Town & Country Planning, February 2006
I used my last column to shake my fists at the sky – or at the BBC anyway – about just how widespread the assumptions are in UK debate that central solutions are more effective than local ones.
The same is infuriatingly true in what passes for a debate about the future of nuclear energy in this country – actually a few managed clashes on the Today programme while the Prime Minister and his advisors are ensconced with the dinosaurs of the nuclear industry.
Does that display a certain bias in the debate? Well, yes it does: it seems to me that the sheer expense of decommissioning and the terrorist threat are either of them adequate reasons for not wandering back down that particular blind alley. But that is not quite what I wanted to write about.
What I wanted to say was that, here again, the whole debate is framed in such an old-fashioned way? There is, underlying the whole sorry exchange on the media, the assumption that all energy has to be produced by big central agencies and distributed down a grid that we know loses at least 25 per cent of it before it gets used.
If you add in the waste heat generated by big power stations, the proportion of energy wasted is about two thirds.
But then the big grid and central provider seems to be deeply ingrained in the psyche of British bureaucrats. There even seems to be some failure to understand that more than one energy source – wind and sun, for example – might actually be possible.
There seem to be too many armchair pundits who explain that wind can never supply 100 per cent of UK energy needs and seem to think the argument is at an end.
As it happens, Greenpeace UK has just published an excellent study of a decentralised energy regime that could halve our electricity system’s contribution to climate change within a few decades.
Their report Decentralising Power proposes that buildings, anything from terraced homes to factories, should use a mixture of solar panels, small wind turbines and combined heat and power units to be net producers of electricity. They also want a network of local energy networks producing heat and energy.
I am also absolutely sure they are right, and am confused that this option never slips past the gatekeepers of the BBC.
The local authority that has pioneered some of this in the UK is Woking, whose energy services manager Allan Jones has just been poached by Ken Livingstone to do something similar on a bigger scale in London.
Inevitably somehow, it was Danish pension funds, rather than the hopeless conservatives in the City of London, that provided the investment money that has made Woking such an example of good practice.
Greenpeace points out that about half of the annual investment in energy in the UK at the moment is going on costs associated with transmission, so local energy would clearly represent some substantial cost savings.
There would also be job benefits – Greenpeace estimates 7,000 more people in energy jobs in London alone by 2010.
What we need now is some economic comparisons between the costs and benefits of another 15 nuclear power stations, as proposed by Tony Blair, and proper investment in local energy generation instead.
Even that will probably not be enough in itself to tackle the entrenched centralisation in the energy debate, but – thanks to the foresight of Margaret Thatcher of all people, who tried and failed to privatise the nuclear industry – we don’t any more have to contend with the old Central Electricity Generating Board.
I remember the futurist Francis Kinsman describing an encounter with one of their managers after a talk he gave on the rise of the ‘inner-directed’ approach to life – those people who put independence, health and self-improvement above keeping up with the Joneses.
While much of the discussion had been about the benefits to business of independence of mind, the CEGB manager took him aside afterwards to ask how they could recognise inner-directed people on the payroll, and weed them out.
Let’s face it, only centralised bureaucracies on a truly Soviet scale – buttressed by centralised assumptions – could have succeeded in producing the staggering waste, delay, expense and secrecy of the British nuclear industry over the past half century.
The difficulty for decentralised energy is that, so far anyway, many of the providers seem equally inefficient.
Convinced by the Greenpeace report, I have been scouring the internet looking for small wind turbines I can install on my house. They are small, attractive and priced at under £1,000.
But will any of their manufacturers return by emails and phone calls? No, they won’t.
So watch this space, but don’t hold your breath.