11 FEBRUARY 2004

Dr Brenda Boardman and Mr Graham Sinden

  Q160  Lord Winston: Do you think the current Government policies are likely to lead to efficient distribution of renewables across the various technologies? If not, how would you like to see them change?

  Dr Boardman: As I have just said, I do not think we have confidence that it will and it is difficult to see exactly what will be required. We have got to have a  system which welcomes renewables and intermittents, they will contribute a lot, especially to our 60 per cent target. At the moment the system is not geared up to supporting them and helping them. It seems to work reasonably well, and other people will be able to say better, with the large scale wind, especially when it is onshore and it has already got to the stage of being cost-effective. Of the newer technologies—I will leave that to better informed brains—it is the most cost-effective. There is no way you would get your money back with photovoltaics at the moment even with the 50 per cent grant. The system is not yet supporting the development and the implementation.

  Q161  Lord Winston: Do your calculations include the cost of carbon with regard to photovoltaics, the manufacture of photovoltaic panels? Does that include the carbon costs?

  Mr Sinden: No. That is a little bit separate from what we are doing. We are interested solely in the electricity pattern.

  Q162  Lord Winston: So you are really looking at the end use?

  Mr Sinden: Yes, rather than the whole life cycle. If I could just add to your previous question, I do not think there is a good appreciation at the moment of the benefits of exploiting different patterns of intermittency, both in different locations or in different technologies. I think until that message comes across and people realise that you can address intermittency through a planned strategic approach to where and what type of technology you use, I do not think Government policy is going to be well positioned to accommodate it.

  Q163  Lord Winston: Can I ask a brief supplementary which seems relevant to this question. Do you think Government is doing enough about informing the public about what the options really are?

  Dr Boardman: I do not think so. This is veering a little bit away from this particular research. In many cases when the public is asked to make a decision about a planning application on a wind farm it is treated in isolation, they do not know the extent to which this is an either/or, what are the options if they refuse this, what are the implications if they refuse this. I have a great deal of sympathy for local people wanting to respond to a planning application. I do not want to impose anything on them but I do not think they are told "This has implications for the fuel mix. If you do not do this you must be more energy efficient. If you do not do this there will be more nuclear". I do not think anybody has a clear understanding. Actually, we are entering into a period of these choices.

  Q164  Lord Methuen: You argue about the benefits of the various intermittent energy sources. Have you considered the effects of climate change, stormy winters and dry summers?

  Mr Sinden: We have looked briefly at this. There has been some previous research into long-term change in wind speed which has shown that in some parts of the UK wind speed does change and in other parts it does not. In terms of predicting what is going to happen in the future, UK-CIP[3] which is the leader in this area of climate modelling, refused to classify how confident they are about what is going to happen with wind in the future, it really is one of those unknowns. One thing I would like to follow up there is most of these long-term changes that we see in wind speed tend to happen over quite long time frames, probably longer than the life expectancy of an individual wind farm, so I do not see it being a particular problem for individual investments. The other thing is that the work that we did covered more than two decades so the result you are looking at here is the worst case scenario over those two decades. The reason we chose such a long time frame was to try and include some of this longer environmental variability that we see. To some extent we have already covered that in the approach that we used to this research.

  Q165  Lord Methuen: If it is windier you could get these things shutting down because the wind is too high, could you not?

  Mr Sinden: It is very difficult to know what sort of response you are going to get. Windier at the low end will see these machines operating far more efficiently but, as you say, windier at the high end will see them shutting down. The modelling that is available at the moment is just so uncertain that no-one knows how it is going to respond.

  Q166  Lord Wade of Chorlton: On the basis that you brought this research as to how one might solve the intermittent problem, if you did not do it, in other words if you did not encourage these other technologies, would the intermittent problem be such that it would not be right to do it at all, in other words move solely to wind without the other technologies and try to get 10 per cent?

  Mr Sinden: The implication is that you will have to manage intermittency in another way. The standard way of doing that is building more conventional generating capacity. The downsides of that are it is going to cost you money to invest in that capital, it is going to cost you money to fuel it when you need to run it and it is going to undermine the CO2 benefits of your renewables because you are running this back-up capacity. What we are suggesting is that if you have a strategic approach along the lines that we are suggesting you can achieve many of these improvements to what you see in intermittency without any of the costs of building back-up and without any of the CO2 emissions undermining what is the end objective.

  Chairman: Thank you very much indeed for taking the time to come and talk to us this afternoon. If we have follow-up questions we would be grateful to hear from you. On behalf of the Committee, thank you very much.