Source: BBC Radio 5 Live
URL: N/A
Date: 28/10/2014
Event: Sally Uren: "and so we have this grid which allows us to store energy..."
Credit: BBC Radio 5 Live, also many thanks to Bishop Hill commentator Paul - Nottingham for transcribing this.
People:
Nicky Campbell: Lead story, Energy, the National Grid publishes its annual winter outlook later this morning. It’s expected to say the risk of blackouts this winter has increased significantly from last year and that spare capacity in the power network has fallen to a seven year low. But emergency measures have been taken to ensure the lights stay on. The Energy Minister Matthew Hancock says that the Government will ensure we have the energy we need.
Matthew Hancock: Indeed there has been a historic underinvestment in energy and a few years ago we needed £100 billion worth of investment in energy production assets and 45 billion of that has happened and that means that we’re halfway there but there’s still a lot of catching up to do. We have also taken measures which will also be announced today to make sure that we have the capacity to generate the electricity that the country needs.
Nicky Campbell: Let’s talk about this. How are we going to ensure the UK has enough energy this winter and beyond. There will be some people listening, this presenter included, who remembers doing homework by candle light back in the early Seventies. Sally Uren is Chief Executive of Forum for the Future an organisation that advises on sustainability. Good morning Sally.
Sally Uren: Good morning.
Nicky Campbell: We’ve also got Jeremy Nicholson, director of the Energy Intensive Users Group. Hello.
Jeremy Nicholson: Good morning to you.
Nicky Campbell: Right. Sally, Jeremy. Jeremy, Sally. Sally, what’s the way ahead?
Sally Uren: Well, first of all we don’t think that the lights will go out this winter but this is clearly a wake-up call and we need to think really seriously about long-term stability and new policy across the UK. The peak demand that we’re planning only lasts (twenty?) hours or so, so we can shift the time use of our energy, as domestic users as businesses, to avoid the need for creating this over …, this, this demand. And let’s remember that it’s fossil fuel and nuclear plants that have been turned off recently not renewables and I think that, Nicky, you said about the future. The future has to be about putting more serious investment behind renewables. Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and many others have at least 50% or more renewables than the UK does and they don’t have blackouts or even the prospect of them.
Nicky Campbell: Mmm, Scotland’s actually leading the charge, isn’t it.
Sally Uren: It is and this notion that wind and solar is unreliable, it’s just a myth, it’s simply not true. So we need to develop policy that delivers that mix of affordability, low carbon and security, but we need to really think much more seriously about the role that renewables can play.
Nicky Campbell: Earlier on, Matthew Hancock, the Energy Minister, said that “Sometimes" - this wasn’t his exact phrase - but he said that “Sometimes the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine.” He didn’t say it like that but that’s the gist.
Sally Uren: Well he’s right, of course but that’s not a worry when we’re thinking about security of supply from renewables because we have these things called storage units, and so we have this grid which allows us to store energy and deal with peaks and troughs in demand so this notion that when the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing so does our energy. It’s just not true.
Nicky Campbell: Yes. Jeremy Nicholson, join us.
Jeremy Nicholson: Well, all can say is I don’t know what planet Sally’s on but it’s certainly not the same one that our members in industry or indeed anyone else I know. I wish it was possible to store electricity, these “storage units” it’s the first time I’ve heard about them. I think that what she may mean is coal and gas-fired power stations take up the slack on the regular and prolonged occasions when wind delivers virtually nothing to the National Grid. It’s costing us, by the way, two and a half billion pounds a year to subsidise unreliable wind and solar energy production and that’s set to rise to seven and a half billion but consumers paying a very heavy price to subsidise very unreliable power generation. Now, it’s absolutely true that wind makes a contribution on average but I don’t want the lights to stay on, on average and business needs that power 24/7 and it’s certainly true that business can make use of off-peak power and if you’ve got flexibility in your production perhaps you can use a little less and that’s a good thing and industry will be doing everything possible this winter to help manage a tricky situation but it can’t be sustainable to keep the lights on for everyone else by shutting down chunks of British industry.
Sally Uren: Well I think that’s interesting because I think that the last I checked we were inhabiting the same planet and I think that partly what we’ve just heard there is one of the reasons why we’re seeing resistance to the alternative forms of energy. It’s simply not sustainable to consider a future where we’re completely reliant on fossil fuels and nuclear, renewables have to be part of the mix, it’s scaleable, the price structures will work, in ten years’ time from now some more nuclear capacity will come on line but it will be very, very expensive. Solar and wind will not be as expensive.
Jeremy Nicholson: Well, not according to the Government. According to the Government offshore wind is going to be 50% more expensive than nuclear and that’s before you consider the cost of backing it up when the wind isn’t blowing. So of course we all want to see more clean energy, who wouldn’t? And we want to see our carbon emissions coming down. But we need to be grown up about this too, we need power stations that work at the flick of a switch not when the wind happens to be blowing or the sun’s shining. And the minister, Matt. Hancock, is right about this. I think the penny has finally dropped. We want to have a clean and greener future, of course we do, but it has to be at a price we can afford and it has to be whilst providing reliability and I think, you know, it’s an insult to industry to suggest that there’s some resistance to alternative energy. It’s not the alternatives we object to, it’s the unreliability, so if we’ve got reliable alternatives then, fine let’s have them, we want more of it in fact.
Sally Uren: Well, I would argue that there are reliable alternatives today. And I also think we need not just to look at the supply of energy but also at the demand side so you, yourself, have just talked about the ability of businesses to switch supply to look at off-peak supply which is great and that will help, help manage the supply of energy but actually there’s another part to this whole debate which is actually what we as domestic consumers can do and I think that we can really start to think seriously about changing our attitudes towards energy and actually reduce demand for energy in the first place. And that has to be part of the policy going forward.
Jeremy Nicholson: So, so, the future that the Forum for the Future wants is that we’re all going to use less energy, well that’s lovely if we can maintain our standard of living, if we can compete in the rest of the world, and who wouldn’t want to be energy efficient. National Grid have just announced today they’ve contracted for 300 Megawatts worth of demand response from the industrial sector to add to our security of supply this winter and very welcome it is too. But we have plans to have twenty five Gigawatts, that’s almost one hundred times that level of power on the system coming from wind by the end of the decade if it all gets built. Something is going to have to back up that power when it’s not there and we can’t have ten times the demand response from industry and the domestic sector …
Nicky Campbell: OK.
Jeremy Nicholson: … without not lighting our homes.
Nicky Campbell: Thank you very much indeed and just measuring who said what I think, Sally Uren, you perhaps deserve another twenty seconds. I’ve been timing you both.
Sally Uren: Oh, thank you. I think that this conversation is interesting and of course at Forum for the Future we put the long term sustainability of business first and foremost because that helps deliver a sustainable economy. But we have to think differently about energy and just exercise a bit more creativity, a bit more imagination and look more into the long term. And I think that will deliver a sustainable energy supply which will mean that in the future we won’t have these warnings of blackouts which quite frankly is a bit of scaremongering. We won’t have a blackout this winter we just need to think much more seriously about a sustainable energy policy.
Nicky Campbell: Thank you, thank you both very much.