Renewable energy is not working

My Times Column explores why renewable energy has
been so disappointing.

On Saturday my train was diverted by engineering
works near Doncaster. We trundled past some shiny new freight
wagons decorated with a slogan: “Drax — powering tomorrow: carrying
sustainable biomass for cost-effective renewable power”.
Serendipitously, I was at that moment reading a report by the chief scientist at the
Department of Energy and Climate Change on the burning of wood in
Yorkshire power stations such as Drax. And I was feeling
vindicated.

A year ago I wrote in these pages that it made no sense for
the consumer to subsidise the burning of American wood in place of
coal, since wood produces more carbon dioxide for each
kilowatt-hour of electricity. The forests being harvested would
take four to ten decades to regrow, and this is the precise period
over which we are supposed to expect dangerous global warming to
emerge. It makes no sense to steal beetles’ lunch, transport it
halfway round the world, burning diesel as you do so, and charge
hard-pressed consumers double the price for the power it
generates.

There was a howl of protest on the letters page from the chief
executive of Drax power station, which burns a million tonnes of
imported North American wood a year and plans to increase that to 7
million tonnes by 2016. But last week, Dr David MacKay’s report
vindicated me. If the wood comes from whole trees, as much of it
does, then the effect could be to increase carbon dioxide
emissions, he finds, even compared with coal. And that’s allowing
for the regrowth of forests.

Despite the best efforts of the Conservatives to rein in their
Lib Dem colleagues, the renewable-energy bandwagon careers onward,
costing ever more money and doing real environmental harm, while
producing trivial quantities of energy and risking blackouts next
winter. People keep telling me it’s no good being rude about all
renewables: some must be better than others. Well, I’m still
looking:

Tidal power remains a (literal) non-starter; if you ask
ministers why nothing has been built, they say it’s not for want of
proffering ludicrously generous subsidies on our behalf. Yet still
no takers.

Wave power: again, the sky’s the limit for what the government
will pay if you can figure out how to make dynamos and generators
survive the buffeting of waves, corrosion of salt and encrustation
of barnacles. Nothing doing.

Geothermal: perhaps great potential in the future for heating
homes through district heating schemes, though expensive here
compared with Iceland, but not much use for electricity. Air-source
and ground-source heat pumps, all the rage a few years ago, have
generally proved more costly and less effective than advertised,
but they are getting better. Trivial contribution so far.

Solar power: one day soon it will make a big impact in sunny
countries, and the price is falling fast, but generating for the
grid in cloudy Britain where most power is needed on dark winter
evenings will probably never make economic sense. Covering fields
in Devon with solar panels today is just ecological and economic
vandalism. Solar provides about a third of one per cent of world
energy.

Offshore wind: Britain is the world leader, meaning we are the
only ones foolish enough to pay the huge subsidies (treble the
going rate for electricity) to lure foreign companies into tackling
the challenge of erecting and maintaining 700ft metal towers in
stormy seas. The good news is that the budget for subsidising
offshore wind has almost run out. The bad news is that it is
already costing us billions a year and ruining coastal views.

Onshore wind: one of the cheapest renewables but still twice as
costly as gas or coal, it kills eagles and bats, harms tourism,
divides communities and takes up lots of space. The money goes from
the poor to the rich, and the carbon dioxide saving is tiny,
because of the low density of wind and the need to back it up with
diesel generators. These too now need subsidy because they cannot
run at full capacity.

Hydro: cheap, reliable and predictable, providing 6 per cent of
world energy, but with no possibility for significant expansion in
Britain. The current vogue for in-stream generation in lowland
streams in England will produce ridiculously little power while
messing up the migration of fish.

Anaerobic digestion: a lucrative way of subsidising farmers (yet
again) to grow perfectly good food for burning instead of eating.
Contrary to myth, nearly all the energy comes from crops such as
maize (once fermented into gas), not from food waste.
Expensive.

Waste incineration: a great idea. Yet we are currently paying
other countries to take it off our hands and burn it overseas. If
instead we burned it at home, we would make cheap, reliable
electricity. But Nimbys won’t let us.

Over the past ten years the world has invested more than $600 billion in wind power
and $700 billion in solar power. Yet the total contribution those
two technologies are now making to the world primary energy supply is still less than
2 per cent. Ouch.

If we had spent that sum on research, and steadily replaced coal
with gas as a source of electricity, we would have done far more to
cut carbon emissions and kept prices low. A new report by Charles Frank of the Brookings
Institution has come to the startling conclusion that if you encourage gas
to replace coal, you get fewer emissions per dollar spent than if
you use wind or solar.

In Mr Frank’s words: “Solar and wind facilities suffer from
a very high capacity cost per megawatt, very low capacity factors
and low reliability, which result in low avoided emissions and low
avoided energy cost per dollar invested.” In short, we are picking
losers.

I would not suggest Drax goes back to burning only coal, partly
because I have a vested interest in the coal industry and partly
because more than 40 per cent of the coal we burn in this country
comes from Russia, so we are more exposed to Vladimir Putin for our
coal than for our gas. The answer is staring us in the face. Gas is
the cheapest clean way of making electricity, and we are sitting on
one of the world’s richest shale-gas fields. Yet investment in
gas-fired power is deterred by the government’s preference for
renewables.