• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 763 0

opposing wind is just as reprehensible as opposing nuclear, and as I discuss later in this book, I do not think any of the planetary boundaries offer compelling environmental reasons for completely ruling out wind—even though problems with bird and bat kills are real and severe in some cases. In any case, the U.K. industry is likely to largely move offshore, where a truly vast resource awaits commercial exploitation. According to a recent assessment, offshore wind and other marine renewables could deliver six times current U.K. electricity demand.74 In September 2010 the world’s largest offshore wind farm opened in the North Sea off Thanet in Kent, adding a further 300 megawatts to Britain’s 5 gigawatts installed capacity of wind.75

But new turbine installations are expected to plummet from 2010 to 2013, and the reason has nothing to do with a shortage of wind. Instead, the problem is money. Both renewables and nuclear are highly capital-intensive, meaning that all the investment needs to be made up front, while the price of fuel is very low (for uranium) or free (for wind and solar). Capital financing is therefore a huge challenge. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that climate change is, more than anything else, a financing issue. With postrecession commercial banks shutting down much of their lending operations, energy utilities are increasingly cash-strapped and unable to finance future investment. The implication of this may be hard for free marketeers to swallow, but a large portion of future energy infrastructure may need to be supported and directed by the public sector.

Energy is very different from other commodities, for without energy nothing can happen anywhere in the economy. It cannot be substituted. Governments, therefore, are key players. It was a French government decision (after the 1974 oil price shock) to move comprehensively toward nuclear that makes the country an accidental climate-change champion today, while Britain’s liberalized approach has led to a real danger of blackouts—and the missing of renewables targets—as investment has failed to materialize. Energy, unlike much of the rest of the economy, demands a degree of central planning, to get the mix of different technologies right in the grid. Wind, for instance, is highly intermittent, so cannot be relied on for baseload (always on) generation. Nuclear, on the other hand, cannot be easily ramped up and down in response to peaks in demand, so is baseload only. Gas can be easily switched on and off to balance load demand, but emits carbon. And so on. Decisions about the extent to combine the different technologies cannot simply be left to the market if the target is a carbon-neutral electricity supply.

In the Maldives, the country faces precisely these questions on a micro level. With each island operating a separate electricity grid, we cannot simply put up a lot of solar panels or wind turbines and declare the country carbon-neutral. Wind speeds are only good for part of the year, and solar requires backup on cloudy days and at night. Batteries might be an option, but for larger islands like the capital Malé the number of batteries needed will make this unviable. We could also keep running diesel generators for the time being to balance electrical loads, but this means carrying on emitting a residual amount of carbon. One option for Malé is to burn garbage on demand, using waste-to-energy technologies as backup. Another might be to import biomass and burn that, but sustainable and reliable sources from overseas would need to be found, as the Maldives has no land to spare. My conclusion is that we need an energy and carbon neutrality “master plan.” This cannot simply be done on the hoof, or the danger is that either nothing at all will happen, or the wrong investments will be made and a lot of money wasted.

In the Maldives as elsewhere, energy efficiency is central. It will always be much cheaper to stop wasting energy than to build energy-generating capacity to cover unnecessary use, whether that generating capacity is powered by diesel,