Great to see Al Gore out there last week refreshing his ‘Inconvenient Truth’ by challenging both Republicans and Democrats to raise their sights in the run-up to the November election. And his “100% renewables†should certainly achieve that particular goal!
Great to see Al Gore out there last week refreshing his ‘Inconvenient Truth’ by challenging both Republicans and Democrats to raise their sights in the run-up to the November election. And his “100% renewables†should certainly achieve that particular goal!
Big emphasis in his campaign on jobs – and I’ve no doubt that’s going to become a huge issue here in the UK too. The Prime Minister himself is clearly alert to that reality, and liberally peppers his various energy–related speeches with references to the number of jobs that will be created in promoting different strategic priorities.
Bag-loads of salt required with these projections – most especially with the latest gob-smacker that a new nuclear programme in the UK would create around 100,000 jobs. Not a single one of the big energy companies involved as potential nuclear bidders has the first clue as to where those jobs are likely to come from.
Much better to work with the facts rather ditzy dreams. Where I am in the South West, for instance, there are now 2,900 FTE jobs in the renewable energy sector, up from 1,140 in 2005 – equivalent to an annual growth rate of around 37%. This amounts to £215 million of Growth Value Added today, up from £34 million in 2005. And that’s just the start – if the Government gets really serious about renewables, as indicated for the first time in the new draft Renewables Strategy.
It’s not just the potential growth in renewables that is threatened by today’s nuclear nonsense. All sorts of short term opportunities to rethink the current energy mix in the UK are likely to be over-looked by BERR (and indeed by investors). A month ago, for instance, Greenpeace published a fascinating report on industrial CHP which it commissioned from Poyry Energy Consulting which really should make the civil servants in BERR totally rethink their heat strategy (in so far as a heat strategy can be said to exist at all).
The report shows that at just nine industrial sites, the installation of mega CHP schemes would provide between 13,000 MW and 16,000 MW of electricity in providing the heat needed by the companies on those sites. 13,000 MW is the equivalent of eight new nuclear power stations.
And guess what? Lots of real jobs projected, no particular planning issues, no complex design challenges, no particular security risks and no legacy of nuclear waste to trouble future generations for thousands of years to come.
