Report Debates Role Of Wind Power In Reducing Co2 Emissions

A new report published today suggests that the Energy White Paper’s proposals for CO2 reduction are seriously unbalanced and that:

1. A reassessment of currently marginalised predictable renewables, such as biomass and tidal energy, and other means to CO2 reduction is long overdue.
   
   
2. The role of wind-power, and therefore its subsidy, must be re-defined in proportion to its merits.The report by David White, Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers, shows that, in relation to electricity generation, there is a consensus that non-firm renewables such as wind power produce a potential emissions reduction which is:
   • Very uncertain in quantity.
   • Plagued by the law of diminishing returns (as more wind is installed, the savings decrease).
   • Extremely costly, relative to the alternatives.

Derived from reports from professional bodies and companies around the world, David White concludes that the main problems are:

• Randomly intermittent renewable generation needs flexible and responsive fossil backup, which operates less efficiently because of the presence of wind, significantly diminishing the overall emissions saving, and driving up system costs.
  
  
• Poor overall load factors mean that the modest savings of CO2 come at a very high price.

The report supports the conclusion that policy needs to be modified to:

1. Improve the efficiency of energy use and conservation, in line with that of our European competitors, to enhance the national economy as well as to protect the environment.
   
   
2. Encourage the development of firm, predictable renewables such as biomass and tidal energy, which can be good team workers in the generation portfolio.
   
   
3. Catalyse the rapid adoption of more efficient fossil power stations with CO2 capture and re-injection to recover the decade or more of oil left in the incompletely extracted fields in the North Sea, which will otherwise go to waste.
   
   
4. Enable local communities to follow the lead of Woking in attempting a broad range of emissions abatement policies such as Combined Heat and Power at both the domestic and industrial scales, as already exists in advanced EU member countries.
   
   
5. Enable UK Government and businesses to showcase a fully integrated deployment of effective emissions reduction technologies, which can then be exported to address climate change at the global level.

It must be emphasised that wind still has a role, though a smaller one, and REF believes that a certain quantity of wind-power offshore might be accommodated economically in the UK system and contribute to our energy supplies and to CO2 emissions reduction.

The government has just announced its Review of the UK Climate Change Policy, and admitted that present methods will not hit the 2010 target for CO2 emissions reduction. REF judges that the ministerial motivation is genuine, though the policy instruments may be mistaken in their emphasis.

REF CEO Campbell Dunford remarked, “The Prime Minister is properly ambitious for UK to offer a role model in meeting climate change. This important and authoritative report published today shows that the current policy’s narrow scope will fall far short of this sincere intent, and will in fact stifle the UK’s innate ingenuity. However, by learning from the evidence now before us it may not yet be too late to demonstrate flexibility and enact effective policy at home and so to assist, both through example and exports, those developing countries which will truly control the future balance of the earth’s atmosphere.