Memorandum
submitted by the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT)
Climate Change, Microgeneration and Local
Initiatives
Introduction:
an integrated approach to climate change
In
the developed west, our physical and economic well-being is underpinned by:
1. Our hospitable, reliable climate
2. Access to abundant, cheap fossil fuels
3. Global inequality
A
sustainable future both for Wales and the UK relies on an integrated approach
to meeting these three key challenges. Although increasingly familiar
individually, their respective experts still work in relative isolation and
their respective solutions are rarely considered in unison.
1) Our hospitable
climate
Since
the industrial revolution, global atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide
has increased from 260 parts per million (ppm) to around 380 ppm. A significant
majority of climate scientists now conclude we have a ceiling of 450 ppm before
we reach a tipping point, beyond which positive feedbacks take hold, setting us
on course for abrupt, accelerated or runaway climate change. [Ref. Meeting our
climate challenge, International Climate Change Task Force & The Future
Starts Here: The Route to a Low Carbon Economy Tyndall Centre]
The
science has revealed that the Earth's 'Carbon sinks' have been buffering us
from the worst effects of our emissions, and slowing climate change - however,
with business as usual, they may be unable to continue. Atmospheric CO2 is now
rising at around 2ppm a year; the tipping point will be reached in around 20
years. We suggest that this gives us around 10 years to develop & implement
technologies that could start to bite into the problem. If global greenhouse
gas emissions exceed the planet's critical 'tipping point', it will set us on
course for abrupt, accelerated or runaway climate change. This could entail
massive agricultural losses, widespread economic collapse, international water
shortages, dangerous rises in sea levels, a slowdown of the Gulf Stream, and
tens of millions of environmental refugees - a complex of global catastrophes
on a scale that would dwarf recent events such as Hurricane Katrina and run for
tens of thousands of years. In his recent review, the former World Bank chief
economist Sir Nicholas Stern's key message stated that although dealing with
global warming by cutting emissions of greenhouse gases will be expensive-about
1 per cent of the world's gross domestic product-doing nothing about it will be
an awful lot more expensive, anything from five to 20 times more. The review
states that unless greenhouse emissions are tackled the world faces major
economic and social disruptions on the scale of the great wars or the economic
depressions of the early 20th century.
To
minimise the risk of crossing the threshold for really dangerous climate
change, the world has less than a decade to reverse the growth in greenhouse
gas emissions. By 2015 the world would need to be cutting carbon emissions by
4%-5% annually. This message needs to be heard, clearly understood and
integrated into future planning at all levels of government and, more
importantly, in every level of civil society.
2) Access to
abundant, cheap fossil fuels
Our
unstoppable oil economies are now being halted by the immovable facts of
geology. Rather than talking about when oil could "run out", the peak
oil experts predict that despite accelerating demand, global rates of
production may be at, or approaching, their peak. This is not news: way back in 1956 an oil geologist named M King
Hubbert predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in 1970. His superiors at
Shell Oil were aghast. They even tried to persuade him not to speak publicly
about it. His peers, accustomed to decades of making impressive oil
discoveries, were highly sceptical, arguing technological improvements in
exploration and recovery would increase the amount of available oil. But after
decades of derision, Hubbert was proved right. U.S. oil production did indeed
peak in 1970, and it has declined steadily ever since. Even impressive
discoveries such as Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, with 13 billion barrels in
recoverable reserves, or the developments of new extraction technologies
haven't been able to reverse that trend - it is simply imposed by the geology.
Peak
Oil should come as no shock to the oil industry, which well understands the process
of discovery, extraction and depletion. North Sea oil has peaked, as have the
supplies of Mexico, Indonesia, China, Oman and Norway. The inevitable peak of
world oil production is now imminent, and to compound the problem we are using
oil quicker than ever before. There will be warning signs. Set against
escalating demand, prices will rise dramatically and become increasingly
volatile. With little or no excess production capacity, any supply disruptions
such as hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico will drive world oil markets into
frenzy. As will occasional admissions by oil companies and oil-rich nations
that they have been overestimating their reserves. Despite continuous warnings
from oil geologists and oil economists across the world little action has been
taken to deal with Peak Oil, and its inevitable price shock. Why not? Because
the prevailing belief is that the free market will take care of it. However,
normal economics break down when it comes to oil. In most cases if the price of
something goes up, more of it is produced. But the price of oil has no effect
on how much oil there is to be found. We are currently using oil that we found
40 years ago. The industry can of course switch to remote smaller fields,
containing harder to extract oil, or make oil from coal but this is neither
cheap nor quick. A high price will not bring back the massive, easily
accessible discoveries of the early days. In addition, free market principles
forget about time lag. We cannot assume that as soon as oil becomes scarce and
expensive alternative forms of generation will be ready to completely fill the
gap. If the new energy technologies we require are not developed fast enough,
there may well be a period of great hardship and abrupt dislocation when oil
becomes cripplingly expensive and supplies intermittent.
3) Global Inequality
We
simply haven't been sharing out the energy, or anything else for that matter,
very fairly. One average American consumes as much oil as 35 citizens of India.
Here in the overdeveloped west, we continue to use vastly more energy than is
required to deliver our well being, whilst the majority world strives to
provide the basic schools, railways hospitals and welfare systems which are not
only a basic human right, but are a vital tool in stabilising global
population. Despite record increases in global economic activity, the rich are
still getting richer and the very poorest are being left behind. Never in the
field of human commerce has so much been earned by so many, for so few. This
unfair distribution of resources has been going on for so long that the
majority world is now demanding the urbanised lifestyles that we in the west
have been demonstrating over the past 50 years, and they are industrialising at
a rapid rate to get it. And who are we to refuse them? Competitive labour rates
sweep the board, generating the economic and political power required to claim
equity. New gigantic markets such as those in India and China have opened up to
modern consumerism and have driven the global thirst for oil through the roof.
If China were to have three cars for every four people like the US does, it
would use 99m barrels of oil a day. But the world only produces 84m barrels a
day and current production is about as high as it gets.
An integrated solution
Business
as usual simply does not work from the climate's point of view; neither does it
work from the point of view of meeting escalating energy demands from dwindling
energy reserves, and it certainly is not working from the point of view of delivering
global equity. There are solutions to peak oil that accelerate climate change,
and there are solutions to global equity that exacerbate peak oil. These kinds
of measures - solving one challenge at the expense of another - will not do.
The key to success is to solve the three main challenges together, and do it in
a way that also encompasses our personal well-being. Once we join the dots and
look for the bigger picture, we find many solutions to climate change are the
same as solutions to dealing with dwindling fossil fuel reserves. In fact,
facing up to our oil addiction and re-thinking our diet, buildings, energy,
water, work, clothing, heating, holidays and healthcare could actually increase
our personal well-being, whilst also releasing resources the majority world
urgently needs.
We
see the crisis, we have the solutions, but our almost total failure to take the
actions that could avert it is making it increasingly obvious that our entire
culture, indeed our entire civilization, is locked into 'fossil fuel denial'.
Denial is the primary psychological symptom of addiction. It is both automatic
and unconscious. Addicts are often the last to recognize their disease,
pursuing their addictions to the gates of insanity as their world collapses
around them. Fossil fuels have become indispensable to almost every aspect of
Welsh life. It's not just food, it's also drinking water, home heating,
manufacturing, communications and personal transport, and that's just the
start. So, how on earth can we in Britain begin to reduce our excessive and
addictive use of fossil fuels in order to converge with the majority world at
some sustainable global fair share? The strategy we are suggesting is one of
'Powerdown plus Renewables'.
Powerdown
We
are energy obese. By this we mean we use far more energy than is actually
required to deliver our well-being. Powerdown is the process of working towards
delivering equal levels of well-being but using considerably less energy. It is
not the same as energy efficiency - it goes very much further. For example,
consider industrialised agriculture. We drive an oil-powered machine to plough
the land, and another to plant the seed. We now depend on fertilisers and
pesticides made almost totally from oil or gas, and we irrigate with water
pumped by oil. We harvest the crop with oil-powered tractors and process it
using fossil fuels. Finally it is packed in plastic and driven further than you
ever imagined. The bottom line is that with modern industrialised agriculture,
we consume ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food we eat.
Switching to a locally sourced, mostly organic, less-processed, low-meat diet
could not only increase our general health and well-being, but massively reduce
the fossil fuel dependence of our eating habits too.
The
potential 'powerdown' which could be achieved through a re-think of our food
alone is massive. For starters, we export some 102,000 tones of lamb to the EU,
whilst also importing 125,000 tonnes of almost identical lamb from the EU. Similar
paradoxes exist for most other products. Local food chains are not only more
energy efficient, they are considerably more reliable and have additional
social and economic benefits. But could we still feed ourselves without so much
oil? With a re-think, many people believe we could. Firstly it would require a
change of diet, but that's something we need to do in any case. Secondly
supermarkets reject around 30% of vegetables because they are the wrong shape,
colour or size. Further waste occurs when food is processed into ready meals.
Finally, consumers bin about 30% of what they buy. If we stopped this wastage
then we could be far more self-reliant in food and vastly reduce our oil
consumption.
Above
the basic level needed to provide food, clothes and shelter, using extra energy
does not necessarily make us any happier. Since the 1970s the UK's GDP has
doubled, but our perceived 'satisfaction with life' has hardly changed.
However, if we 'powerdown', so contracting our energy requirements, delivering these
needs with renewable sources not only becomes achievable, it rapidly becomes
cost competitive as oil prices soar, and significantly more reliable as fossil
energy supplies falter.
Renewables
It
is now 30 years since the newly emerged Centre for Alternative Technology
initiated a process of collaboration which led to the production of the first
'Alternative Energy Strategy for the UK'. Not surprisingly, the reception from
the energy mainstream varied from hostility to outright scorn. This vision was
poles apart from the majority of energy strategists at the time, who expected
demand to steadily increase as it had done since the end of the war, fuelled by
the new North Sea oil reserves and the promise of cheap nuclear power.
Renewable energy was associated with remote 'pre-national grid' systems such as
the small wind and hydro schemes used by remote rural villages in the 1920s and
1930s. The national grid, managed by the Central Electricity Generating Board,
was not interested in any electricity suppliers below 10 megawatts.
CAT's
alternative strategy showed how an alternative approach could level off and
then reduce energy demand whilst radically increasing generation from renewable
sources, thus reducing damaging emissions and preventing 'resource depletion'.
Three decades later, these predictions are very much on target. It has become
clear that if our energy strategy is based on exploiting ever-diminishing
reserves of nuclear or fossil fuels, the inevitable demand-driven improvements
in extraction technology may increase yield in the short-term, but only at the
cost of depleting the reserves at an accelerating rate. However, if our energy
strategy is based on exploiting (renewable) flows, the same demand-driven
improvements in extraction technology will increase annual yield but on a
permanent basis, as the sources are naturally renewed.
Wales
has many of the skills required and some of the best renewable resources in
Europe. The UK has an offshore energy industry in the North Sea that has peaked
and now faces decline. This is ripe for conversion to large-scale marine
renewables. We know the energy is out there. Providing we have a good spread of
technologies and a good spread geographically, the problems of intermittent
supply can be easily overcome. It is fairly easy to predict the amount of
energy we can capture over a season; we just can't tell exactly which day we
will get it. But with intelligent load management and some fossil fuels to fill
the gaps we can make it work.
Microgeneration - domestic and community scale
initiatives
One
of the key advantages of renewable energy sources is that they can work on both
a national, regional, community and domestic scale.
Domestic scale
microgeneration; Solar water heating is well suited to domestic scale
microgeneration as is solar electricity generation (photovoltaics), although
this is somewhat less commercially mature. A number of biofuels systems such as
logs and pellets can also deliver efficient and reliable microgeneration at a
domestic scale.
CAT
has strong reservations about micro-windpower systems. Although a well sited,
tower mounted windturbine in an open location with a good wind resource
(greater than 4 meters/second) can provide useful generation, their performance
when mounted to buildings in an urban location is at best un-proven.
Turbulence, or a simple lack of wind, may produce disappointing results which
could reflect badly on other, perhaps more appropriate domestic scale renewable
technologies.
Community scale
microgeneration: The increase in size of community scale renewables widens the
range of viable options. The solar technologies remain viable, but with some
increases in cost effectiveness with increasing scale. Combining electricity
and heat generation from bio-fuels in the same systems (Combined Heat and
Power, CHP) becomes viable at the community scale, and the range of biofuel
products which can be effectively utilised also increases to include options
such as wood chips as well as pellets and logs (the CHP project at Llanwddyn
has yielded some useful experience).
Community
scale grid linked windpower generation has a much greater proven track record
at the community scale (approx 50kW upwards), providing the site assessment has
been done correctly. Community windpower microgeneration can either be
community managed and installed (such as the Bro Ddyfi Community project
adjacent to CAT) or in the form of 'community shares' issued to enable part
ownership of larger commercial wind farms. Either way, direct financial
community benefit will serve to engage the community and increase support for
the project.
Microgeneration
either at the domestic or community scale can deliver the following benefits:
· Awareness of energy, energy efficiency and levels of consumption
· An
understanding of our renewable resources
· Support for renewable generation, locally and in other places
· Direct
financial benefit to householders and the local economy
· Low
carbon generation to help meet climate change targets
In Conclusion
If
Wales was to try switching to renewable energy whilst still running at our
current, obese demand levels, we would quickly stall. We must first powerdown,
so significantly reducing our energy demand. R&D funding for this must be
increased as a matter of national urgency.
In
addition, more resources must be made available for the technical and social
development of renewable energy sources. As fossil fuel prices go through the
ceiling, any 'technically mature' renewable generation system will become
'economically mature' very quickly. Even at present energy prices, the fastest
growing energy technology in the world is grid-connected solar photovoltaic
(PV), which grew by 60 percent a year between 2000 and 2004. Second is wind
power capacity, which grew by 28 percent.
Set
against our energy challenges, 'business as usual' will be all but impossible.
Both our scientists and our economists now accept that we have to change and
fast! There is no longer any rational economic or scientific case for
un-reformed 'business as usual'; Wales must integrate its science and politics
into a single discipline. We are certainly near a "tipping point" in terms of
climate change; we are upon a tipping point in terms of energy supply security;
it seems possible that we are also near a "tipping point" in terms of public
awareness and readiness to act.
A
'Powerdown plus Renewables' strategy is an important energy option for Wales,
which is of course rich in renewable resources. We now have a chance to change
everything, because everything must be changed. The search for 'carbon lean'
lifestyles could very well lead us back to what we really value. Dealing with
these challenges holds the potential to become a driver for a change that will
allow us to create the kind of Wales we actually want to live in. It doesn't
have to be a huge disaster. But getting the best out of such a massive triple
challenge means using the time and the oil we have left to their very best
effect. If we wait until the challenge is really upon us before becoming
serious about developing the solutions, in the ensuing chaos we may no longer
be able to muster the resources required. Responsibility cannot be left solely
with international agreements; it is now a job for the whole of civil society.
Organisations
and individuals across Wales are poorly prepared, as yet, to face the immediate
and long-term challenge of reducing emissions. In order to begin creating the
framework for social and political acceptance, we must first deliver a
thoroughgoing change of outlook and culture within our society. Change must be
now embedded in local authorities, communities, businesses, trades unions,
families and individuals.
Community
and corporate 'green champions' have a vital role to play, holding the
potential to set trends, inspiring many others in their communities to take up
the challenge. They must be supported as they are already embedded in their
peer groups and can become powerful agents of change in the transformation of
both outlook and behaviour.
What
is needed most urgently is access to a network of real life models, showing how
the transformation to a low carbon economy can actually take place. This
requires live demonstrations of the complex interaction between land use,
planning, food production, energy, buildings, transport, waste management and
all aspects of human society, on a carbon-lean basis. At the Centre For
Alternative Technology, the WISE@CAT project is urgently being developed to
provide training, education, support, innovation, research, and advice to
engage, inspire, inform and enable all sectors of Welsh and UK civil society to
help accelerate this vital transition.
Before
the implementation of such a radical programme of changes in patterns of energy
production and consumption, it is useful to recall the profound changes that
have already occurred in our energy systems during the latter half of the
twentieth century. The dramatic changes that have occurred in the energy
systems of Wales have, broadly, been paralleled in most 'developed' countries
over the same period. Given the scale and profundity of the technical and
social changes over the past half-century, it does not seem unrealistic to
suggest that, given the impetus from across civil society, equally profound
changes could well occur over the next few decades.
20th
December, 2006
