As Professor John Loughhead gave his talk to a large audience of over 200 and as it will be made available on IET Television I am only going to comment.
I must admit that I was disappointed in the talk in that I hoped to hear some reassuring answers. That they weren’t forthcoming wasn’t the fault of the speaker though, who was clearly competent and knew ‘his stuff’.
My starting position is that I’m an engineer. I don’t like waste, I’m fairly frugal but it isn’t an obsession. My house is insulated as far as reasonably practical. It has solar panels and gas central heating. My car is small and diesel powered. I wasn’t an early adopter of solar panels as I felt that the ‘poor’ were subsidising the ‘rich’. I’m comfortable with the feed in tariff that I am on. I have worked in the private sector and as a civil servant and can see good and bad in both.
Looking at my own energy budget I find that 69% of what I buy in goes on transport, 27% on gas heating/cooking and only 5% on electricity. However that is confused by the fact that I generate the equivalent of 18% of the total energy 'buy-in' so without that my electricity consumption of electricity would perhaps double. The 'transport' element is the energy content of the fuel, not what is actually needed to do the job.
So what did the talk do for me?
The first problem that I have with this subject are the ‘targets’. Some years ago I heard a programme in which Professor David MacKay [http://www.withouthotair.com/], later to be Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, (Professor John Loughhead’s predecessor), was in discussion with a none-engineering adviser to the Department, (possibly Bryony Worthington). Prof. MacKay had explained how the UK didn’t have enough land area for all the wind turbines that it needed. This was dismissed as ‘being about the engineering’; the problem was ‘political’. The result was the targets, made up by people who can make 2 + 2 = 6 and who hold the ‘4’ people in contempt.
So the targets become law, (what happens if ‘we’ break the law?). The next easy part is the ‘removal of carbon’ by closing power stations, something that can be done overnight given the political will. But what fills the gap? That was a question that I didn’t think was answered. We had the charts showing from where our power came now, a substantial part being ‘other’, (political code for diesel?) We had a chart showing the change of mix, where Prof. Loughead pointed out that it took decades for new sources to come on line. The same chart showed that the new sources had now essentially reached peak capacity and, (the graph having a log. Scale), that the ‘slight’ shortfall was in fact insufficient by an order of magnitude.
It seems to me that the, (artificial?), challenge is being made ever harder. We are increasing our population with people who want to consume more than they did in the countries that they left. We are removing generators with high thermal and mechanical inertia and only partially replacing them sources that are unpredictable and low-inertia, [I get it now David!]. Our increasing standard of living has been achieved by exploiting ever-denser energy sources. Aviation would have been impossible without this. Yet now, for the first time in our history we are going backwards, wind for instance is a million times less energy dense than coal.
Unfortunately I felt that we weren’t given the answers or the assurance that we will have energy security in the future. I suspect the future will at best be one of demand management or at worst power cuts.
