David MacKay insists that there is no single right answer to achiev- ing the emissions target, but favours the hedging scenario
prices have slumped, and in Britain, senior Liberal Democrats such as Simon Hughes and Paddy Ashdown have condemned the coali- tion’s nuclear policy as “unsellable”. MacKay cautions against a knee-jerk reac- tion. “I would urge everyone to keep all the options on the table. I think it’s already so difficult to reach the 2050 targets, even with nuclear, that assuming that nuclear is off the table just makes the whole pressure of keeping the lights on and taking climate change action even harder.” He also insists that in Britain the industry has been “wonderfully safe”. But why take the risk? MacKay’s model shows that nuclear power is not the determin- ing factor in whether we hit our emissions tar- gets. I devised a scenario based on maximum demand-side measures, renewable targets that are ambitious but politically plausible, and the lowest level of new nuclear, 90GW. Then I removed nuclear altogether, and the good news is it makes no difference to the emissions reductions. But the bad news, as MacKay points out, is that you need 47GW of back- up gas generating plant to keep the lights on when the wind does not blow.
“That corresponds to keeping going all of today’s gas-power stations and then, roughly 50% extra on top of that, and having them all mothballed and maintained so that you can use them for maybe 20 days a year as a ball- park,” MacKay explains. “Is that incredible, is it implausible? There’s a substantial capital
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cost in doing that, and that should be factored into the cost of choosing a pathway like this.” DECC intends to include costs in an updat- ed version of the model by the end of the year. MacKay concedes that we could ditch nuclear and still hit our climate targets, but argues that the ramifications of that choice would be much greater than simply building lots more gas-fired capacity. “People might say we really don’t want nuclear and we do want lots of wind farms on-shore and off- shore and we want to pay for them, and we
“If we have a strong effort on offshore wind, electricity storage systems and nuclear we can squeeze by without CCS”
want the balancing services, and we want to pay for the back-up gas-power stations, and we want to insulate our buildings really well, and we want to use more public transport. “That’s a conceivable outcome.” But not terribly likely, he seems to imply, “given how resistant people are to, say, wind farms in the landscape, and the difficulty of local planning authorities [who] don’t even want you to have double-glazing in a house in a National Park. It would require a radical transformation of public attitudes in other sectors.” One way to dispose of nuclear without the need for vast amounts of gas-fired back-up
is to assume we build large numbers of coal- fired power stations with carbon capture and storage. This reduces the amount of back-up required but, curiously, increases emissions rather than reducing them. That’s because CCS plants – if they are ever commercialised – are likely to be 90% efficient at best, mean- ing 10% of the emissions will still escape. So the more CCS plants we build, the harder it becomes to hit the emissions target. In my scenario, raising CCS from option 1 (zero) to option 4 reduces the emissions cuts achieved from 77% to 72%.
Yet the world needs CCS, says MacKay,
because there is just too much cheap coal available, which if burned without carbon capture would put climate targets completely out of reach. But with around a third of UK coal-fired capacity closing by 2016 in any case, the result of a long-standing EU directive, does Britain need CCS? “I think it would be great for British industry to be the country that leads on CCS development, so I think it’s a good idea for Britain to do it.
“But do we need it for our electricity mix? Possibly not. If we have a strong effort on offshore wind and electricity storage systems and nuclear power then we can squeeze by without CCS. But I think a balanced portfolio is probably the best thing at this stage as part of a hedging strategy.”
The only way to make CCS carbon neutral is to burn a lot of wood along with the coal,
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