Reference Docs

Remarks to the British Electricity Association
Sir Bernard Ingham
5 March, 2003

My task is to talk about your industry - an industry which has just had inflicted upon it an amazingly irrelevant White Paper on energy policy for which, fortunately, I consider the Minister [Brian Wilson] to be entirely blameless.

The charitable explanation for this publishing event is that it is a piece of political temporising - an attempt to give renewable sources of energy and energy conservation their chance to demonstrate their relevance to a modern economy, and that when they inevitably fail, the Government will have to come back to the issue after the election in a stronger position to embark on a nuclear ordering programme.

I don't believe a word of it, though I can see the attraction of it for those Ministers who don't believe a word of their own White Paper. The several years allegedly spent in search of an energy policy have actually been spent in assiduously avoiding one - or, at least, in avoiding a credible one because a credible one is altogether too difficult politically.

But I do agree with the optimists that sooner or later the Government will have to return to a nuclear programme - as its chief scientist, the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering urged it to do this time round.

The issue is the danger, damage and dislocation we might suffer in the interim ranging from loss of skills to conceivably the lights going out.

Mr Chairman, I have a few simple views about energy policy, borne in upon me during my five years at the Department of Energy.

The first is that a Government - any Government - has a fundamental responsibility to ensure the country has secure and continuous supplies of energy - and especially of electricity, the nation's lifeblood - in all foreseeable circumstances at the lowest possible cost.

The second is that we are most likely to achieve that by a judicious mix of energy sources - safety through diversity.

The third is that however much we may - and should - try to use the market to achieve that end, the Government ultimately has a responsibility, which it cannot duck, for ensuring continuity of supplies since they are a matter of life and death.

Latterly these responsibilities have been complicated by a widespread belief in global warming, bringing the threat of climate change and various associated and potentially dire consequences.

I have learned to take scientists with a pinch of salt. They have their fads and fancies. They also have their prejudices which are exhibited daily in the correspondence columns of our newspapers. In the 1970s they had me telling all of you to save energy because, they said, North Sea oil and gas would have run out not by now but ten years ago. And lo and behold, it is still pouring from every orifice, though admittedly in a slower rush.

But, global warming or not, I reckon it does not make sense to go on polluting the atmosphere if we can avoid it. Yet we are still doing so with a vengeance. Carbon dioxide pollution has increased in each of the last two years in spite of Kyoto.

If we generated all our electricity by nuclear means we could eliminate 30% of our current greenhouse gas pollution at a stroke - half way to the 2050 target of a 60% reduction.

But we are nowhere near that. Instead we are proposing to do three incomparably stupid things:

1 - effectively to close down the greenhouse-gas-free nuclear industry.

2 - to rely more and more on half-clean natural gas - indeed to rely on it for up to 75% of our energy, even though 90% of it would have to be imported by 2010.
Professor Ian Fells thinks that reckless. I would say it is suicidal, bearing in mind the volatile places that that gas would come from and the throttle it puts on our windpipe - if not necessarily in terms of supply but certainly in terms of the price we should have to pay for the gas when our vulnerability to extortion is fully appreciated.

3 - we are going to give renewables their head, even to the extent of further corrupting the planning system. And we are going to back renewables up with energy conservation. The idea is to fill the gap opening up in "clean" electricity with the steady closure of ageing nuclear power stations.

We are going to do all this knowing that wind power, the only viable renewable apart from hydropower:

a) now produces only 0.3% of our electricity;

b) is the subject of fierce opposition wherever turbines on top of towers higher than Big Ben are proposed because of their devastating impact on our wildest countryside.

c) produces only intermittent electricity which is useless in a modern 24-hour economy with continuous processes;

d) presents very severe problems for balancing the grid - which the Royal Academy of Engineering keeps drawing attention to, apparently vainly.

And they are going for - or rather dreaming of - 10% of our electricity from the wind by 2010 in the belief that it is clean when it is relatively dirty as well as very expensive. It is relatively dirty because its intermittency requires fossil-fuelled power stations to be kept on standby for when the wind doesn't blow or when it is blowing a gale because the turbines have to be shut down with wind speeds of more than 55mph.

The muck put out by standby fossil fuel stations should properly be charged to wind.

We are going for renewables when:

1 - the potential of hydropower is severely limited;

2 - no tidal power project is on the stocks.

3 - solar scarcely looks to be an option in our climate - or so the DTI advises

4 - Salter's Nodding Ducks have so far harnessed the waves to boil no more than 250 kettles

5 - biomass, bio-oil, bio-alcohol and bio-gas, like hydrogen, are merely exciting the romantics.

And when every one of these is voracious in its demand for land.

A 1000MW nuclear power stations takes up some ten soccer pitches.

To replace it:

o with WIND you'd need more than the area of Inner London - and even then it wouldn't be reliable.

o with WAVES theoretically - and I stress theoretically - 30 miles of Salter's Nodding Ducks - from Liverpool to Fleetwood.

o with SOLAR half as much again as inner London, assuming the sun shone, which it can be relied upon NOT to do at night.

o with BIOMASS a forest the size of Wales.

o with BIO-OIL a field the size of the Highlands of Scotland which would have them sneezing all over Scandinavia.

o with BIO-ALCOHOL you have a choice between devoting the whole of Devon to sugar beet; the whole of Kent and Sussex to spuds; the whole of Yorkshire to corn; or the whole of the UK to wheat. And don't blame me if you feel hungry.

o with BIO-GAS 800m chickens with regular digestive systems covering a third of inner London, not counting the midden or the stink.

All this to replace a mere 1000 of the 55,000 MW we need on our coldest days.

It really is barmy, you know.

As for energy conservation, for which I once had policy responsibility, you can certainly drastically cut usage for a time during a fully recognised and accepted emergency. A vigorous energy conservation programme will certainly improve the efficiency with which energy is used. But all the evidence suggests that demand will continue to rise as people use the money saved through greater efficiency to buy other goods which in turn consume energy and electricity, demand for which steadily grows.

Against that background, I am reminded of a saying coined by one James Duport (1607-79). It is in Latin - Quem Jupiter vult perdere, dementat prius. Loosely translated it means: Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.

It is madness to rely heavily on imported gas, largely undeveloped, unproven or unreliable renewable technologies and the pipedream of energy conservation.

Indeed, I submit that anybody who does that is unfit to be in charge of the world's fourth largest economy. We are running entirely unacceptable risks with people's jobs and lives.

But that is not the worst of it. We are doing so knowing that:

Now what does all this tell you? In my submission, it tells you that we are running the risk of blackouts and unnecessarily costly and uncompetitive power in the bargain.

I know that the Electricity Association cannot differentiate between its members or its members' methods of generation. But if its role in life is "to be capable of creating and changing the perceptions of key decision makers, wherever and whenever necessary", it needs to get to work now to educate the nation in at least some of the realities.

Of course, the Friends of the Earth are not going to realise their prejudiced dream of an end to nuclear power. The situation I have described this evening is bringing a nuclear renaissance.

But the issue is when that renaissance will occur, given that we cannot now have a new nuclear power station in operation before 2015 at the earliest - by which time half our current nuclear capacity will have closed along with some old coal-fired power stations.

This means that the nuclear renaissance could come in the form of a crash programme of new power station building - the last way to go about it. Nuclear development should be done in a measured, deliberate way.

You can, however, be sure of one thing: the British people, when confronted with even the threat of a loss of comfort and convenience, will rapidly conclude that after 45 years of safe, reliable, clean and economic nuclear power, they could do with a lot more of it.

They will rapidly - and rightly - conclude that it is highly economic electricity - far cheaper than being without.

They will rapidly come to see that the only problem with nuclear waste disposal is our Environment Minister, Michael Meacher, who is clearly determined NOT to designate a waste repository while he is in office.

And just as the Greens advocate recycling for everything apart from nuclear waste, the people will come to see the merit of nuclear reprocessing instead of throwing years of electricity supply back into the bowels of the earth.

Well, I hope that's cheered you up. It certainly should have given you a purpose in life. For what higher purpose could there be for the Electricity Association than to try to make sure Britain always has enough reliable power - not merely to keep it going in the manner to which it has become accustomed but also to enable it to develop and enrich its people?

If the Electricity Association is looking for a mission, I warmly commend a couple of years' remedial social work down among the deranged who try to pass off last week's White Paper as an energy policy.

Let us be clear: what Britain needs is real, reliable electricity; not unreliable political electricity.

I trust you feel electrified - not to say fully irradiated. Thank you.