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Newsletter 27th June 2008
27.06.2008

- Infrastructure planning - Changing the power generation balance

Infrastructure planning

The UK government is trying to streamline the country's complex planning system. At its worst, this can currently result in large expenditures and years of delay while public enquiries are held into such major projects as Heathrow's Terminal 5 and the Sizewell B nuclear reactor. The rules allow not just local opposition groups to present their case, but also national lobbying organisations play a major role in opposing projects on principle rather than for reasons directly related to the proposal. In the end, such projects tend to be implemented in any case, so there is certainly an argument for avoiding costly delays of the seemingly inevitable.

On the other hand, there must also be scope for genuinely local opposition to be properly heard and assessed; readers of last week's newsletter will have seen our comments on proposals for "eco-towns". The difference perhaps lies in the in-built inflexibility of some projects. Once the strategic decision has been made to increase airport capacity, it is quite legitimate to ask whether it is right to expand Heathrow or build from scratch in the Thames estuary, but the options are strictly limited.

In the case of nuclear power, the question is not whether new stations should be built, but where. The obvious sites exist already, alongside the current generation of stations, most of which will soon be decommissioned. A recent consumer survey for Utility Week magazine found more than half of respondents favouring an increase in nuclear capacity, and people near existing nuclear stations (excluding employees at the sites) were even more positive. In principle, a planning system which allowed legitimate local concerns to be aired while excluding national campaigners would seem to be fair.

For ground transport, the options are even more limited: road and rail links have to be built within rather narrow corridors. Railways are generally seen as a useful part of the mix of public transport which should be supported in an attempt to reduce the use of cars. Despite overcrowding and over-pricing, the UK system has shown strong growth in passenger numbers in recent years, with more people travelling now than at any time in the last 60 years. To the chagrin of public transport enthusiasts, this reflects a trend for people generally to travel more, rather than some move away from car journeys.

Nevertheless, the demand is there and must be met, and Network Rail has now announced a study which will look at the possibility of building five more – potentially high-speed – railway lines in the busiest transport corridors, albeit not until 2025. If these go forward as formal planning proposals, we can doubtless expect more objections – this time local – and delays before the UK rail network is finally brought up to the standard the French system reached 30 years ago. France has been followed more recently by many of its continental neighbours, who seem much more willing to commit to necessary infrastructure projects than the Brits.

Ultimately, major infrastructure projects need to be assessed on the basis of need. If the need is there, they surely have to be built in the most appropriate place, taking into account local sensitivities as much as possible. But in the end the way to streamline the process may be as much about fairly compensating the inevitable losers as spending years on exhaustive and fruitless consideration of evidence. Such attempts to be fair still end up pleasing no-one and delaying the inevitable.

Changing the power generation balance

Power generation is an important part of a country's infrastructure. What the mix will look like in a couple of decades' time is anyone's guess, but the role of renewables is still a matter for intense debate. The eventual prize must surely be to find a way to tap into the ultimate (and, on a human scale, inexhaustible) source of energy for the planet: solar radiation. This requires not only more efficient and cost-effective ways of capturing this energy, whether photovoltaic or thermal, but also significant improvements in large-scale storage and distribution. Pumping water uphill to generate hydro-electricity when needed is a very limited option, and other means to energy storage systems (hydrogen, batteries etc) are simply not yet developed on a sufficient scale.

In the meantime, there is continued investment in wind power in many countries, with technology apparently developing to allow turbines to operate at higher wind speeds than are currently possible. But the overriding problem with wind remains its intermittency, which is one reason for the decline in enthusiasm in Denmark and Germany, two leaders in the technology. One answer to this in the longer term could be better storage technologies, as for solar power, but the fact that we hear little of this re-emphasises the lack of currently viable solutions.

Another approach is to build new supply grids to smooth out supply over a wider area. This brings us to a seeming paradox, with many renewable energy enthusiasts promoting micro-generation, heavily subsidised by high feed-in tariffs, whereas the built-in inefficiencies of both scale and positioning of domestic micro-generators suggests strongly that bigger is better. A recent Economist special report covers a wide range of issues, but in particular makes the case for large-scale DC power grids to make the most of wind energy (see http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11565667).

The argument goes that, by linking generation capacity over a wide enough area, the inherent variability of wind power can be smoothed sufficiently to achieve a reliable supply. Put simply, if the wind isn't blowing in Spain, it probably is in Scotland. Like all good ideas, the reality is probably not quite as simple, but the principle should certainly reduce the need for conventional standby capacity. The downside is that this would require large-scale – effectively continent-wide – grids of DC cables, which give fewer losses over long distances. They have the added advantage of working under water, allowing off-shore power not only to be brought ashore, but also conveyed long distances under the sea without the need to erect unpopular on-shore pylons.

However, this comes at a cost. The UK government, for example, has put more flesh on the bones of its commitment to 15% of total energy from renewable sources by 2020. In practice, this means 30% of electricity generated from renewables, which seems hopelessly optimistic. Part of the thrust is to invest a significant proportion of the estimated £100bn budget in 4,000 onshore and 3,000 offshore wind turbines. The most efficient way to make use of this variable capacity would be to feed it in to a European-scale grid, but there seems little evidence that this will become a reality any time soon. In the meantime, the onshore turbines will create more challenges for the UK planning system.




The 5 most recent newsletters are listed below. To view all of our newsletters, please visit the newsletter archive by clicking here.
20.06.2008
13.06.2008
30.05.2008
23.05.2008
16.05.2008
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