Transcript of speech made by guest speaker at Hockerton Housing
Project’s launch of its renewable energy systems on 14th September
2002.
Guest Speaker – Professor Peter F Smith (Sheffield Hallam University – School of Construction & RIBA Vice President for Sustainable Development)
Already the Johannesburg summit has dropped from collective consciousness perhaps because it represented a case of starting with low expectations and ending with even lower outcomes. There was barely a mention of global warming and climate change. That was incredible when you remember that only a short time before the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its Third Assessment Report (TAR). I’m sure the main reason for its low profile in South Africa was the fear that it would embarrass the US the single biggest engine of climate change. You can see why.
The most direct predictor of climate change is
the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The report states that the
current atmospheric concentration of CO2 at 350 parts per million by
volume (ppmv) is the highest for 420,000 years and probably 20 million years.
By 2100, the level of atmospheric CO2 could be as high as 970
ppmv. It should be remembered that
the pre-industrial level was 280ppmv.
As for temperature rise, the IPCC report
predicts that
“all land areas will warm more rapidly than the global average,
particularly those in northern high latitudes in the cold season”. It adds that in certain parts the overland
warming could be more than 40% higher than the global mean. We’re talking of
around 8.5 deg C probably in central southern Europe.
Ice sheets will continue to melt and
contribute to sea level rise for hundreds of years after stabilization. The
Greenland ice sheet alone would cause a 7m rise and the Antarctic ice a 5m rise
in the long term.
Global warming and its climatic consequences
are subjecting the planet to stress at a rate which has no occurred for hundreds
of thousands of years. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
is noted for its caution yet it concludes: “Projected
climate changes during the 21st century have the potential to lead to
future large scale and possibly irreversible changes in Earth systems resulting
in impacts at continental and global scales”. (Third
Assessment Report 2001)
The compelling argument for rapidly switching
to low to zero carbon technologies is that the future of the planet could be
determined by our actions within the next two or three decades. The verdict of
the future may be that Johannesburg was our last chance to do something decisive
to arrest global warming and stabilize the climate and we blew it. Instead, as
far as energy is concerned it was business as usual. What does that mean?
According to an OECD report coinciding with
the summit, we will continue to subsidise fossil based energy to the tune of $57
billion per year. The report states: “through the provision of subsidies on
fossil fuels, governments are effectively subsidising pollution and global
warming as more than 60% of all subsidies flow to oil, coal and gas”. This
is the context in which the summit refused to adopt targets for the development
of renewable energy technologies due primarily to the blocking power of the US.
But the UK is not blameless. We are good at
rhetoric and bad at delivery. For example, take the 2001 Home Energy
Conservation Bill a private member’s Bill which sought to make it a statutory
requirement that local authorities improve the energy efficiency of homes by 30%
by 2010, as recommended in the Home Energy Conservation Act. It had cross party
support and got through the committee stage and Report Stage in the Commons.
Ministers supported the Bill until they realized that only 1 in 4 local councils
were on course to meet the 30% HECA targets. There arose the spectre that the
government might need to subsidise local authorities if the target became
legally binding rather than merely aspirational. So, the Bill was quietly killed
off. As the Book says: “By their deeds ye shall know them”.
The message is clear. If really serious things are to be done it’s up to individuals and groups to drive home the message by their actions rather than words, actions such as this ground breaking development. You might say that the scale of the gulf between the business as usual market centric attitude that won the day in South Africa and the policy shift that will be necessary to stabilize the planet is represented in microcosm by the current state of housing. On the one hand there is the developer’s doll’s house executive home aesthetic spreading like a virus across the nation and, on the other, Hockerton and Bedzed. As I see it, Hockerton symbolizes the ultimate sustainable net zero energy solution in a rural setting and the Beddington Zero Energy Development (Bedzed) in outer London the urban equivalent. These are the cutting edge and prototypes for the future.
At present housing alone accounts for around
28% of all CO2 emissions in England and Wales. You have demonstrated
that housing, far from being part of the problem can be part of the solution.
Not only is the energy demand of buildings like this a tiny fraction of that of
a conventional home, you have the potential to create a net energy surplus.
Millions of homes could, if the conditions were right, become micro-power
stations through the use of PVs and small scale wind etc.. This was the vision
offered by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution report ‘ Energy,
the Changing Climate’ last year. It recommended: “a shift from very large
all electricity plant towards more numerous combined heat and power (CHP)
plants. The electricity system will have to undergo major changes to cope with
this development and with the expansion of smaller scale, intermittent renewable
energy sources”. (Energy – The Changing Climate, p.169).
The government term for this is distributed
generation (DG) and it would effect a fundamental change in the shape of the
energy infrastructure, making a radical impact on the function of Distribution
Network Operators (DNO’s). We are talking of intelligent grids which can
instantly match supply with demand. Information technology is now capable of
managing the complexities of a system with a large number of distributed
suppliers of all sizes without centralized control. This potential for
reconfiguring the supply of electricity to take account of numerous small even
domestic scale generators was the subject of a DTI conference I attended earlier
in the year. What it amounted to was a succession of speakers outlining the
research they had been contracted to undertake by the DTI to see how a
distributed generation system could be made to work in the UK.
First there will have to be a realistic value
attached to the benefits of renewable energy, not least in terms of CO2
abatement and security of supply. The government insists that a free market must
prevail, ignoring the fact that the market is already wildly distorted in favour
of fossil energy.
In an interval of the conference I suggested to the speaker who represented the regulator Ofgem that the stark truth is that small scale renewables and distributed generation will never take off in the UK whilst it has to compete head to head with the depressed prices of fossil fuels. He agreed. He also conceded that it was unlikely that the government would change its stance. It must be remembered that his job is to maintain a downward pressure on fossil fuel prices. Perhaps the present problems of British Energy may concentrate minds within the DTI, compounded by the fact that al Qaeda originally planned to target nuclear power stations.
It’s ironic that the New Energy Trading
Arrangement NETA has hit the nuclear industry so hard. It also has had a
disastrous effect on renewables & CHP but that never makes the headlines.
Nuclear power has never paid. Last year British Energy responsible for 8 nuclear
power stations, declared a loss of £518M and still paid a dividend to
shareholders. British Energy itself estimates that decommissioning power
stations over the next 50 years will cost £14billion to say nothing of the
250,000 years the stuff will glow in the dark.
It’s not rocket science. We have proved we
can create buildings which are zero net energy users as the Vales here and Bill
Dunster in London have shown. At the same time buildings as platforms for
renewable energy technology could transform the energy deficit run up by the
built environment and play a leading role in achieving the stabilization of CO2
emissions. Assuming we achieve that goal, the climate will continue to change
but at least at a rate which would allow us and the Earth’s ecosystems to
adapt.
We have to get it across that we only have a
short time to take decisive action within the framework of the long-term goal of
genuine sustainability. Only by such action will we safeguard a somewhat damaged
planet for future generations. The alternative is to slide myopically into the
abyss.