The Solution to Global Warming: Drop Taxes on Renewables

12th January 2007

Hi Derek,
  thank you for your reply.

Couldn't agree more with most of this - I do think that, unfortunately, people now equate renewable energy with wind-farms, whereas there are loads of much better, more reliable methods of generating power...

For example:

• Tidal lagoons
• Wave generators
• Methane digesters (people always product sewage - windy or not ;^)
• Hydro-electrics
• Biofuels - i.e. elephant grass / willow coppice...
• Even burning rubbish...

As usual, rather than enabling small scale private installations by dropping taxes, the government opts for huge, grandiose mega-schemes which it thinks makes it look good. When these big schemes fail to deliver - as every single big government project always does - people fail to see it was the government that screwed up, they blame the technology (or the provider - eg. EDS)...

The bottom line as I see it is: we obviously must stop burning fossil fuels completely - as they are (most likely) the sole cause of global warming.

We have a choice - do we use:

1. A large number of diverse, but simple technologies which are well understood, low-tech, easy to manage. Although output is small per device,
   
   or do we use...
   
   
2. a single, vastly expensive, complex and inherently dangerous technology - which has intractable problems concerning how to dispose of it's waste. Although output is high...

???

Pollution can be defined as:
'The output of a system which is not an input for any other system'

i.e. CO2 is the output of burning fossil fuels - but that CO2 is not used anywhere else, so it builds up - and becomes a pollutant.

Nuclear power is dangerous & polluting...

It seems crazy to me to replace one polluting technology with another - potentially worse one. Disposal of the waste from reactors is a very very big problem. People have been agonising over how to safely dispose of nuclear waste for over 50 years, and the best solution they have come up with is to 'bury it in a big hole' (slight simplification, but essentially correct). Why create more problems when we already have a safe solution?

Besides. Doesn't anyone remember Chernobyl?

Nuclear power is unbelievably expensive...

The long term costs of clearing up just the existing nuclear waste are staggering- £56bn according to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority quoted in the Guardian in August.

If we were to do a COST / BENEFIT analysis on renewables vs. nuclear - there is no doubt whatsoever that renewables are *by far* the better option.

Nuclear only appears to be viable against the backdrop of a *total lack of legislation supporting the use of renewables!* (and some very dodgy figures)

This issue really is one I feel I know an awful lot about. I have a degree in Biology, I'm a trained permaculture designer, and my job is 'Systems Analyst / Programmer'. I understand natural systems, and systems in general. Also, I know how innovative the British can be - given the opportunity.

At least give renewables a chance...

Before we use dirty, dangerous nuclear, we should at least give renewables a decent chance... We should give our business people the chance to solve the problem for us. Government routinely engineers markets - why the hell not this one?

I am confident that making renewables *really* profitable by dropping taxes, reducing regulations, changing building regs, (and possibly even providing subsidies) would result in the UK using virually no fossil fuels within 10 years. (Dropping taxes = removing them completely - i.e. VAT, Duty, Corp. Tax. Also could reduce Nat. Ins. - both employer & employee, probably other taxes I don't even know of... Allow businesses to offset startup costs against tax)

I would bet my house on it!

Furthermore, I would bet my house that if renewables and micro-generation were fully encouraged in this way (and the grid was changed as I described in my last email), that within 15 years, (with no nuclear power stations!) the UK would have a surplus of electricity - all generated by renewable means - that we could sell to Europe, (plus gain all the carbon credits for it too.)

This policy would cost the UK virtually nothing, whereas investing in nuclear will cost *hundreds of billions*.

Summary:

Please tell me I'm convincing you...

Derek's reply

Hi Again,

I may have given the impression that I was opposed to investment in renewable forms of energy generation, but that is not the case.

There are, however, certain requirements for nationwide power distribution. One of these is to be able to supply electricity to all the population at all times throughout the day, week, month or year. Whilst I support most of your suggestions for generating renewable energy - none of these could feed energy into the national grid on a permanent basis.

At present, the coal, gas, oil and nuclear powered generators can meet the above condition and have to make up for the energy lost when renewable energy sources fail to deliver.

Most people would be most unhappy to lose their electricity supply during a prolonged cold-snap when there may be snow, ice or frozen slush underfoot.

I am in favour of renewable forms of power generation that can give a prolonged permanent output of energy without interruption such as hydro-electric, large-scale waste incinerators, and, hopefully, future large scale tidal and wave-power generators. I am also in favour of straw-burning and methane powered generators for small communities and farms, etc, as a separate source of power in addition to the national grid.

I believe the most overlooked and least invested-in of all natural means of power generation is tidal power. It seems to me that if the tide can move all the ships in all the oceans up and down by 25 to nearly 40 feet, depending on their location, representing many billions of tons of vertical movement, then surely it must be possible to find a way of exploiting this enormous source of potential energy.

I know about the tidal barrier in France, but it does not provide permanent power output. A new concept is needed where huge barges filled with sea water are ratcheted up within the confines of huge steel columns to heights of hundreds of feet by lifting vessels on each new tide and then allowed to fall at a predetermined rate generating electricity as they descend. Obviously some barges would be being raised as the higher barges were being lowered thus giving a continuous output of electricity. The raising of the barges to several hundred feet gives them potential energy and this can be used to generate a steady supply of electricity. The raising of the barges to many times the tidal vertical differential is similar to votage doubling and tripling in electronic engineering. I am convinced that tidal power will eventually prove to be the cleanest and most cost effective way of generating electricity at some time in the future.

Wave generation depends on the wind and is not predictable or constant whereas tidal power depends on the gravitational pull of the moon which is both predictable and permanent - at least for a few more million years, possibly billion years.

Nuclear fusion depends upon converting hydrogen atoms into helium atoms neither of which are radio-active so there is no storage problem. The main problem is to develop a containment vessel that will withstand the many millions of degrees temperature that is needed to fuse the hydrogen atoms into helium atoms which causes a huge release of energy that has the potential to provide vast amounts of electricity.

This is very futuristic, but so was travel to other planets and colour television less than 100 years ago. Some nuclear fusion experiments such a the ZETA project have indicated that generation of electricity by nuclear fusion is a distinct possibility at some time in the future.

Next Installment

Nuclear Power vs. Renewable Energy

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