Lights out

Today's Times (paywa££ protected) leads with the news that plans to incinerate household waste in the UK, both to reduce the need for landfill and to fill the looming gap in electrical power generation, are in jeopardy.  Locals are worried about pollution risks and traffic problems ("huge HGVs coming down our narrow country lanes"), while environmentalists argue that incineration reduces the incentive for people to recycle.

I have some personal experience with energy-from-waste (EFW) plants, from my banking days in Canada a couple of decades ago.  I recognise these arguments against incineration, and know them to be almost entirely false. The insanely parochial Toronto Star would routinely talk of EFW plants "spewing deadly dioxins", when a more accurate description would be "emitting trace amounts of a chemical with no known adverse health effects".  Tiny amounts of dioxins are emitted every time you strike a match or fire up the barbecue. Scientific studies showed that the air emitted from the stack of an EFW plant was much cleaner than the air taken in at the base -- though, if you've ever descended into Toronto airport through the brown miasma that passes for that city's atmosphere for most of the year, you may see that as a very low barrier.

By and large, the facts made very little headway against the prejudices in Canada back then, and there's every probability that the NIMBYs and the greens will be able to do serious damage to EFW plans in the UK as well.  If we can't use EFW, then, exactly how is the UK going to meet its electrical power needs in the years and decades ahead?  Let's take a quick roll-call.

Nuclear? The Government is in favour, subject to some strict conditions, but as the UK's engineering sector has been comprehensively hollowed out, any new nukes would have to be built by foreign companies. The industry is running scared on a global basis, thanks to last year's events at the Fukushima reactor in Japan (death toll to date: still zero), so that doesn't seem like something we can rely on.

Shale gas? The UK seems to have huge reserves, but the environmentalists, horrified by the possibility that conservation efforts might be derailed if we were foolish enough to exploit an abundant and cheap new energy source, are talking up scare stories about undetectably small earth tremors that may result from the "fracking" process.

Wind? The government likes it, but people (and birds) in the vicinity of the turbines certainly don't.  It's spectacularly unreliable -- it doesn't like too much wind, or too little -- and so requires a whole fleet of conventional power stations to be kept on standby for those times when the wind doesn't cooperate.

Solar? Helpful at the margin, even in the UK's habitually gloomy climate.  However, attempts to promote it in recent years led to such rampant profiteering that the tariffs have been reduced, and it remains to be seen how much of the industry will survive.

Tidal?  There's lots of potential:  the Bristol Channel is the second-most powerful tidal bore in the world, after Canada's Bay of Fundy.  However, the capital costs are immense, making it a non-starter under current economic conditions, and there are also environmental issues that could rule it out.

Coal? You must be joking.

Oh dear.  Much of the UK's existing nuclear and coal-fired generation capacity is scheduled to be decommissioned in the next few years to meet EU regulations.  If we rule out all of the domestically-available options,  it looks like we be ever more dependent on importing gas from our friends in Norway, Russia and Qatar for the foreseeable future.  What could possibly go wrong?