Energy, Environment and Sustainability Group
Prof Younger’s lecture was amusing and informative. He started with the proposition that “security of energy supply can no longer be achieved without also ensuring environmental welfare”. The solution will inevitably include a variety of technologies including carbon capture and storage (CCS) and nuclear power as well as renewables. In the ‘60s, growing up in the Durham Coalfield, our speaker was anti-nuclear as it would put miners out of work. Social issues are important too.
Fascinating statistics showed that coal provides 93% of South Africa’s electricity and 41% percent of Germany’s. In the UK the figure is 28%. CCS could help with this and China is moving fast to develop it. In the future they may be running our ‘greened’ coal fired power stations as well as our nuclear ones! However, CCS cannot be the complete solution.
Electricity generation is the easy part of the energy conundrum. In Scotland 55% of energy is used as heat (the figure for the UK as a whole is 40%). Transport is the second highest energy user with electricity only forming 20%.
The debate on energy is emotional and Prof Younger has received death threats. Protest is easy and fun, engineering a solution rather more difficult. As an example, Glasgow University is in the process of installing a gas-fired combined heat and power (CHP) system. Would biomass have been greener? Perhaps, but the pollution and lorry trips in a city centre location would have been unacceptable.
In pursuing idealism you may be left with nothing. We could reject:
- Wind because of visual amenity
- Tidal power because of avian habitats
- Hydropower because of landscape changes
- Biomass because of forest destruction
- Geothermal because of induced seismicity
Remember that nuclear power has led to far fewer fatalities per GW of generation than any other baseload source of electricity and that coal has a myriad of uses in the chemical industry where the goods do not release the carbon into the atmosphere.
Application of the waste hierarchy to the energy industry had some interesting results. For example, don’t knock down that old coal-fired power station and build luxury houses. You will lose a site zoned for industrial use that might be essential for a different form of energy production.
A further opportunity is a project called LOCAL, low carbon afterlife for coal mines. Their use as heat pumps has been shown to be effective in the Netherlands and Spain. They can also be used for heat storage.
Prof Younger has done a lot of work in developing countries and quoted “extreme poverty fuels population growth. The only tried and tested measure to control population growth is to ensure that women have access to the same educational opportunities as men”. There are enormous opportunities for these countries to bypass polluting solutions and jump straight to the greener options. This has already happened with mobile phones in areas where no land network has been constructed. In the energy field it includes extensive use of geothermal energy in which Prof Younger is heavily involved. The resource in Bolivia could provide the whole country’s energy needs and there are huge resources in East Africa as well. As an added bonus, the condensate can be used for irrigation or as potable water.
Many of these solutions require public subsidies initially until they become economically viable. Changes in public policy are required in the same way that there was a campaign to convert from town gas to natural gas in the ‘60s and ’70s. Can we achieve this?
Find out more about the Energy, Environment and Sustainability Group (EESG).
The views of the writer do not necessarily represent the views of the Institution.