Catch the tide

If we’re going to get a fifth of our energy from renewables, something big has to change, says Jonathon Porritt.The tide could do it.

The UK is a long way adrift of its targets on renewable energy. We’ve signed up to meeting 20% of our energy needs this way by 2020 – but on current policy we’ll be getting just 5%. This pathetic state of affairs has been apparent to ministers for many years. And little has been done to bring forward any serious measures – although John Hutton’s announcement of a huge expansion in offshore wind in December was hugely encouraging.

Investing decisively in tidal power could help reinforce the chances of that. Turbines carefully placed on the sea floor to harness the ebb and flow of tidal streams, plus a big (and admittedly controversial) tidal barrage across the Severn estuary, could together generate enough of what I call “near-zero carbon electricity” to meet 10% of UK needs (for electricity, that is, not total energy). To put this in perspective, our current ‘fleet’ of nuclear reactors provides around 18% of our electricity. Or they would do, if they were actually operating properly!

“We need massive new investments in energy efficiency and in new large-scale renewables”

For some time there has been fierce resistance inside the Treasury to committing major public expenditure to renewables. This is perverse. After all, it commissioned the Stern Review, which laid it on the line that we won’t get the low-carbon economy we want without paying for it. Stern talked of anywhere up to 1% of annual GDP – not insignificant, but wholly reasonable in comparison to the 5-20% of GDP it will cost us if we don’t tackle climate change.

Gordon Brown’s ‘green speech’ in November did at least confirm (albeit without saying how) that we’d play our part in the EU-wide ‘20% by 2020’ renewables target. Which wasn’t quite the line being taken only weeks beforehand by John Hutton, secretary of state for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR); in a presentation helpfully leaked to The Guardian, he’d been offering Brown all sorts of options for getting the UK out of this very pledge.

There are two areas where government needs to intervene. One is energy efficiency; the German government, for example, is currently investing around £1 billion a year to bring that country’s existing housing stock up to new-build sustainability standards. And the other is renewables – big and small.

“It doesn’t get much bigger than tidal power”

And it doesn’t get much bigger than tidal. Not just in terms of barrages (of which more in a moment), but what is called ‘tidal stream’ [right]. We hear little about this, though the available resource is huge – possibly up to 5% of the UK’s total electricity needs. The UK already has something of a lead in this area internationally, with the Scottish government dead keen to turn this into a serious operating reality – something which won’t happen without a lot of new money being invested in upgrading transmission lines from the far north of Scotland.

We could then get another 5% of equally low-carbon electricity from a single tidal barrage on the Severn estuary. This is uniquely important because of its huge tidal reach (the difference between high and low tide). And it’s highly controversial, too, because of its potential conservation impact. Which takes us straight into the debate about our legal obligations under the EU’s Habitats and Birds Directives.

Recognised as a wetland of international importance under the worldwide Ramsar Convention, the estuary is designated under the Directives as a Special Protection Area for birds, and has been elected as a possible Special Area of Conservation, the highest protection under planning law. This means major economic development cannot take place unless three things can be demonstrated:

• that there’s an over-riding strategic imperative to justify such a development;
• that there are no alternatives;
• that it’s possible to compensate for the damage done by creating habitat of equal conservation value to that being lost.

The Sustainable Development Commission recently recommended in favour of pursuing the Severn tidal project – but not before we’d debated it back and forth over many weeks. We felt there was little difficulty on the first two tests, but the ‘compensation’ one was a great deal trickier. In the end, we were persuaded that there was no ‘deal-breaking’ reason why an appropriate compensation package couldn’t be constructed.

Such a package would be both massively ambitious and extremely expensive. But what clinched it for us was the realisation that the UK is going to have to spend many billions of pounds over the next 20 years or so adapting to inevitable changes in the climate that we’ve already set in train. Extensive tracts of land at risk from rising sea levels and storm surges, especially down the east coast, will have to be managed very differently in the future. Flood plains are going to need to be restored; new saltmarshes established. And that’s precisely the kind of massive conservation benefits that a compensation package arising out of the Severn barrage would make possible.

If you want a feel for what that looks like on a mini-scale, check out the RSPB’s new scheme at Wallasea Island, Essex, returning arable farmland to a mosaic of mudflats, saltmarshes and coastal marshland. It’s a sign of much, much bigger things to come.

Of course, even this won’t do it for those who feel that no amount of habitat compensation can replace the uniqueness of the Severn estuary itself. But for those who are also opposed to a new nuclear programme, or to thousands of new wind turbines either onshore or offshore, this presents an almost insoluble conundrum. Just what are we to do to secure our low-carbon energy economy?

Equally unhelpful is what I call the “wouldn’t-it-be-better brigade” – as in “wouldn’t it be better to invest in energy efficiency”, “wouldn’t it be better to put the wind farms offshore”, “wouldn’t it be better to focus on small-scale generation on our homes”, and so on. To which the answer has to be “No, No and No”. All of those things would be good in their own right, but they wouldn’t be better. People still don’t get this: we need massive new investments both in energy efficiency and in new large-scale renewables. Which is why it’s so frustrating to hear the Environment Agency banging on about efficiency being the answer to all our prayers, as if this would somehow dispense with the need ever to build any new generating capacity!

There is, of course, a very long road still to be travelled before any decision is made one way or the other. However, BERR does seem to be moving with uncharacteristic alacrity on this Severn tidal power proposal, so maybe it’s finally dawned on them that at roughly £8 billion of public money (amounting to half the total price tag) it represents seriously good value for the consumer, as well as for the environment. But don’t hold your breath: the dead hand of the Treasury has not yet made itself felt.

Jonathon Porritt is founder director of Forum for the Future and chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission.

The SDC report Turning the Tide can be downloaded from www.sd-commission.org.uk/pages/tidal.html

5 January 2008

Jonathon Porritt

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