By John Knox
Perhaps it is because I have just become a grandfather, but I am increasingly worried about how my granddaughter will heat her home and power her life in 30 years’ time.
We have great hopes for renewables – seen last week in the plans for the world’s biggest offshore windfarm off the Caithness coast. But there are growing doubts about their costs and viability. Indeed, there are growing doubts about all known forms of energy.
Meanwhile, in Durban, South Africa, the latest United Nations conference on climate change is getting underway with more hand-wringing over the continuing rise in carbon emissions.
At the centre of this whole debate about energy is an awkward question: should we live for the present and leave our grandchildren to deal with the consequences? The eggheads call it “inter-generational justice”.
At a personal level, we take great care to leave the world a better place for our children and grandchildren. We amass wealth for them, we resent the state taking anything away in death duties or care charges. We take trouble over their education and their long-term health. We certainly would not want to leave them a pile of debt to deal with. We might even extend this to a community or municipal level, campaigning for better schools, roads, parks etc.
But when it comes to a national or global level, inter-generational justice breaks down. The excuses are legion. Our contribution is too small to matter. The free market will work things out for us. The next generation will be cleverer and wealthier than we are and they can take care of themselves. Science and technology will come to the rescue. And finally, the future is all too uncertain, too far away and too difficult.
All of these things are true, but they are also excuses for dealing the next generation a poor hand. It may even be unfair – that is, we could leave them with problems that are too big to solve then but could be fixed fairly easily now. Or we could leave them with fewer resources than we inherited. We could plunder the planet.
Looking back over the history of energy is dispiriting. Our ancestors cut down the forests to provide themselves with fuel. In Scotland we are left with just 1 per cent of the original Caledonian forest and we are facing an unfair struggle to replant it. The same is happening now in Africa and South America.
Coal, gas and oil are leaving us with a climate change problem that looks mighty daunting: rising sea levels, heavier rainfalls, more violent weather conditions, farming and wildlife displacement, a suffocating planet. It seems the climate change conference in Durban will again postpone any serious action on limiting carbon emissions until 2015. The best measure the organisers have come up with so far is to turn down the air-conditioning in the conference hall to 24C and advise participants to take off their jackets and ties to save energy.
Hydro power has a better record, stretching back to the ancient Egyptians along the Nile and the water mills along the Clyde. But even with hydro power there is a price for the following generations to pay. Today the Aswan Dam on the Nile has left the lower reaches slow-moving and silted up. The Falls of Clyde are a tame imitation of what they would naturally be. And locals say the same where ever great dams have been built – the Hoover Dam on the Colorado or the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze.
The more immediately renewable sources of energy – wind, wave, tide and solar – also have their generational downside. Moors are cluttered with turbines (1,367 at the last Scottish count, with another 2,000 to come), electric power lines criss-cross the country and the seabed, vast stretches of land are given over to unsightly solar-panel farms.
And when we come to nuclear power, the inter-generational debate enters a higher plane altogether. Is it right to leave high-level radioactive waste buried in a hole in the ground and untouchable for 200 years? And is it right that an accident or terrorist attack resulting in an escape of radiation could lead to birth defects for generations afterwards?
All the choices seem unpalatable. And yet we have to make a decision now in order the have the systems built and running successfully by 2040. Or, as they say, the lights will go out – and, more importantly, the heating will go off and the trains will stop running.
The UK government’s Committee on Climate Change cannot make up its mind which energy source it is best to go for. It opts for a “portfolio approach” in which there is a mix of nuclear (40 per cent), renewables (40 per cent), and gas and carbon-capture coal (20 per cent). It honestly admits that it is hard to be sure which will cost the most, and yet a subsidy given to one will mean less investment for the others.
As things stand, the committee estimates that nuclear power is the cheapest at between 5 and 10 pence per kilowatt hour (p/kWh). Gas is next at between 5.5 and 14.5 p/kWh. Carbon-capture coal comes in at 7.0–15.0 p/kWh (even though the technology is not proved). Onshore wind is put at 7.0–8.5p/kWh. Offshore wind is at 8.5–13.5 p/kWh. Tidal energy costs are estimated at 10.5–23.0 p/kWh. Solar power comes in at 11–25 p/kWh. And the most expensive is wave power at 15.5–31.5p/kWh. (The latest craze, for shale gas, was not even mentioned.)
But these estimates contain a whole radiator-full of complexities. For example, the cost of solar energy is coming down fast as countries such as Germany begin manufacturing panels en masse. (Germany is planning to source half its daytime energy from solar panels and is ending its nuclear programme following the nuclear disaster in Japan in March.) The cost of wind, tide and wave is also expected to come down as more machines are built. Nuclear costs, on the other hand, are rising.
The estimate for nuclear power includes decommissioning costs, but does not include insurance costs (on the grounds that a nuclear accident would be so catastrophic it could not be covered by insurance). Furthermore, the two nuclear power stations being built in Europe, in France and Finland, are years behind schedule and at least 50 per cent over budget.
Nor is nuclear so reliable as we think. Hunterston B is currently running on only 70 per cent of capacity as it comes near to the end of its life. Torness has had trouble with cracks in its cooling system and had to be closed down completely in 2002. It was shut down again in August 2006 because of a build-up of seaweed, and again in June this year by an invasion of jellyfish.
The Scottish government (in contrast with England) has set its face against any more nuclear stations. Instead, it has set a target of 100 per cent of our electricity from renewables by 2020 and all energy to be decarbonised by 2050. The sceptics are pointing out that America is fast losing faith in wind generation after a number of high-profile renewable companies went bust. But the government says we need to set an ambitious target if Scotland is to take advantage of its natural wind, wave and tide resources and create 60,000 “green jobs”.
Amid the peat bog of uncertainties over energy, there seem to be two tufts of firm ground. Energy costs are going to rise – they have increased by one-fifth this year alone. The average household is now paying £1,200 in energy costs. And for all our talk about converting to renewables, our greenhouse gas emissions are still going up – they rose by 9 per cent in Scotland in 2010. In a way, the rise in energy costs is a good thing, a signal that we need to conserve more. But we have not solved the issue of energy supplies for our successors and we are polluting the planet as never before. That is unfair on our grandchildren.
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