27.06.2008
- Infrastructure planning - Changing the power generation balance
Infrastructure planning
The
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
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
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.
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
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
However, this comes at a cost. The
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20.06.2008
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13.06.2008
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30.05.2008
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23.05.2008
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16.05.2008
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