PowerSwitch

Cameron: we will build £1bn 'smart grid' to green Britain

David Cameron will set out his vision today for a low carbon Britain built around a £1bn investment in a hi-tech National Grid that would include putting "smart meters" in every home in the UK. The network would allow energy companies to tell people when it is cheapest to use electricity, cutting bills and making the system more efficient.

The Conservative leader's intervention will attempt to rub salt into Labour's wounds, opened yesterday by the its decision to press ahead with a third runway at Heathrow airport.

In an interview with the Guardian, Cameron said "smart grid technology", one of the centrepieces of Barack Obama's planned multibillion dollar infrastructure investment programme, was the equivalent of "the internet for electricity. It is the thing that brings our plans all together, that makes it all possible and will deliver a genuinely low carbon world".

Full story The Guardian, 16 Jan 2009

Tory plans give householders up to £6,500 to improve energy efficiency

Campaigners welcome proposals which are compared to Barack Obama's 'green economy' plans

Britons will get £6,500 to make their homes more energy efficient under plans by the Conservatives to build a green economy in the UK. The plans are part of the opposition party's move to claim the environmental lead from Labour following the outroar form green groups at Thursday's announcement of a third runway at Heathrow.

Other measures announced include maximising the potential of untapped renewable energy sources such as waves, tides and biogas. Yesterday, the Guardian revealed Tory plans to build an "internet" for electricity using smart grids that would allow demand and supply to be managed in an intelligent and environmentally friendly way.

The Tories say that their proposals would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the green technology sector by 2020.

... Shadow energy and climate change secretary, Greg Clark, said: "No longer will we need to be overly dependent on imported fossil fuels from unstable countries. Instead, our electricity and heating will come from a wider range of more dependable and renewable sources," he said. "This will help guarantee our energy security, reduce our carbon emissions and do all we can to protect the future."

Full story The Guardian, 16 Jan 2009

There are some major gaps in the plans explained by Cameron this afternoon and in the document his party has just published. They reflect his party's continued fetishisation of micro-generation. The Conservatives favour expensive and grossly inefficient systems like rooftop wind turbines and solar panels because its members hate onshore wind farms, which are much cheaper and more efficient. My heart sank when Cameron extolled Germany's decentralised energy revolution: doesn't he know that the half-million solar roofs that country has installed supply only 0.4% of its electricity?

His enthusiasm for domestic combined heat and power (CHP) plants is disappointing for another reason: the likely carbon savings produced by replacing your boiler with a heat and power plant top out at around 15%. This is tiny by comparison to the cuts required, and locks in fossil fuel use for the 20 or 30 years until the machine dies. The only sensible CHP schemes, which the Conservatives also support, are industrial projects big enough to make carbon capture and storage viable.

I'm intrigued by his plans to use biogas to supply 50% of all the heat our homes use. Is this possible? Is there enough of it? I hope so, because he has no other viable plan for decarbonising the domestic heat supply.

The policy document talks of using a Maglev or TGV-type system for a high-speed rail link from the north of the country to the south, but the provisional figures I have seen suggest that their fuel use is similar to that of airliners. The Spanish AVE train might be a better model, but we need to see some hard numbers before deciding whether or not this kind of railway will really cut emissions.

The biggest disappointment in both the document and the interview was the lack of a clear statement on coal-burning power stations.

biffvernon wrote:Indeed. No matter how crass, inept, and determined to shoot themselves in their collective Labour foot half our cabinet and the Prime Minister are, it would be silly to assume for a single nanosecond that the Tories would manage any better