HEALTHCARE ESTATES 2022 KEYNOTES – SUSTAINABILITY
Recent flooding in Bedfordshire.
floods in Bedfordshire, fires in California, Austrian flood damage, floods in Sudan, recent floods in Pakistan, and Hurricane Ian in Florida – all deemed ‘one in 100 year events’, which were now happening ever more frequently. In global emission terms, the speaker pointed out, the UK contributed just 1%; the big players being China and the US, closely followed by Russia and India. Dame Sue said: “While what we do in the UK will make a difference, unless some really big steps are taken by all those nations, our input will only make a small difference.” Looking at the UK’s daily energy use, Dame Sue said she had an ‘app’ on her phone called Electricity Maps (available as a free download) which gives a picture of different countries’ main energy sources, and the CO2
emitted in their generation.
She showed a map of Europe from the app, which highlighted how the various European countries were doing.
Energy sources and associated emissions She said: “Those shown in brown like us are not doing very well in ‘green’ terms. If you’re shown as green – like France and the Nordic countries – then you’re doing very well, while if you’re shown as brown like us, then gas is the main cause of your carbon problem in generating electricity. Contrastingly, in Germany and Poland, the main energy source is coal. So, even when the wind is high here in the UK, we still have a big problem in our generating capacity.”
One of the major issues for the UK, Dame Sue said, is that the our electricity demand varies widely over a 24-hour period. She explained: “So, even when the wind is strong, and the grid can take it, it’s not enough, and similarly with solar, in the winter, the solar to grid input is not very high at all.” Gas thus remained ‘the mainstay’ of our electricity requirements. However, she asked rhetorically, looking at gas ‘geopolitics’, how does the UK get its gas? In fact, much of it is currently imported, with just 47% coming from domestic production, and the rest from pipeline imports from Europe, or from LNG by ship from the Middle East.
54 Health Estate Journal November 2022
A screenshot from the Electricity Maps ‘app’.
LNG imports She said: “Most LNG imports are from Qatar, with some – and in fact more currently – from the US, because we’re not actually now taking any from Russia. It’s the pipelines through Europe that are causing us the bigger problems, and we have a bigger issue than most of the other European countries, because our gas storage capacity is tiny in the overall scheme of things. We’ve only got 9.3 terawatt hours of stored gas reserves, compared with Italy’s 167.9, and 151 terawatts in Germany. So, while we’ve only got enough gas for a four-to-five day problem, everybody else in Europe has gas which will last quite a bit longer than that.” The UK needed low carbon energy supplies; it was ‘not just about electricity’, but also low carbon transport, low carbon residential, and low carbon business. Dame Sue said: “When we look at electrification of our transport network, or putting heat pumps or other renewable fuel systems in our homes, our electricity supply needs are going to double, or possibly even treble, without some demand restrictions.” This – the speaker said – was one of the things that would cause us a problem
going forward, since we are currently in the UK running at 50% gas. She said: “If we’re doubling or trebling the grid, we can’t build renewables and other forms fast enough.” While the previous government had published the document, The Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution, with lots of new wind farms, solar, and potentially new nuclear plants envisaged, so far very few of the plans had come into play, and there was as yet no certainty as to what the current administration would do – ‘faced with other very big financial pressures’. Dame Sue Ion said: “I would like to draw your attention to a Royal Academy of Engineering report, Generating the Future: UK energy systems fit for 2050, published over a decade ago, where the Academy sat down with industry experts and worked out what would be physically possible to build that will get us to an 80% carbon emission reduction by 2050. The report is still very relevant today, because it indicated that we needed to build thousands of new wind turbines on shore, install the equivalent of 38 London arrays and 25 million solar panels, put wave power and sea turbines down, and build a Severn Barrage.”
The Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution, published in November 2020.
Need for new power plants She continued: “Some of those have already been ruled out, but the publication said we also needed to build at least 80 big new power plants to replace the gas turbines that currently churn out over 50% of our electricity, and to look seriously at how we reduced the demand, and were more efficient.” Dame Sue’s next slide showed what has actually been built to date in terms of new energy generation facilities, in contrast to what the 2010 report said we would need. She said: “We’ve not built anything like enough of these new facilities to get close to the right trajectory, and we haven’t built, and delivered to the grid, any new nuclear power stations or fossil with carbon capture. So, please focus on these figures here. If you look at wind power, we’ve in fact only managed to build some 24 GWe of electricity-generating wind capacity on the grid so far.”
Bedforshire Fire and Rescue
Open Government Licence v3.0
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