Power ins and outages

Where is our energy going to come from over the ten or twenty years? We aren’t heavily reliant on gas from Russia – a mere 4% compared to Germany’s 40% and more – but as the European countries wean themselves off the Russian teat, competition from alternative sources will become fiercer. That means harder to get and more expensive. Don’t know the figures for oil, and suspect we take no coal from the Russian coal fields.

So where we will we get our energy from to fuel a rising demand for electrification and satisfy our net zero carbon ambitions - if they still exist?

The rising cost of carbon fuels make the prospect of revisiting the North Sea oil fields somewhat more affordable even though the deposits there may be a little bit more difficult to reach. We have also, apparently, started to look again at fracking as we suspect there are sizeable reserves located around the country. The downside is that we seem to have shelved any prospect of meeting earth’s demands for a reduction in global warming and Carbon Dioxide emissions. Tough, but we mustn’t catch cold, it seems.

We need to rely more on renewables and both solar and wind are now giving us sizeable returns, and have the advantage of becoming cheaper and more efficient. The problems that we have are mainly concerned with NIMBYism and the space they will increasingly need (an issue with fracking as well). Bio fuels are not popular, as the size of crops we need for that for our energy needs will be much larger and cut down on agricultural land, either here or inexcusably in some third world country.

Nuclear is becoming more popular as an option, with KWh costs, like oil and gas approaching parity, and are reasonably environmentally sustainable till we need to get rid of its waste – however, as soon as we get enthusiastic about building a couple more nuclear plants, we find cracks appearing in the reactor cores at Torness in East Lothian which might mean its early closure and it raises questions about safety.

Alternative solutions are being looked at more closely – and quickly discarded, like the tidal lagoons on the Severn Estuary which should, theoretically provide a lot of energy, and mini nuclear reactors from Rolls Royce. There are also signs of success in Nuclear Fusion at the Joint Nuclear Torus (JET) in Oxfordshire, which promise unlimited energy, but don’t get too excited, as it only produces enough at the moment to boil 60 kettles of water?

The most important question, though, is how can we turn the considerable heat that will generated on the subject over the next couple of years to our advantage.

David Chadwick

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