Feature Energy management Are renewables the answer?
Professor Nicholas Goddard of carbon offsetting organisation,
CarbonApproved.com looks at some of the arguments for and against the use of renewable resources to meet our future energy requirements
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fluctuations: flows may be reduced or non-existent in periods of drought, while they may be frozen during the winter. When the factory system was adopted, the physical availability of suitable sites to allow the utilisation of waterpower was quickly exhausted and it was this factor which hastened the transition to steam technology gen- erated by fossil fuel - ‘king’ coal in the 19th century followed by oil in the 20th. It is our dependence on these fossil fuels which is held to be at the root of the environmental problems facing our planet.
O
ver the last two decades or so there has been much interest in the potential of ‘renewable’ resources for meeting our future
energy needs. Wind, solar power, and ‘biofuels’ have all received extended attention, while hydro-electric genera- tion is a long-established technology. For many, there is a highly persua- sive argument behind this interest. If we are at risk from global warming brought about by the burning of fossil fuels, then alternatives which are non- polluting must be found without the dangers thought by some to be inher- ent in nuclear technology. Deployment of renewable resources can also reduce dependency on expensive fuel imports which has with it political as well as economic benefits, leaving aside the environmental imperatives.
The ‘renewable’ mantra is preached with almost missionary zeal by its advocates. The present leader of the opposition, after all, when Secretary of State for the Department of Energy and Climate Change claimed that it was ‘anti-social’ to oppose the building of wind farms. Certainly wind farms, appropriately located, can make a mar- ginal, but nonetheless useful, contribu-
tion to our energy needs although their shortcomings are such that their overall impact is likely always to be limited as part of the totality of our energy mix. This is because wind farms have peri- ods of ‘downtime’ when they cannot be operated as the prevailing wind is either too weak or too strong so that the capacity that they can provide has to be replicated in alternative generation sys- tems. Utilising current technologies, wind farms need to receive substantial public subsidies to achieve economic viability and the jury is currently ‘out’ as to whether this expenditure makes optimum use of public money.
The trouble with nature These limitations lead t o a broader consideration of the ‘trouble with nature’ in providing our energy needs. Human material needs were always constrained when we relied on ‘nature’ to provide. It was the modern ‘indus- trial revolution’ which freed us from these constraints. For example, early industry was often dependent on water to support manufacturing processes, powered hammers in the production of iron implements being a case in point. However, rivers are subject to various
Professor Nick Goddard read Geography at the University of
Cambridge and was awarded his Ph.D by the University of Kent. He was for- merly Head of Geography at Anglia Ruskin
University where he taught at postgrad- uate level on envi- ronmental issues
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Another ‘renewable’ power source which has it advocates are various ‘bio- fuels’ but it is difficult to place much faith in these to provide anything more than a small proportion of our total energy needs. Before the Industrial Revolution we were largely dependent on wood for fuel. This meant ‘living on capital’, the clearing of world forests, or taking an annual ‘crop’ of wood through managed coppicing tech- niques. This limited growth as the economy was constrained by what could be produced by the ‘sustainable’ natural cycle. Mining or extracting fossil fuels liberated human society from the inherent limitations of ‘nature’ and unleashed an exponential growth of the world population. Pre- industrial modes of production imply pre-industrial levels of population. The standards of living which the western world has come to take for granted and which the rest of the planet’s population aspire to cannot be sustained by ‘natural’ processes. Human inventiveness can provide a solution to the provision of our energy needs through the development of increasingly sophisticated nuclear and carbon capture technologies to elimi- nate CO2 emissions, and ultimately there is the promise of harnessing the potential of hydrogen. This is where we need to concentrate research funding. We have to some degree broken our dependence on the rhythms of the cycle of nature but the ‘trouble with nature’ is that she is a capricious mistress, as we are reminded from time-to-time by vari- ous extreme natural events. If humanly- induced global warming threatens the sustainability of the world-system the solution is not to be found in a return to what are the essentially pre-industrial dependencies that the employment of ‘renewables’ implies.
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NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2011 Factory Equipment
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