BRITAIN MAY HAVE TO DUMP CARBON CUTTING TARGETS
01.31.08 - Leído 76 veces. Enviar esta notaJeremy Lovell
Britain may have to dump its carbon cutting targets or risk power cuts due to the retirement in the near future of old coal and nuclear plants, according to energy consultancy Inenco
LONDON, UK; January 31, 2008.- The crunch could come in just four years as falling supply of electricity and rising demand produce a power gap that at best will create far greater price volatility and at worst may mean the lights going out at peak times, Inenco said.
“We are facing a big hole. It is likely that the carbon target will go out of the window,” said Michael Abbott, deputy managing director of Inenco, which is part of Spice Plc.
“This is a wake-up call to action. The most likely response of the industry will be to go for gas, but as the margin lessens, price volatility and price rises will become an even greater feature of the market than they are now.”
This would put price pressure on industry as well as cause politically unacceptable hardship for thousands of households that are already having difficulty paying fuel bills.
This in turn would significantly raise the attractiveness to the government of simply abandoning its carbon targets and keeping the old coal fired stations burning.
There is an electricity supply line running under the sea from France, but Inenco said it was already at capacity and in any case spent some of its time exporting power to the continent because of shortages there.
Most of Britain’s nuclear power plants, which supply 18 percent of the country’s electricity, will go off stream within a decade due to old age, and many of its old coal-fired stations will also have to be retired by 2012 under emission rules.
“There are about 11 gigawatts of coal and some oil due to go off stream at some point,” Abbott told Reuters.
SLOW PLANNING PROCESS
While there are plans on paper for up to six gigawatts of electricity from conventional power plants and the same again from renewables like wind, the country’s planning process is slow, cumbersome and bureaucratic.
The government is streamlining the planning system but this will not take effect until 2009 at the earliest and new plants will not come online until some years after that.
At the same time it is bringing in a Climate Change Bill that will set legally binding targets of cutting climate warming carbon emissions by 26-32 percent by 2025 and 60 percent by 2050, with five-year rolling “carbon budgets”.
Earlier this month the government gave the go-ahead to a new generation of nuclear power stations. EDF Energy, a subsidiary of French power utility EDF, said it planned to build four nuclear stations in Britain.
While the company said it could have the first one ready by 2017, most experts believe around 2020 is more realistic — well after Inenco’s calculation of when lights could go out.
“The risk is there. We need a call to action immediately,” said Abbott. “We are missing our carbon target and putting everybody’s bills up and leaving a big element of doubt about where next year’s bills going to go because of volatility.”
“And then, possibly, the lights might go out occasionally.”
(Reuters)
Enlaces Relacionados
