How will David Cameron keep the lights on?

Neither of the main parties seems to have any
idea how we are to meet the looming shortfall in
power, warns Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:11PM GMT 06 Mar 2010

As the election approaches, two issues should transcend all others.
One, obviously, is what the parties propose to do
about the £178 billion deficit in government
spending. But another, equally terrifying - as
this column has warned for years - is what is to
be done to avert the fast-looming crisis in
Britain's electricity supplies. With 40 per cent
of our generating capacity due to disappear in
the next few years, as 14 of our major nuclear
and coal-fired power stations are forced to
close, how do the parties propose to keep
Britain's lights on and our computer-dependent
economy functioning?

The energy policy of the Conservative Party
appears to rest on four main pillars. The first
is that electricity companies should not be
allowed to replace those coal-fired power
stations which help provide us with 35 per cent
of our electricity unless new ones are fitted
with a system to pipe off their CO2 emissions and
bury them under the North Sea.

The Government has allocated some £4 billion for four new plants to
pioneer this unproven technology (to be paid for
by all of us through electricity bills), but the
Tories say that no new plants should be permitted
unless carbon capture is already in place.

The only problem is that two recent studies have
shown why carbon capture and storage on this
scale is simply not physically possible.

Two
academic petroleum experts in Texas, Michael and
Christine Economides, have shown that it is
impossible to inject such huge quantities of CO2
into underground aquifers - 20,000 tons a day for
a 1 gigawatt power station - without fracturing
the surrounding rock, making further injection
impossible. This finding is confirmed in a study
by the Grantham Institute at Imperial College.
In other words, that £4 billion to be spent in
Britain (with a further £3.3 billion to be spent
by the EU on eight pilot schemes) will be wholly
wasted. Burying CO2 in holes in the ground is no
more than a hugely expensive fantasy. Yet the
Tory party insists that no coal plants can be
replaced without a system which cannot physically
work.

The Tories' second headline policy is what they
call a "decentralised energy revolution",
subsidising millions of homeowners, firms,
schools and hospitals to cover their roofs with
solar panels and mini wind turbines.

Again, the Government has already got on to this one with
its new "feed-in tariff" scheme, appropriately
due to start on All Fools' Day. This will pay
34.5p to the owners of mini-turbines for each
kilowatt hour (kWh) of power they feed into the
grid, and 41p per kWh for electricity from
photovoltaic panels.

Even The Guardian's green crusader, George
Monbiot, has denounced this as a scandal, which
he estimates will add £8.6 billion to our
electricity bills over 20 years.

But the absurdity of the scheme was even better
highlighted by Dr John Etherington, author of The
Wind Farm Scam, who, when he alerted me to this
some weeks back, pointed out that he currently
pays only 14.27p per kWh for his electricity
during the day and 5.51p at night. In other
words, so desperate is the Government to recruit
homeowners to its scheme that it is prepared to
pay between three and eight times the going rate
for any electricity they supply to the grid. It
will thus pay them to sell all the electricity
they produce, while meeting all their own needs
with much cheaper power from the grid.

In fact, despite these ludicrous bribes, so
derisory is the amount of electricity these
gadgets produce that they are merely an
irrelevant gimmick. Yet the Tory party again goes
even further, dreaming, according to a document
leaked to Channel 4 News, that it can somehow
meet 15 per cent of Britain's electricity needs
in this way. That equates to eight gigawatts,
which couldn't be achieved even if every building
in the country was plastered with panels and
turbines.

What is truly startling about the Tory party is
that it doesn't seem to have anyone at the top
with the faintest grasp of the practicalities of
how electricity is produced. Hence the third
pillar of their energy policy, which is to
support the Government's plan to see £100 billion
spent on 10,000 giant wind turbines, in a further
desperate bid to meet the EU's requirement that,
within 10 years, 32 per cent of our electricity
must come from renewables. (Last Thursday, our
2,900 existing turbines met just 0.1 per cent of
demand, or 1,000th of the electricity we were all
using.)

Again, even if it were worth doing, there is not
the faintest chance that we could install three
giant offshore and onshore turbines up to 650
feet high, each costing up to £4 million or more
(and almost all produced and installed by
foreign-owned companies), every day between now
and 2020. In practical terms, as any expert could
have told the Tories long ago if they were
capable of listening, we cannot hope to build
more than a fraction of the number they are
fantasising about.

So, even if David Cameron manages to scrape into
Number 10, where will this leave us in terms of
keeping our lights on? He and his colleagues are
so lost in their green dreamworld - even more
than Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, which is
terrifying enough - that they seem not to have
focused at all on how we are to meet that 40 per
cent shortfall in our electricity supply.

One looks in vain through their policy statements
for any glimmer of realisation of how serious a
crisis is bearing down on us. They are happy to
prattle on about how we must spend hundreds of
billions on unworkable gimmicks which will do
nothing to close the gap. But in reality, the
only way we could make up the shortfall in time,
as our electricity companies realise, would be a
crash programme to build new gas-fired power
stations, thus making us up to 80 per cent
dependent on imported gas just when world gas
prices are likely to soar. So, even if we do
somehow manage to fill the gap, we shall all be
paying a colossal price, through energy bills so
high that well over half the nation will be
sucked into "fuel poverty" (where energy costs
are more than 10 per cent of income).

And what is the fourth pillar of the Tories'
energy policy? They want every home in the
country to be fitted, at a cost of a further £10
billion, with "smart meters", to allow for
"better management of supply and demand". Indeed,
that is precisely the point about smart meters.
They not only allow consumers to monitor their
own electricity usage, they also allow
electricity companies to "manage supply", by
cutting off the power when not enough is
available to the grid.

So when the shortages come, at least it will be
possible to control whose lights and computers
have to be switched off to prevent the grid
crashing. But it means that anyone thinking of
voting for Mr Cameron should first invest in a
generator, before his smart meters turns their
lights off.