EU Referendum


Booker: wasting heat that could warm our homes


26/10/2014



000a Booker-026 CHP.jpg

No pictures last week were more spectacular, writes Booker, than those showing flames and smoke engulfing the large gas-fired Didcot B power station in Oxfordshire. In fact, the damage done to one of the plant's cooling towers was relatively minor. Its owners tell us that by next week it will again be able to supply the grid with 750MW of power, equivalent to the average output of 1,300 wind turbines.

But the really interesting story behind that fire was what it tells us about arguably the most extraordinary fact of all to do with our energy policy – the astonishing way in which more than half of the energy we use to make electricity is wasted.

When the BBC website last week reported the EU's latest wholly unrealisable plan to achieve a 40 percent cut in our CO2 emissions within 16 years – Ed Davey actually wanted 50 percent – it was inevitably illustrated with one of those pictures of cooling towers.

They were belching what readers might imagine were clouds of smoke and nasty, "polluting" CO2. But in reality, what emerges from those cooling towers is steam, given off by heat from the gas that drives the turbines – and all that colossal amount of heat literally goes up the chimney.

But what also emerged last week from an as yet unpublished study was the startling fact that the heat we waste in this way is "very significantly" more than all the heat we get from the gas used to warm Britain's 25 million homes.

So why don't we save billions of pounds a year by following the example of the countries that use that heat to warm buildings? In Denmark nearly half of its buildings are kept warm by "combined heat and power", or CHP, piping heat from power stations to whole districts of towns and cities.

To a very limited extent, we do this already. When David Cameron sits at the Cabinet table, or Mr Davey in his office at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, they are among the beneficiaries of the "Whitehall CHP scheme", using a 4.9MW gas-fired turbine in the bowels of the Ministry of Defence, not only to provide Whitehall's ministries with a secure supply of electricity, but also heating for a large surrounding area.

There was a time when governments produced reports suggesting that a major extension of CHP across the urban areas of Britain could not only contribute up to 17GW of electricity – nearly half of our average needs – but also supply heat to millions of homes.

By this means, as Owen Paterson pointed out in his recent speech on energy, we could more than double the efficiency of our energy use, from 40 to 90 percent. Already the NHS has seen the light, as in its CHP scheme in Leeds, which provides both electricity and heating to the city's main hospital and university complex. Didcot B, between a housing estate and a technology park, would be equally ideal.

But astonishingly, despite earlier official enthusiasm, our government's new energy policy seems to offer no long-term place for CHP, because powering such schemes by gas would prevent us reaching our statutory requirement under Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act to cut CO2 emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

Instead, Mr Davey fondly imagines that, by 2030, we can rely for almost all of our heating on electricity, produced by tens of thousands of wind turbines and huge nuclear plants too far from population centres to use their heat.

The overwhelmingly sensible answer, as Mr Paterson explained in his seminal speech, would be to return to smaller, more local power stations, putting their heat to good use rather than wasting it.

When the Combined Heat and Power Association next month publishes the study mentioned earlier, it will include those devastating figures showing how we waste much more heat than that we currently pay for to heat our homes.

But there is no way we can switch to such a policy until we have repealed that crazy Climate Change Act. Meanwhile, Mr Cameron and Mr Davey continue to enjoy the heat provided by a system that they would deny to the rest of us.

FORUM THREAD