roundtable: environmental issues 25


one of our planning applications, yet it had successfully gone through the local democratic process. We finally got past the judicial hurdle two years down the road and started doing things at the site. It’s just crazy. We spent £250,000 on lawyers, after we got the planning permission, and we won’t get that money back.”


us being entirely dependent on just renewable energies.”


Farrow suggested the way forward was to reduce demand while also increasing the supply of low carbon energy sources. Technology advances were helping with energy efficiency he added and smart- metering would boost usage awareness. Depressingly however, he had heard that despite today’s fridges being vastly more energy efficient, total household electricity used for refrigerators dropped by only 4% – as consumers increasingly bought larger or more fridges. Worryingly, if energy were made cheaper, people might simply use more of it, he commented.


Roscoe: “It has got to cost more if you want to go green.”


Andrew Hillier


Are renewables making good headway?


Murray queried if such sources were viable competitors yet for our traditional energy supplies.


Farrow mentioned that wind farms could produce 15% of UK energy requirements on a good windy day. “That’s impressive, but you have to have back up for less windy days.”


Roscoe provided figures revealing that UK electricity generation from renewable energy in 2012 totalled 41,258GWh, representing 11.3% of the UK supply. Of this energy, wind constituted almost 47%, solar PV 3%, hydropower 13% and biomass energy 37%.


Copping: “The opposition to solar and wind energy has always been lack of land on our crowded island, but technological advances have improved the efficiency of panels and turbines. The UK now has the largest offshore wind farm in the world (the 630MW London Array) with many more sites in the planning and construction phase, supporting the view that offshore wind seems the obvious route to go.”


Roscoe however spoke about “scary numbers” connected with renewable energy production. Even turning over the nation’s whole agricultural crop to biomass generation would not have a significant impact on UK electricity supplies. A 4km- deep ring of wind turbines all around the UK coast would only produce between 10-20% of UK demand. 5% of our UK land mass dedicated to solar PV would produce less than 30% of our future demand, he stated.


“There is no prospect in the future of THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – NOVEMBER 2013


Reel stated: “Those who can afford it will have cheaper energy because they will buy efficient solar panels, proper insulation, heat recovery units etc and save money that way. Fuel poverty is a real issue that both society, business and government need to focus on. Those who can least afford it will be impacted the most by energy price rises.


“Fuel poverty will become a real problem because the underlying cost of energy is going to double in the next ten years.”


Can new technologies save the day?


Investor and eco-preneur Reel was hopeful. “Some of the technologies I’ve seen coming through will in future resolve some of today’s problems, for example, with mixed waste plastics.” The range and rates of recycling recovery had become much greater over the years as technology advanced, he highlighted.


Roscoe: “But, the low-hanging fruit is now gone, and so we do need new technologies and procedures for separating these other materials.”


Reel said progress was forthcoming: “There are good businesses out there, assisted by business incubators and mentoring schemes. That’s the great thing about this country. It will always innovate, but we must capture and accelerate it better.


“We also have to match technological change with consumer behavioural change or we will end up like the Germans just burning everything.”


Yarrow noted that:“The key for any new technology is tipping the balance, such that the cost of recovery is less than the cost of traditional disposal.”


Copping pointed out that waste innovation didn’t have to be a new gadget or process. It could be established technology, but used better. He mentioned landfill gas extraction engines, developed


in the 1990s, being used far more cost- effectively – admittedly within an industry encouraged to invest by incentives. “AD and biomass gasification are not new technologies; the issue here is about controlling the feedstocks coming in.”


Is nuclear still under a cloud?


The Roundtable broadly accepted that not enough decarbonisation could be achieved through renewables alone, so nuclear had to be another energy option.


Farrow: “One nuclear power station represents an awful lot of wind farms or solar panels. It’s not clear whether we can decarbonise our energy supply without nuclear, but it does seem that the politics and the economics are getting harder every year.”


Stephen Roscoe


Roundtablers remarked on how nuclear development companies had dropped out of the market over the years, leaving EDF as virtually the sole provider in Europe. Also, the image of nuclear had been badly hit by Japan’s Fukushima disaster, Germany’s change of energy policy and the growing costs of creating nuclear facilities – all casting a cloud over nuclear as an option for the UK.


But what else is there, asked Copping, if NIMBY-ism, planning difficulties and lack of investment were already hampering the growth of wind, solar, tidal, EFW, district heat and shale gas alternatives? “We are not making it easy for a mixed energy solution."


Yarrow also noted that the other challenge to nuclear development in the UK was that the nuclear skillbase now lay outside the UK with our engineering talent exported


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