Flooding and the need to decentralise energy supply

In all the uncertainties about climate change one thing is very clear. In the United Kingdom we are experiencing more extreme weather and we are feeling the effects of extreme weather more extremely than ever. I think that what is happening is that climate change is having an effect on our environment in ways that we have not planned for.
A great deal of brain power goes into planning the infrastructure of a developed nation. There are transport systems to build and maintain, communication links, homes to build and shops schools and offices to serve the homes. In addition we have to provide work for the population and while all this is going on plan for the increase in population and make educated guesses at how the economy will work, how much we will grow by and what will be our food requirements.
We also have to decide whether we are likely to have any enemies and then what share of our wealth we need to invest in protecting ourselves as a nation and our citizens from criminals. It is a complicated scenario.

But woven into this garment is a thread that joins all these complications in one enabling whole; if we pull the thread away the whole falls apart and becomes no more than rags. That thread is energy. The matter is made more complicated by the centralisation of our gas and electricity supplies. There are few energy supply companies and fewer gas and electricity generating companies. The supplies of gas and electricity depend on relatively few suppliers and by 2020 over 75% of the fuel that we need will come from abroad.

A key part of the energy problem (and there is an energy problem) lies in the centralisation of energy. It seems that parts of the United Kingdom are becoming prone to increased flooding as a result of climate change or cyclical weather variations. As a result we have now discovered that many power plants and water treatment plants can be so badly damaged by future flooding that they will have to shut down if floods on the scale of those that happened a year ago were to re-occur.

You may remember that floods last year cane within a foot of causing the close down of Walham electricity switching station which supplies power to over half a million buildings in Gloucestershire and acts as a relay switch for South Wales. In Mythe flood damage to the water treatment plant cut of water supplies to over a third of a million Gloucestershire homes.

As a nation our flood warning systems are almost non existent, responsibility for surface water run off is unclear, no one knows who should be cleaning out drains and the £800 million budgeted for flood defences seems significantly less than we need to spend to save life and propertyBut flooding, probably one of the several effects of climate change, like climate change itself needs many solutions, not just a single solution.

One important way to alleviate the effects of flooding would be to decentralise energy and localise it as much as possible. It is not enough to set up local power and heat generating stations, although these are very valuable, because they all depend upon some form of fossil fuel supply, usually gas, and are therefore vulnerable to flood disruption.

We have to go smaller scale than that and relive the central energy of as much of the burden as possible by using homes and businesses and mini centres of energy generation. That means solar panels, PV panels and where appropriate wind turbines to generate heat and power. The more microgeneration devices that we have the more energy self sufficient we are and the less our nation shall experience the worse effects of energy disruption by such events as flooding, war, economic changes and strife.

There will be a price to pay because the capital cost of microgeneration is (when balanced on the present uneven playing field dominated by the fossil and uranium fuel providers) is relatively expensive but in uncertain times it could prove a very shrewd investment indeed.