will be difficult to change to these tariffs that penalise those who use the most energy in a competitive market, but Nicholas Stern has pointed out that climate change involves a fundamental failure of markets. It seems logical therefore that If markets fail we need to establish alternative structures that work, so it is probably about time to get rid of the utility companies as free market entities.