environmentalresearchweb blog

« Can the government get a return on risky energy technologies? | Main | Settled science with a vengeance »

2050: an all-electric future?

The UK Department of Energy and Climate Change has been developing a 2050 Road map. A report was expected in parallel with the recent pre-election Budget, but in the event all that emerged was an interim statement, in an appendix to a Treasury/DECC ‘Energy Market Assessment’ up to and beyond 2020. This concluded tentatively that:

* Based on the analysis to date, total UK energy demand in 2050 will need to fall significantly, potentially as much as 25% lower relative to 2007 levels.

*A substantial level of electrification of heating and surface transport will be needed.

* Electricity supply needs to be decarbonised, and may need to double. It says: ‘The use of electricity for significant parts of industry, heating and transport means that demand for electricity is likely to rise, even as overall energy use declines.’

It says we might look to higher levels of interconnection with neighbouring countries to allow fluctuations in demand and supply to be smoothed across a number of countries; new storage technologies, such as large-scale batteries; smart or flexible demand, such as off-peak charging of electric vehicles; the distribution network would need to become bigger and smarter to enable a potential doubling of overall electricity demand and to cope with new sources of energy supply and demand.

Overall it says that: ”Low-carbon electricity will provide a very large proportion of the UK’s future low-carbon energy. It can be used for a wide range of activities, often with high efficiency compared to other fuels, and can, to a large extent, be scaled up to meet demand’ although it accepts that ‘other technologies are also likely to be required. For example, in heating, the use of waste heat from power stations, solar thermal technologies and energy from waste may be important and could reduce the burden on the electricity system. In road transport, biofuels and fuel cells may also be long-term contributors, particularly for modes that are hard to electrify. Even so, a significant degree of electrification appears to be necessary.’

www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/budget2010_energymarket.pdf

What the report doesn’t say is which low carbon sources we might need, a key issue being the role of nuclear, something that the long term EU and US studies mentioned in my previous blog included only in some low renewables scenarios, tangentially, or not at all. Instead they all focused on renewables, with 100% by 2050 or even earlier being seen as viable.

For more information, visit:

www.pwc.co.uk/eng/publications/100_percent_renewable_electricity.html

www.roadmap2050.eu www.rethinking2050.eu/

www.energywatchgroup.org/Renewables.52+M5d637b1e38d.0.html

www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdf

A nuclear future?

The UK governments recent National Policy Statement on Energy by contrast focuses mainly on nuclear, and asserted that ‘by 2050 the UK may need to produce more electricity than today’, as part of its justification for an expanded nuclear programme. But it had little to offer to back this up. And the new DECC statement above goes only a little further. Basically we don’t yet have a 2050 UK scenario.

The Sustainable Energy Partnership (SEP) spotted this omission and also pointed to an apparent contradiction: SEP noted that the 2008 Nuclear White Paper said that, given attention to energy efficiency, by 2050, total electricity demand could ‘remain at roughly today’s levels despite the UK’s GDP being three times larger than it is today’.

SEP brings together nearly all environmental and fuel poverty NGOs and relevant trade groups, including ACE, AECB, BWEA, CPRE, CHPA, FoE, Green Party, Greenpeace, Micropower Council, NEA, PV-UK, PRASEG, RSPB, REA, SERA, Solar Century and WWF-UK. In its submission to a Select Committee review of the NPS, SEP commented: ‘It defies common sense to approve a massive [nuclear] building programme to achieve the long term objectives of energy policy without a proper assessment of the future long term need for electricity.’

In the absence of 2050 scenario, what the NPS does, says SEP, is to assert that ‘under central assumptions there will be a need for approximately 60 GW of new capacity by 2025’ – and then quotes a Redpoint study as the source for this. But Redpoint’s study simply looked at how ‘a goal of achieving around 28–29% of electricity from renewables by 2020’ might be achieved, not at how or whether we could generate enough electricity without nuclear to meet demand. Or, one could add, what the 2050 situation might be.

The government was evidently aware that the longer term rationale for nuclear was a little weak (to put it mildly) which is no doubt why it commissioned a review of energy policy issues and options up to 2050. Hopefully the interim DECC statement will be followed by something more substantial in due course, which will take note of the very encouraging EU scenarios mentioned above.

Meanwhile in its reply to ‘Energy Envoy’ Malcolm Wicks’ proposal for 30–40% of nuclear ‘beyond 2030’, the government indicated that, in addition to renewables, with around 35 GW expected by 2025, we might need 25 GW of new ‘non-renewables’ (presumably nuclear and CCS) by 2025. But a specific nuclear target was said not to be needed at this stage.

Maybe that’s not surprising. Most of the large number of scenarios now available seem to agree that ‘100% from renewables by 2050’ is possible, with the costs not being prohibitive – after all there would be no fuel costs.

Interestingly even the relatively conservative International Energy Agency, concluded in a recent report on the Projected Costs of Generating Electricity, produced with the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), that, in comparative cost terms, there was now not a lot in it, depending mainly on location: “Nuclear, coal, gas and, where local conditions are favourable, hydro and wind, are now fairly competitive generation technologies for baseload power generation.”

Certainly, even under present economic framework, wind power is already competitive in some US states (it’s the cheapest source on the grid in California), and it is moving ahead in the US rapidly, as it is in China, India and the EU. As costs for wind and other renewables fall further, while the cost of fossil and fissile fuels rise, we are likely to see a steady transition in most places around the world. And if more rational climate policies are adopted this transition could accelerate, so that 100% % by 2050 becomes a real possibility.

An all-electric future?

Most of the new scenarios focus on electricity, but accept that there are also other renewable heat supply and transport options which may be significant – solar and biomass in particular. Electricity is obviously important, but the best balance between large and small projects, local generation and supergrid feeds, heat and power production, as well as of course energy efficiency, remains to be determined.

Clearly the energy system of the future will look very different from the one that has grown up in the fossil fuel era. Demand and supply will be matched dynamically via interactive load management systems, with a wide range of renewables of varying scales and types linked up by supergrids and with energy storage becoming important. While some look to an almost all-electric future, others look to the use of hydrogen as a new more easily storable energy vector, while others again argue that heat is the best storage option. In the event a mixture of some or all of these is likely to emerge, differing in each geographical context.

Whether nuclear has a continuing long-term role in this remains to be seen.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Landmark report explodes renewable energy myths (businessgreen.com)

Posted by Dave Elliott on May 1, 2010 2:27 PM | Permalink