Publications

Recharging The Nation - available from www.ercouncil.org  See Press Release here.

See Neil Collins' assessment of Recharging The Nation in the Daily Telegraph below

City comment
Edited by Neil Collins (Filed: 01/11/2003)


"Power that's blowing in the wind

Here is some disappointing news for the Cassandras who keep telling us we're all doomed to shivering in the dark one winter quite soon: the lights are not going to go out. Amazingly, there's even an outside
chance that 10pc of our electricity will come from renewable sources by 2010, as John Prescott pledged so rashly in Kyoto all those years ago.

In a carefully-worked and remarkably restrained piece of research, former Treasury analyst Dan Lewis has investigated the areas that might help. He concludes that solar power is a waste of money and effort, that biomass would need to cover a tenth of the entire country to make a
real impact, and that the Government's policy is, in effect, mere bureaucracy.

We might have guessed all that, but the surprise in Mr Lewis's paper "Recharging the Nation" for the Economic Research Council is that the economics of wind power are nothing like as bad as they might
appear. They are far behind, say, gas, on any but the most dismal assumptions about its price, and there is no realistic prospect of more than a marginal change in our dependence on fossil fuels.

Nevertheless, wind power looks miles better than any other renewable. The biggest obstacles to its development are not economic, but planning, environmental, and the Government's obsession with
micro-management.

Offer locals free power, Mr Lewis suggests, and see their objections to those massive wind farms melt away. Give landowners and nearby residents a share of the ownership and see how keen they become.

Oblige all electricity companies to buy "net power" sent into the grid from microgenerators, and watch forests of little turbines spring up on schools, blocks of flats, industrial parks and isolated
buildings...

While the wind doesn't blow hard all the time, it's usually blowing at least a bit, and doesn't stop when the sun goes down. If Mr Lewis is right (and he's done the maths) we are not looking for romantic
technological breakthrough. We are simply looking for a sensible, market-orientated policy from the Government. Sounds familiar?"