Climate Action - Assisting business towards carbon neutrality

Leonie Greene, Head of External Relations, The Renewable Energy Association

The solutions to climate change already exist. The science is looking bleaker by the day. So how, asks the UK’s largest renewable energy trade association, can technological solutions to climate change be better mobilised – and quickly?

In the disorienting field of climate change it can be easy to forget we face a crisis not of energy, but of fossil fuel use. There is no shortage of renewable energy but a shortage of infrastructure to harness it. Societies remain locked into physical and institutional fossil fuel infrastructure that constrains their ability to accelerate renewable solutions. Just as dangerously, societies are also locked into outdated mindsets allowing precious resources and vested interests to replicate the outdated infrastructure that has already pushed humankind to the precipice.

In 2007, PV industry analysts anticipate price cuts of 40 per cent in just three years as technology and polysilicon supplies improve. The potential of concentrated solar became clear with California’s Pacific Gas & Electric committing to one of the largest ever purchases of solar power to be generated by mirrors in the Mojave Desert. Off the coast of the UK, planning permission was granted for the world’s largest 1,000MW wind farm. But if these advances in renewables are to be captured and accelerated, it is essential that our energy systems stand at the ready to incorporate them. Only a handful of countries, including Iceland or Sweden, can claim to be in that position.

A NEW INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE OLDEST ENERGY

Admittedly, gas pipe lines, electricity networks, fuelling stations, wires, network interchanges, grid architecture, system planning and the rules and regulations that determine who builds and uses what, where and when, don’t hold quite the same immediate appeal as the latest renewables breakthroughs. But if we are to unleash the promise of a renewables revolution, we need to focus far greater political and professional interest on the infrastructure beyond new generation technologies. At its heart, climate change is an infrastructure issue. How do we create an infrastructure that will underpin the rapid technology shift towards a low carbon economy? What does this new infrastructure look like? How do we best get there from where we are and how much will it cost?

From Europe to India, from the remote African community to the powerful multinational, awareness is growing that a renewables revolution means something much more profound, challenging and ultimately liberating than simply replacing, say, the world’s coal-fired power plants with wind farms. The infrastructure on which we all depend is itself an extension of fossil fuel technology. Found in relatively few places in the world, the fossil fuel industry has developed vast global infrastructure to distribute to almost every corner of the Earth the fuels that underpin people’s daily lives.

But renewables don’t need inputs shipped in from other continents. Their ambient and decentralised nature makes possible a very different physical infrastructure indeed – and one with huge economic advantages.

A MOVE AWAY FROM CENTRALISED POWER SYSTEMS

Centralised power systems supply 93 per cent of the world’s electricity and are the biggest single source of global CO2 emissions. The UK is a particularly meaningful model of infrastructure to critique, for it was here, in the 1930s, that the first centralised grid model was constructed in order to bring electricity generated next to coal mines to users all over the country. While today’s UK system is unquestionably well managed, losing just eight per cent of power in transmission and distribution, the centralised fossil fuel grid model itself remains staggeringly inefficient, wasting a total of two-thirds of primary energy inputs. Designed in a very different era, when fossil fuels were abundant and climate change the concern of a very few farsighted scientists, no sensible engineer would design a ‘coal-by-wire’ system like this today. 

Worse, in many ‘developing’ countries the centralised power model can suffer transmission and distribution losses of nearer 40 per cent which, on top of poor generation efficiency, can end up delivering less than 10 per cent of primary energy inputs as usable power.

A CHANGE TO THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Buildings are another critical dimension of energy infrastructure increasingly talked about in the context of climate change, but not always recognised as energy technology. Buildings represent humankind’s first attempts to master energy in their surroundings to ensure the sustenance and comfort of warmth, cooking, cooling and light. In many ways our built environment has changed remarkably little over centuries, arguably millennia. That must now change. The beauty of renewable technologies is they can work in practical and aesthetic harmony with building materials to deliver a low carbon built environment. A combination of good design, including high levels of insulation and passive solar alongside PV and solar thermal, can offer the 21st century citizen a comfortable and benign building that runs itself. These buildings can stand alone. Or, embedded in a responsive network infrastructure, they are power stations as well as homes or offices, offering clean electricity to neighbouring buildings. The role of buildings in renewable energy infrastructure needs very close attention given the majority of the world’s people now live in cities.

Figure 1: Centralised energy - yesterday's technologies. Source: Greenpeace UK

 While power generation enjoys political attention, heat is often overlooked. Yet in cooler climates, heat is the primary use for energy. Here again infrastructure is key. A highly energy efficient built environment can reduce the need for space heating dramatically. The staggering wastage in the electricity system is mostly in the form of heat; this wastage is visible in the vast white plumes of vapour from the cooling towers of generation plant. Decentralised combustion generation plants, brought closer to users, enables the capture of waste heat for distribution via heat networks to commercial, industrial or domestic buildings. This is the tried and tested technology of Combined Heat and Power.

When we start to think holisitically about energy and how to create the most efficient and renewable energy system possible, it becomes clear how much of a role infrastructure has to play in delivering the solutions. The example of heat also shows how much more widely and imaginatively we need to think about infrastructure.

REGULATORY BARRIERS

Infrastructure is a long term investment and cannot be overhauled overnight, but it is vital that today’s infrastructure is as receptive as possible to new technologies. Unfortunately the rules over which technologies have access to centralised infrastructure all too often prohibit renewables. For example, it is technically viable to add biogas produced from organic agricultural or food wastes to gas networks ensuring a greener fuel for cooking and heating but no incentives exist to pursue this in the UK. Likewise, under European Law, it is legal to allow renewable power priority access to transmission networks, but some European countries, including the UK, have failed to adopt this measure. With its insensitive regulatory barriers to infrastructure use, it is no accident that the UK is one of the worst performers on renewables in Europe while countries like Denmark, that pursue bold regulatory inventions to support the penetration of renewable energy, excel.

SMART GRIDS

So decision makers need to turn their attention to infrastructure; the way in which its ongoing physical development and day to day management must change to underpin renewables expansion. The European Union has developed a ‘smart grids’ programme to look at exactly these issues in relation to power supply. The driver for this rethink of electricity network infrastructure is clear; smart grids is a necessary response to the environmental, social and political demands placed on energy supply. The diagram above is a Greenpeace version similar to the EU Smart Grids Initiative and demonstrates a low carbon power system adapted for far higher levels of decentralised and intermittent renewable energy, integrated with the built environment and with an emphasis on active operational management of networks. Modern network infrastructure can be highly sophisticated, using computerised automation, demand-side management technologies and other renewable interface technologies, like storage, to balance any intermittency.

DECENTRALISED AND OFF-GRID

India has recognised the benefits of a network infrastructure rethink, passing laws in 2004 to support greater use of decentralised systems. And in Africa, where many people lack basic access to electricity inhibiting human development, some countries are now questioning the merits of a centralised approach. Renewables can dispose of the heavy fossil fuel infrastructure we are accustomed to – a vital consideration in severely economically constrained countries where renewables allow a piecemeal system development as the skills and resources available permit. Over the past decade, nearly 7,000 homes in South Africa have been provided with solar home systems. Namibia is masterminding a 20 year electricity infrastructure plan setting out which parts of the country will be grid connected, and which will instead be powered by stand alone renewable systems. As the coordinator of South Africa’s Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Programme says, “The old fashioned idea that everyone should be connected to the grid is finally being recognised as unrealistic and undesirable.”

Influential mainstream organisations are also recognising that low carbon means a radical rethink of infrastructure. For example, the International Energy Agency’s ‘Alternative Scenario’, commissioned by the G8 + 5 Gleneagles Dialogue, underlines the value of ‘smart investment’ – the replacement of ageing network and generation assets with an efficient and responsive infrastructure model fit for 21st Century technologies.

A RENEWABLES INFRASTRUCTURE

But what is the cost of an energy system explicitly oriented towards renewables? Unusually in the climate change field, there are some very pleasant surprises when it comes to the economics. All too often, analyses of generation options look exclusively at generation costs while ignoring the delivery infrastructure in the mistaken, and often subconscious, assumption that centralised networks are a given. One of the major economic advantages of a more efficient and renewable system is that net system costs can actually be reduced, as the International Energy Agency found out its 2006 Alternative Scenario. The massive expense of profligate, generally drastically over-specified centralised grid networks is not commonly appreciated. In fact, of the US$20 trillion the IEA anticipate the world will spend on its energy systems under a Business as usual scenario, over half of that is on the power sector, of which half again is for network infrastructure alone. Under the IEA’s Alternative Scenario, savings of 40 per cent in transmission infrastructure costs and 36 per cent in distribution costs are anticipated. That means liberating greater resources to spend on renewable generation technologies themselves.

Just as importantly, renewables offer a very different pattern of system ownership. While renewables can operate at the largest imaginable scale allowing multinationals their grand projects, they can also work at the very smallest. A more renewable and decentralised system therefore lowers barriers to sector entry, opening up the system for the widest possible array of new actors to invest in the solutions. Sectors particularly well placed to contribute are the construction, farming and waste industries, as well as PR sensitive commerce, and concerned communities and individuals. While fossil fuels subscribe purely to an economic logic of economies of scale, renewables can also offer economies of mass production. Indeed, this opening up of the, hitherto, exclusive energy sector to a flood of new small investors offers exactly the competitive dynamic needed to push the traditional centralised fossil fuel sector towards radical action on renewables.

By making our infrastructure as enabling as possible to renewables at all scales, a virtuous pathway is established of greater renewables penetration and further technological stimulus. The challenge for politicians concerned with climate change and energy security is now clear. It is to ensure the trillions of dollars of public and private resources that energy systems will absorb over coming decades are now robustly redirected to develop network infrastructure tailored to the decentralised and ambient nature of renewable energy. Likewise, R&D must be prioritised away from fossil fuels towards both renewables generation technologies and also interface and network technologies. Barriers to access for all infrastructure, however imperfect, must be removed. Those who want to act to mitigate climate change must be enabled to do so, and very fast indeed.

Figure 2: Decentralised energy future - today's technologies. Source: Greenpeace UK

Only national governments can direct such a bold strategic reorientation of our energy systems and set out the long term frameworks public and private investors need.

If we are to emerge from the dark era of climate change, the world must spotlight OECD governments. It is these most wealthy of countries that, as the IEA firmly points out, are now at the critical point in their investment cycles to pursue ‘smart investment’. A colossal amount of generation and network assets now require immediate replacement in OECD countries. If these affluent countries get it wrong and merely replace like with like they will frustrate renewables for decades and damage any credible case for urging emerging giants, such as India and China, to do things differently. If they get it right, they may yet unleash the renewables revolution in time. They will offer the most necessary and practical of global leadership imaginable.

Author

Leonie Greene is the Head of External Relations for the Renewable Energy Association. She was previously Political Adviser for Greenpeace UK and policy officer to the Deputy Mayor of London on sustainable development. She holds an MSc in Environmental Change and authored Greenpeace’s report Decentralising Power; An Energy Revolution for the 21st Century.

Organisation

The Renewable Energy Association was established in 2001 to represent British renewable energy producers and promote the use of sustainable energy in the UK. REA’s main objective is to secure the best legislative and regulatory framework for expanding renewable energy production in the UK. We undertake policy development and provide input to government departments, agencies, regulators, NGOs and others. With over 500 members, the REA is the UK’s largest renewables trade association covering renewable power, heat and transport fuels.

Enquiries

Leonie Green
REA
17 Waterloo Place
London SE1Y 4AR
Tel: +44 207 747 1830
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