Conservation:our best route to reduce carbon emissions in the UK in the near future

In previous posts on this blog I looked at UK plans to spend, on Government figures, at least £45bn to generate around 10GW of energy flow from a 33GW off-shore wind installation, and argued that it was not an effective way of reducing CO2 emissions, but would instead lock in high levels of carbon release from coal and gas burn as that is the cheapest way of making up for wind's intermittency.

In another post here I also argued that solar was not a good solution for the UK.

So what should we do with our £45bn that would work better? A nuclear program is going to take a few years to get off the ground, and up to full speed.

Conservation seems to me the best and most cost-effective way to proceed until then.

In the UK there are around 24million households.

Lets take £1,000 for each of them total £24 bn, and see how much that could help.

Conveniently it leaves £21bn, the cost of around 7 of the new 1.6GW reactors such as that being built in Finland, based on a cost estimate of $6bn for one reactor:
Finnish plant demonstrates nuclear power industry's perennial problems - International Herald Tribune

This has had cost over-runs, and is currently well over budget at about $4bn.
I have assumed that this over-run will get worse, and total cost will end up at $6bn.
I have also allowed nothing for the benefits of experience in buildign several reactors, or for technical progress such as this:
ES&T Online News: Reshaping nuclear fuel

So these costs are very much based on present reality, and do not assume the progress such as are assumed even to give the £45bn cost of the wind project.

Back to conservation.

A very high proportion of British energy needs is used in houses, and reductions would not only reduce costs, they would also if planned the right way tend to reduce the difference between winter peak use of around 75GW and daytime summer base load of around 20GW.

Coal and gas do better for peaking need than nuclear, as for nuclear most of the costs are upfront and they need to be kept running most of the time to pay for themselves.

In a later post I will examine whether this will always be the case, or if nuclear can deal with peaking in the future.

In the meantime anything we can do to reduce peak load helps, and at a later date when we have more nuclear we need not be very concerned even if we increase base load towards peak, as the marginal costs of a kwh in nuclear are very low. the more closely matched base-load and peak load are, the better the economics of nuclear.

For that reason I would suggest that subsidy should not be applied to solar thermal panels, as although they are an exciting technology and very useful where annual variation is not so great, they make their biggest contribution in the summer, and aren't much help in the middle of the winter.

PV has the same problem, and is far more expensive, so for this reason is also ruled out in this country and for northern areas generally.

I have dealt with the problems of solar in areas where most energy use is in the winter in another post on this blog.

So what should be done? I would suggest better insulation, heat recovery from waste water, air-heat pumps, tougher mandatory standards, green roofs, alterations to planning permissions and encouragement of plug-in hybrids.

To take them in turn, the 3 million worst homes in Britain are in band G, having absolutely terrible insulation. Improving them is unlikely to do much to reduce energy use, unless they are upgraded to a very high standard, as most of the people there would like to be warmer, and would turn their thermostats up. They would also be amongst the most expensive to upgrade, as for a lot of better off people a part-subsidy can result in their putting their own cash in, but many of the people in these houses are too poor.

A further 9 million households are in band F, still pretty terrible.

We have two big factors in our favour.
A lot of these households are rented, and improvements can be mandated on the owners.
The other thing is that these measures drive costs down permanently, so at some stage the initial investment is recovered.
One way of financing improvements then would be to make loans for the improvement, and recover it by estimating how much energy should be saved by keeping the heating and electric use set for the same level of comfort as before the upgrade, and increasing the unit cost to the resident to make it so that their bills should remain at the same level until the loan is repaid, when the resident then benefits.
If, say, a loan of £3,000 resulted in a saving of £300 per annum, then after 15 years the customer would start to see the money, and the loan would be financed.

If we moved to reward utilities in a similar way to California, then decreasing energy use would profit the companies and lead to innovative solutions.

By those sorts of means our £24bn could accomplish huge amounts.

Heat recovery from waste water is also very cost effective, particularly in larger households where a lot is used.

Recovery systems for showers could be fitted almost everywhere, as the water is used and flows out at the same time, to recover heat from the washing machine outflow and other sources you need to have the space to install another tank.

We are fortunate in the UK in having a mild maritime climate, where the temperature rarely drops far below freezing for long periods of time.
This means that the far cheaper air source heat pumps are perfectly adequate, rather than the groundsource heat pumps needed in places like Sweden.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pumps

Basically they multiply the effectiveness of electricity for heating by taking heat from the air.
It is more effective where you have underfloor heating, multiplying the heat from the electricity by around 4 times, but still can get a factor of about 2.5 in houses where you just outsize the radiators by about 20%,as it is better at providing lower temperature water than traditional heating.

Running costs in an radiator-type installation are about the same as for gas, but CO2 emissions around half with the present energy mix of electricity generation.

Since a lot of nuclear capacity is to come off-line before a new build is possible, we should be wary of putting any extra strain on generation, as we would end up having to build more gas or coal power to bridge the gap.

For that reason heat pumps should initially be targeted at the 5 million or so homes that are not on the gas grid until more nuclear comes on line in perhaps 2025 or so.

New homes might be mandated to have underfloor heating, but not heat pumps in the meantime.

Other standards such as insulation on new builds and house sales could simply be mandated, as long as they were enforced properly.
Inspectors pretty well ignored then in the past, so many houses built before 2005 do not meet even the low standards then in force.
Severe penalties for inspectors failing in their duty should do the trick there.

We should stop putting tarmac all over the country, and even with more houses required for an expanding population we don't have to, due to Greenroof.

What that is is planting greenery on the roofs of buildings, which insulates them , reduces heat islands effects, and would provide gardens in dense housing if built on to flat roofs.

They are built extensively in Germany:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_roof

Building regulations at the moment specify tiny houses to get more people in to the square mile, and our equivalent to the very energy efficient Passivhaus in Germany specifies taking some of that to provide for front and back porches, to act as a barrier to the cold air.

This is because the Passivhaus uses active mechanical ventilation, but it is not felt that builders here would be able to work to the standards of air-tightness required.

We should be looking to provide more spacious accomodation by the building both up and down, with roof gardens and basements.

Whilst present plans provide for very small houses, they do nothing to prevent urban sprawl as stores are allowed to be opened with large carparks, and the countryside is being built over, as permission is granted in the name of jobs.

We need joined up planning, so that future developments would have to provide for no increase in built-up area.
Greenroofs and insisting on underground car parks should help towards this, whilst cut and cover techniques as used in Germany for roads would contribute.

Any remaining need for roads could be balanced out by paying for older properties to have Greenroofs built or building underground parking.

Future building should be made firstly with the pedestrian in mind, would be high density and green.

Plug-in hybrids are now becoming possible at reasonable cost:
Next Big Future: UltraBattery combines a supercapacitor and a lead acid battery

The tax system should encourage this, no subsidy would be needed.

Although this would put some extra demand on the grid during the period before nuclear build gives it a boost, it would be off-peak capacity and so would fit in well with efforts to reduce the difference between base load and peak load as they would be charged off-peak.

It will take around 10 years for them to have a substantial impact anyway, and their demand on the grid would be more than compensated by the other measures I have outlined.

One final point is that efficiency gains always disappear into increased consumption if prices for the energy stay constant.

Prices would have to be allowed to rise per unit consumed until nuclear build made strict conservation less important.
The easiest way of doing that would for the money for both the conservation program and the nuclear build to go on prices.

It's a tough call politically, but the way to compensate the very poor is with grants, not by reducing the overall price of electricity.
This of course would put up the price still more for the rest of us.

Although the uncertainties of how much leverage can be obtained on the use of the £24 bn budget preclude exact costings, I hope the foregoing shows that we can obtain reductions in demand and in carbon emissions form such a strategy than could ever be obtained by the use not just of £24bn, but the whole of the £45 bn cost of the off-shore turbine proposals.