Greenpeace’s EfficienCity (details below) is a virtual city but all towns and cities in the UK could be enjoying the same lower greenhouse gas emissions, cheaper bills and better energy security. Greenpeace introduced this interactive flash simulation in 2008, so you may find some references out of date on the site. Since then, the Labour Party formulated policies for F-i-T tariffs for micro generation of energy from renewable sources. While this has been introduced widely during the last few years, there are concerns that the Coalition’s policies are not looking to be as green as promised in the election manifesto of either party.
Recent Evidence shows that the Coalition government ( 2 and 3 ), opposes EU Green Energy Targets. New documents that have been leaked reveal that the British government has been trying its best to dilute the potency of new European renewable energy and carbon emission targets, despite professing to be “the greenest government ever.”
In a move backed by the UK’s six biggest energy firms, British officials have been constantly trying to prevent the approval of new EU rules on energy efficiency, and try to alter them to make them voluntary rather than mandatory; they have also repeatedly blocked EU efforts to adopt new renewable energy targets. Joss Garman, a senior energy campaigner at Greenpeace, said that “these documents are proof that (Ed) Davey has caved in to fossil fuel industry lobbyists fighting to increase our dependence on burning imported and polluting gas to generate power.” “With rocketing gas prices hitting families’ energy bills and the wider economy, now is exactly the time ministers should be backing clean energy to provide secure power at stable prices. This is a government that has a too cosy relationship with powerful special interests – and Britain’s bill payers will pick up the tab.”
CLICK ON THE IMAGE (needs Flash)
TO SEE HOW CLIMATE FRIENDLY A CITY CAN BE
MORE ABOUT EFFICIENCITY
EfficienCity: a climate-friendly town EfficienCity is a virtual town, but pioneering, real world communities around the UK are using similar systems. As a result, they’re enjoying lower greenhouse gas emissions, a more secure energy supply, cheaper electricity and heating bills and a whole new attitude towards energy.
While our government promotes the fallacy that we need coal and nuclear to keep the lights on, innovative councils, businesses and individuals are taking the leap into a cleaner, greener future with decentralised energy.What is decentralised energy? Well, it’s pretty much the opposite of our present, outrageously inefficient energy system, which was designed to meet the needs of a society that hadn’t even heard of climate change. This centralised system is a shambles – in fact, it would be impossible to invent a less efficient way of generating energy.The typical power plant in the UK is only 38 per cent efficient. By the time we use electricity in our homes and offices, we’ve lost nearly 80 per cent of the usable energy inside the fossil fuels we burn.This is mostly because we have two separate energy systems: one for electricity, and another to heat water and buildings. It’s news to some, but heat is a far bigger culprit than electricity when it comes to global warming.For electricity, we burn fossil fuels in a few large power plants, miles away from the homes and offices they supply. Two thirds of the energy available in fossil fuels is lost in the power plant as waste heat (a by-product of electricity generation) and during transmission. Another 13 per cent is lost through inefficient use in our buildings. For heat, we burn more fossil fuels (mostly natural gas) in boilers in our homes, offices and factories.It’s a little bit like putting radiators on the outside of your house instead of inside it; we’re burning one lot of fossil fuels for electricity, and another lot for heat, but waste heat is a by-product of electricity generation. Can’t we just burn one lot of fuel to generate electricity, and capture the ‘waste’ heat at the same time? We can. Combined heat and power or CHP does exactly that.
COMBINED HEAT AND POWER
CHP is the heart of an efficient, decentralised energy system like EfficienCity’s. It’s the most efficient way possible to burn fuel because so little energyis lost as waste heat. That’s how CHP plants in Denmark can reach up to 95 per cent efficiency.
Because the heat needs to be captured and piped around the local district, CHP plants are usually sited in the towns and cities where the electricity and heat will be used. This makes it more efficient for electricity generation as well as heat; very little energy is lost in transmission.
If we combined the efficiencies of CHP with improved efficiencies in the home (proper insulation say, and minimum efficiency standards for appliances), we’d practically eliminate the profligate wastage of our current system.
CHP is also brilliant in the transition from a fossil-fuelled energy system to one based on cleaner, greener fuels like biogas and biomass. CHP plants can run on a variety of fuels, which means that the fuel mix can include fossil fuels like natural gas but, as more cleaner fuels like biogas become more available, they can switch to those.
Pretty much any organic matter can be used to produce biogas; farm waste is the most famous example (thanks to The Archers) but we could be reaping energy from all of our food that ends up as landfill. Biodegradable waste makes up about half of our total landfill, where it produces large amounts of methane, another greenhouse gas.
LOCAL RENEWABLE ENERGY RESOURCES
But decentralised energy isn’t all about CHP. There’s an abundance of energy out there in our natural world, ready to be harnessed. We could be harvesting energy from the wind, the sun’s rays, the ocean,underground springs and even the earth itself. According to the government, just the wind, wave and tidal resources of our windswept island could meet 40 per cent of our energy needs by 2020. In the longer term, the sky’s the limit.
A FLEXIBLE, SCALABLE ENERGY SYSYEM
Unlike our conventional power plants, decentralised energy is completely scalable and flexible. You can have a tiny CHP plant in a supermarket oran enormous industrial plant like Immingham, which will soonprovide as much electricity as Sizewell B. You can have a single wind turbine like the one at Manchester City’s stadium or a massive wind farm like the forthcoming London Array.This also means that decentralised energy systems can be installed much faster than huge power plants, and can be tailored to fit local needs.
ENERGY SECURITY
Whereas decentralised systems like EfficienCity’s rely on local, diverse energy sources, our current system will soon rely mostly on imported fossil fuels.On top of that, using hundreds of small energy generators instead of a few major ones means there’s a far lower risk of system failure; it’s far less likely that several small plants will fail at the same time than that one big plant will.If a local decentralised network did fail though, only one small area would be affected, and that area could import from neighbouring areas.
NO MORE ENERGY PRICE HIKES
Decentralised energy can also save consumers an enormous amount. Efficiency measures alone can save consumers a whopping £12 billion a year (the government’s own figures) and they save more money than they cost to implement.
But there are other savings to be made. Although energy from decentralised systems may be more expensive per kilowatt hour than energy from coal, it can actually work out cheaper for the consumer. Why? Because only 37 per cent of the average British electricity bill is for the electricity. The rest goes to propping up the grossly inefficient infrastructure. And of course, if the UK decoupled itself from the fossil fuel market, we’d be protecting ourselves from the massive price increases of gas, coal and oil, which will inevitably keep coming.
RECLAIM THE POWER!
Pioneering councils can transform the UK’s energy system. In Manchester, Eastleigh, Southampton, Woking and Birmingham, exciting schemes are already underway. We’d like to encourage all councils to do the same – and we need you to help.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
1. Greenpeace UK EfficienCity Interactive Simulation
2. Guardian: Leaked documents reveal Uk fight to dilute EU Green Targets
3 . Oil Price.com Government Oppose EU Targets
4. BBC March 2012 Coaltion Greenest Government Ever?
FROM THINK LEFT
5. Peak Oil, Neo-Liberalism and Think Left
6. Energy for Somerset: Nuclear or Tidal?
7. Renewable Energy, Specifically HVDC Power Grids
8. Soaking up the Sun: Ed Miliband, the Coalition and Climate Change
9. Microwave Ovens are Key to Energy Production from Wasted Heat
10. Coal is our Heritage not our Future!
11. The Coal-ition
12. Clean Coal (Another Financial Device for the City?)
13. Some of the Scientific Evidence – Climate Change
Think Left 
BBC centre in White City has always had CHP. The only reason it hasn’t been implemented is because it reduced profits for the power companies.
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There have been years lost from the opportunity to defend the UK population from climate change by moving to systems as described here by Greenpeace. For twenty years Labour has seemed to see all green policy as a threat not as a solution, then we got the Coalition that talk green but every policy runs in the opposite direction. It is much worse now that their encompassing energy policy has been laid out: frack & nuke.
While the arguments against new nuclear have been aired (not least the simple problem that it is economic madness), no-one seems to say much about the coming apocalypse that is Fracking. This technology is about sucking methane out of the deep bedrock and replacing it by sand, using chemical additives in huge quantities of water to lubricate the process. 50% of UK land has been quietly licensed for testing, many areas have been given planning permission. Leicester has already experienced earth tremors as a result of drilling, stopping work, pronouncing it not devastating and allowing start-up again. The enquiry overlooked the problems of eg lethal health problems, leaking methane, chemicals eg benzene, destroying water supplies and poisoning aquifers….the oil & gas lobby conceal it all by non-disclosure agreements, & laws in some cases.
Swansea Bay is likely to be the next live drilling, intending a cousin technology which sets light to the coal seams and collects the gases given off. Apart from mere common sense giving an idea of the dangers in this (permanent uncontrolled burning has happened in the US), only 30% of the gases are recovered. The coalition refer to this as ‘natural’ or ‘alternative’ gas because it is not CO2, but methane is THIRTY times more effective a greenhouse gas than CO2 and mining it across the world is fast accelerating us to that tipping point.
If this isn’t a huge cause for socialist thought I don’t know what is! Please can people with any sort of voice get onto it? PS Gideon Osborne’s Father in Law is a paid advocate of the industry & Shell have provided ‘training’ for civil servants re the industry; Osborne has never consulted any of the opposition, DECC seems full of ex- gas-industry ‘experts’.
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I completely agree. The CO2 captured in the time of the dinosaurs must be left there, and the same for methane. Think Left have made reference to fracking in passing but you are right. With the expansion of this technology in the US, and now here, this subject needs to be at the top of the green agenda.
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