Connecting the Future - Greenpeace UK

Connecting the Future: the UK’s renewable energy strategy
Sustainable Energy Systems
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CHP, clean coal and nuclear power as well as renewables, ranked according to
environmental impacts and efficiency. Ofgem suggests that they could also
be made to include the offsetting of carbon emissions. The concept of green
tariffs could thus end up being extended to include a range of non-renewable
technologies which may generate low-carbon power but some of which may
bring other environmental problems. The guidelines for low-carbon tariffs are
currently intended to be voluntary, with Ofgem having no formal enforcement role
for the scheme. As it stands there is a risk that some suppliers may be less than
transparent in revealing the exact technology mix in their low-carbon scheme
and there is little that can be done to prevent this. This is particularly serious given
the implicit blurring of the edges in the proposed classification of low-carbon
offerings – between ‘low-carbon’ and ‘green’ supply. At the moment, this would
allow nuclear power and fossil fuel power produced using carbon sequestration
and storage to be marketed as ‘green’ despite the broader environmental problems
associated with the technologies. Logically, if these guidelines are for green power
rather than just low-carbon power, then these broader impacts – for example, the
volumes and half-lives of nuclear waste – should also be listed.
Central government departments have a commitment to source 10% of
their electricity from renewable sources by March 2008. In June 2007,
the government agreed a contract worth more than £1 billion for EDF to
supply 1TWh of renewable electricity to government departments up to
2011. This represents around a third of electricity currently supplied to central
government (Office of Government Commerce 2007). The four year deal will
cost no more than buying conventional power and paying the associated CCL.
This is interesting in that it implies that the level of certainty offered to EDF by
a long term supply contract has reduced the unit cost of the power – providing
evidence in favour of long-term contracts and/or feed-in tariffs for renewable
output. However, little information has been revealed about the details of the
deal. So, for example, it is not clear whether EDF or the government will retire
the ROCs associated with the energy supplied, which would create additional
demand for renewables output over and above that required by the RO.
UK demand for green energy currently outstrips supply, with companies
reportedly planning to buy 34TWh of green electricity in 2007 while
renewables output amounted to only 18.1TWh in 2006 (Datamonitor 2007,
DTI 2007a). Under current proposals, this shortfall in renewable generation
could be met with non-renewable energy sources labelled as low-carbon, or by
other schemes such as offsetting which, while they may offer some emissions
reduction benefits, are doing little to encourage a shift to lower-carbon energy
systems in the longer term. The disparity between the supply of renewable
energy and the demand from UK consumers demonstrates the failure of
the government’s renewables policy to create the conditions necessary for
renewables generation to expand at the rate required to meet public demand.
The danger is that the demand for renewable power will contribute to a
situation where low-carbon power is marketed as green regardless of its wider
environmental impacts. Unless information on these broad impacts is also