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To tackle climate change, renewable energy technologies,
like wind, can be embraced by adopting a DE pathway.
©Greenpeace/Weckenmann.
Cover: Solar thermal installation. ©Langrock/Zenit/Greenpeace. KEN LIVINGSTONE, MAYOR OF LONDON
I am delighted to have been asked by Greenpeace to contribute
a foreword to this timely report.
Climate change has now become the problem the world cannot
ignore. Addressing future global warming, and adapting to it
now, will require making fundamental changes to the way we
live. How we produce, distribute and use energy is key to this.
My London Energy Strategy set out how decentralised
electricity generation could deliver huge CO2 reductions in
London by enabling the convergence of heat and power
generation, leading to massive growth in renewable energy
production, and providing the cornerstone of a renewable
hydrogen energy economy.
Decentralised energy allows the financial costs and energy
losses associated with the long-distance national transmission
system to be reduced and savings passed on to consumers.
Bringing energy production closer to peoples lives helps in our
efforts to promote energy efficiency. Security of supply can be
improved, with power blackouts reduced. The UK could take
the opportunity to develop expertise and technologies, leading
the developed world, and facilitating the developing worlds
path to a sustainable energy future.
In London the opportunities for decentralised energy supply
range from solar panels on Londoners homes, to adapting
existing full-sized power stations to more efficient combined
heat and power systems supplying thousands of businesses
and residential buildings.
To achieve all this we need an energy revolution, overhauling
the current regulatory and commercial framework of the
electricity industry to incentivise the use of combined heat and
power and renewable energy. And, as I know first-hand from
the struggle I had in making my house a solar home, we need
to strip away the bureaucracy and costs that currently dissuade
all but the most determined individuals from taking action to
reduce their own energy usage.
This is why on June 20th this year I launched the London
Climate Change Agency, with a mission to deliver ground-
breaking energy efficiency and renewable energy projects
across London. I want London to lead Britain and even the
world in tackling climate change.
Large, major-energy consuming cities like London have both a
responsibility to reduce their carbon emissions, and, by virtue
of a high density of population, the greatest opportunity to
take advantage of new energy systems and renewable energy.
In the Thames Gateway we have the single biggest
development opportunity in Europe, and a chance to showcase
sustainable building and energy supply.
Decentralising power: An energy revolution for the 21st
century makes a vital contribution to the debate about how we
can do this and I look forward to working with Greenpeace on
implementing Londons decentralised energy programme.
DECENTRALISING POWER:
AN ENERGY REVOLUTION FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
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FOREWORD
©Liane Harris. DECENTRALISING POWER:
AN ENERGY REVOLUTION FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
STEPHEN TINDALE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
GREENPEACE UK
Electricity production in the UK is responsible for a third of our
carbon emissions. This is the UKs single greatest contribution
to climate change. It need not be so. Our centralised model of
production and transmission wastes an astonishing two-thirds
of primary energy inputs, requiring us to burn far more fuel and
emit far more carbon dioxide than necessary. It is hard to
imagine a more wasteful and inefficient model than that which
currently services the economies of the developed world.
In our existing system, electricity is produced in a small number
of large power stations, and then distributed to where it is
needed. Because the power stations are generally far from
centres of demand, much of the heat which is produced when
fossil fuels are burnt is not used, but vented up chimneys or
discharged to rivers. This heat loss alone represents a wastage of
over sixty percent of the total energy released by burning the
fossil fuels. Further losses occur as the electricity travels along
the wires of the transmission and distribution systems.
In total, the energy wasted at the power station and on the wires
is equal to the entire water and space heating demands of all
buildings in the UK industrial, commercial, public and domestic.
This is a nonsensical way to run our economy and power our lives.
But there is an alternative. In a decentralised energy (DE) system,
electricity would be generated close to or at the point of use.
Buildings, instead of being passive consumers of energy, would
become power stations, constituent parts of local energy
networks. They would have solar photovoltaic panels, solar
water heaters, micro wind turbines, heat pumps for extracting
energy from the earth. They might also be linked to commercial
or domestic operated combined heat and power systems.
The massive expansion in renewable capacity that this would
represent, and the fact that when fossil fuels were burnt the
heat would be captured and used, would lead to dramatic
reductions in overall carbon emissions at least half of all
emissions from the power sector, or 15% of total UK emissions.
This radical transformation of our energy system sounds
attractive but expensive. But in fact decentralising our energy
sources, instead of replacing our current centralised system,
may actually save money in the long run. A centralised network
of cables is an old technology and a phenomenally expensive
one at that. New low-carbon technologies dictate a different
infrastructure. According to the International Energy Agency,
the European Union will spend $648 billion on modernising and
replacing the transmission and distribution networks. The
opportunity to avoid many of these costs means that
decentralised energy makes economic as well as
environmental sense.
DE also offers a way forward for developing nations and for the
emerging economic giants like China and India. It is sometimes
claimed, fatalistically, that efforts to stabilise the climate will be
overwhelmed by China burning its coal reserves. But developing
a decentralised energy system in response to its growth in
demand for power would enable China to reduce associated
carbon emissions by 56% as compared to the centralised
scenario and costs would be reduced by 40% as well.
Unfortunately, the debate in the UK has focussed more on
whether we need a new generation of nuclear power stations.
Nuclear power is the epitome of centralised, outdated
electricity generation. Replacing existing nuclear stations
with new ones would perpetuate the centralised system,
entrenching all the costs and inefficiencies that implies. Such
inefficiencies currently waste three times as much energy as
would be contributed by new nuclear power stations.
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It is only
because of technological apathy failure by government and
industry to invest in real innovative alternatives that nuclear
power is given any serious consideration.
Decentralising energy offers a compelling alternative vision, in
which we can both combat climate change and roll back the
nuclear threat. To give just one example of the potential, if half
the houses in the UK were provided with domestic combined
heat and power units, which is technically feasible, then the
electricity generated would replace the entire nuclear capacity
we have today.
This report sets out a series of reforms that are needed to
make the vision a reality, including regulations to require all new
buildings to double up as mini-power stations, and a ban on any
new fossil-fuel power stations unless they are CHP. These may
sound radical, or too dirigiste for some tastes. But as Tony Blair,
Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy have all acknowledged in
the past year, climate change is the greatest challenge we face.
Already a hundred and fifty thousand people die each year from
its effects, a figure that will spiral upward unless we curb
emissions dramatically and quickly. In the face of such a
challenge, radical measures are surely required.
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FOREWORD
©Greenpeace/Rezac. Heat and cooling, as well as electricity, is provided to Wokings leisure centre by a hydrogen fuel cell. ©Greenpeace/Cobbing. In the early years of the new millennium, the electricity system,
the bloodstream of industrial society, is going to change almost
beyond recognition. It will have to.
Walt Patterson, Royal Institute of International Affairs, UK
2 Climate change has thrust electricity generation under the
political spotlight. Our current centralised electricity system
dominates the developed world. Yet it is the embodiment of
technological inertia, performing little better today than it did
in the 1970s.
The debate over the UKs energy future routinely overlooks an
issue that is key to our rising emissions the huge wastage
inherent in our centralised electricity system. Because we
generate electricity in large power stations far from our cities,
almost two-thirds of primary energy inputs to the system are
wasted partly from the wires that transmit the electricity
around the country, but mostly in the form of waste heat from
the power stations themselves. If this could only be used rather
than lost into t