The
Guardian reports that the government are to scrap tax relief for green
community energy schemes, when George Osborne the Chancellor announces his
spending review at the end of November. This comes on top of a cut of 87% in
the Feed In Tariffs (FIT), which is the amount of money paid to generators of
renewable energy, to make it financially worthwhile investing in the technology
and setting up the schemes.
All pretence it seems, of cleaning up our energy production,
has been jettisoned by this government now. The ‘green crap’ as the Prime
Minister is reportedly to have termed it, has served its purpose in detoxifying
the Tory brand, to some extent anyway, and the public relations exercise is now
redundant, and climate change etc can be ignored once more. Or, use the climate
change argument to support large scale centralised nuclear power production,
which obtains huge amounts of subsidies from government, much more than
renewables have ever done.
The idea of local renewable energy networks has been
championed by Greenpeace in particular. This is from their 2006 report ‘Decentralising
Power – An Energy Revolution for the 21st Century:’
In our existing system, electricity is
produced in a small number
of large power stations, and then
distributed to where it is
needed. Because the power stations are generally
far from
centres of demand, much of the heat which is
produced when
fossil fuels are burnt is not used, but
vented up chimneys or
discharged to rivers. This heat loss alone
represents a wastage of
over sixty percent of the total energy
released by burning the
fossil fuels. Further losses occur as the
electricity travels along
the wires of the transmission and
distribution systems.
In total, the energy wasted at the power
station and on the wires
is equal to the entire water and space
heating demands of all
buildings in the UK – industrial,
commercial, public and domestic.
This is one of
the main problems with large scale conventional electricity generation, it is
very inefficient, as well as being mostly ‘dirty’, i.e. the generation is
mainly from fossil fuels. By moving to a localised network of renewable
generation, Greenpeace estimate that the UK could reduce its carbon emissions
by at least half of all emissions
from the power sector, or 15% of our total emissions.
Moving to localised energy networks would
probably be cheaper in the long run too, as the current centralised system is
very expensive, and local networks would deliver electricity supply which is
far less vulnerable to massive system failure due to sabotage or extreme
weather.
But the real
beauty of this idea is in democratising our energy supply, and the radical
opportunities that this would bring. The report says this:
Decentralising energy would also democratise
energy,
providing real opportunities for local
political leadership on
climate change, and curbing the influence of
the centralised
industry’s powerful vested interests. By
enabling local action
and empowering individuals and communities
as producers,
decentralisation has the potential to bring
about a massive
cultural change in our attitude to and use
of energy.
And not only
that, it has the potential to push the energy corporations completely out of
our lives. Imagine, small scale cooperatively owned clean electricity, our electricity
shared amongst members. It would be a staging post on the long road to
ecosocialism. Actually existing, for people to see working to the benefit of
the environment and for us users.
Maybe the
government realises this, and their move to discourage this type of good
example by reducing subsidies, is a sign?
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