The pretence over renewables has gone on too long
IN a letter to last Friday’s Groat Morris Pottinger bemoaned the future proliferation of trees and feared for the future of Caithness. He might well have added the effect on the quality of life the burgeoning number of wind turbines will have on the county.
So far 48 are operational, a further 75 approved, with applications submitted for another 74; scoping opinion is being sought for 92 plus.
Wind turbines at best produce only 25 to 33 per cent of their declared capacity and electricity has to be overwhelmingly generated from coal, gas, oil and nuclear power.
At midday last Saturday a mere 2.2 per cent of all electricity to the national grid came from wind.
The Scottish Government has an unrealistic target of 80 per cent of Scotland’s electricity consumption coming from renewable sources within nine years’ time.
This is based largely on the production of electricity from wave and tidal power. But this is still an unproven source and, as the Carbon Trust reported recently, marine technologies for achieving this are still in their infancy. There is still doubt whether such systems will ever play a meaningful role in meeting global energy needs.
Further full-scale demonstration of wave and tidal devices is required to prove their technical viability before moving on to assess whether they are commercially viable.
The overoptimistic view at Holyrood on renewables was well expressed just before last May’s election when six distinguished engineers – two power engineers and four academics – wrote to The Scotsman saying the pretence that our electricity can be supplied from renewables, mainly wind and marine, had gone on for far too long.
One of the correspondents was Sir Donald Miller, former chairman of Scottish Power, and another Colin Gibson, former national grid network director.
They wrote: “These matters are not a question of opinion. They are answerable to the laws of physics and are readily analysed using normal engineering methods. All of these energy sources are of very low concentrations and intermittent. They are and will remain inherently expensive and no amount of development will have more than a marginal effect on this conclusion.” Nor, they said, could wind and marine energy be relied on to provide electricity when it is needed and marine energy did not constitute a vast untapped resource. At best it could provide only a small percentage of electricity supplies at costs which, including back-up generation, would be entirely unacceptable to customers. Moreover, carbon capture’s costs, assuming it could be scaled up, were too uncertain to gamble on its playing a significant part in energy policy.
“If low carbon is to be the principal driver of energy policy,” they added, “we can build on Scotland’s half century of experience with nuclear, generating some 50 per cent of our requirements reliably and at low cost. Scotland needs a balanced energy system which can deliver economic and reliable supplies. We are at the eleventh hour. There can be nothing more urgent on the political agenda.”
Over the past 50 years a number of wave devices have been proposed, and even carried to the small-scale pilot stage, but none of these have survived actual tests at sea. Despite this, there is increasing optimism and activity in the quest for a workable device.
The European Marine Energy Centre with its test site in Orkney lists some eight different wave projects with five different devices being tested at sea. A further six tidal devices are also under evaluation.
But if it all comes to fruition they will still need the back-up of conventionally generated electricity from coal, gas, oil or nuclear. The first three will need the development of carbon capture in the future – involving a technology that it is believed will consume a significant proportion of the electricity produced; this leaves nuclear, which certainly produces radioactive waste but most of it is relatively short-lived.
The French obtain over 80 per cent of their electricity from nuclear, and charge their customers considerably less than we pay in Britain. Unfortunately we cannot take the nuclear route in Scotland since the Scottish Government has decided that it will not sanction any new nuclear stations.
Nonetheless it seems that we shall be supplied in the future, to a greater or lesser extent, with electricity from this source, via the national grid, by the new nuclear stations now being planned for England.
