Sheffield Tony":1xnxrmaj said:
I don't think EU directives can be blamed here for our energy security, beyond the closure of coal plant perhaps.
Sucessive governments have dithered for years over new nuclear build; the dilemma has been between requirement for clean generating capacity (in so far as nuclear can ever be regarded as clean), and public acceptability. Basically until the situation was dire no decision of nuclear build was going to happen. Having missed the point at which the decision need be taken, wind / solar etc are a stopgap solution, allowing the unpopular decision to be deferred even longer. But now there is the question of whether we can afford to build it. And if it will be completed within any sort of useful timeframe.
I agree with much that you said above, with some comments:
The trouble is that coal is ideally suited for base load generation.
It's typical of the EU to issue a directive that's more like a piece of polemic, without any real attempt to address unintended consequences.
For decades we have understood coal-burning pollution, and we have had strategies to mitigate it. For example, fitting filters to generating stations is effective, particularly so as the pollution is concentrated in one place. It's a cost-effective approach.
We cannot sustain our present energy use (or anything
close to our present energy use) without fossil fuel consumption. Right now, the vital base-load stations like Drax and Didcot are being replaced with gas-fired plants - hardly any greener, geo-politically dodgy (as the gas comes from Russia in the main, and is a vulnerable import), and no more effective against the greenhouse effect than the coal they replace.
"Green" energy still only accounts for 1-5% of our supply, and this is unlikely to rise significantly in the next decade or so. It has bought us no time at all (I quite agree about politicians dodging the essential decisions about nuclear until it's too late). Worse, it has diverted scarce resources (cash, mainly), into inefficient and environmentally unfriendly stuff that basically doesn't deliver.
The EU has been a driver for much of this, because it feeds off the lobbyists (corruptly), and big profits have been made from the subsidies, land deals, etc.
One of the major problems with 'green' energy is that it's not very green. Solar farms have a predictable limited lifespan of around ten years (UV kills solar cells, cumulatively). This is probably not stressed when the rooftop versions are sold to naive householders! The chemicals involved are not friendly, and some are quite scarce resources themselves, and if you look at the cost-per-gigawatt of the capacity, it is quite enormous - far more than the proponents admit to, because the real-world efficiency is extremely low, and the infrastructure cost is huge.
How did we get here? You
have to look at history - you can't ignore it if you want to understand the present.
I mentioned earlier that the EU was conceived by Schuman and Monnet to have a Stalinist/Fascist command economy (they were admirers of Soviet Russia, which at the time appeared to be successful, and there are dark hints in the literature that they also admired the Nazi's and Fascists's ability to "just get things done").
The coal and steel community came first, and was intended to do two things - cover Europe's energy and raw materials needs to make Europe independent of global trade cycles, but also to make countries
dependent on each other (so they couldn't/wouldn't go to war again). This was to be achieved by
removing the ability to do certain things from each country: so the Benelux countries and Germany got to mine coal and make steel, France got agricultural rules in its favour, and so on. The rest of the EU-to-be was to depend on them.
Unfortunately there weren't roles for everyone in the new utopia, and realpolitik played its part too, so we found ourselves with no fishing grounds any more, and signed-up to rules about government subsidies, affecting the big raw materials and energy industries in particular, that frankly weren't in our interests.
It's subtle; it's all in the name of "competition law" and "preventing monopoly positions" etc., but it goes right back to the statist approach of the EU's founding fathers. Over decades, successive UK governments have become more compliant too (the biggest change was probably with John Major). Big industry loves all this, because lobbying has become highly cost-effective, and is also a good entry barrier to these markets, and unfairly discriminates against smaller players.
Control of energy policy has always been at the heart of EU policymaking.
We NEED green energy, very desperately, but there are presently no solutions to the problem - there simply isn't a "green" method of base load generation, and no commonly-agreed method of storing renewably-generated energy for it to be used as a base load substitute. We can't make "green" energy in sufficient quantity; we can't store it; and the technologies aren't actually green and are HUGELY expensive compared to what we've got used to.
The only currently public technologies that might offer hope for base load generation both exist in the EU already: thorium fission reactors, and fusion. Both are insufficiently funded, thorium reactors particularly so.
The ITER project (being built in France - can you guess why?) is actually a fully international scheme (not just the EU), as a next step towards a practical fusion generator, although the first successful* fusion experiment was done at Culham, Oxfordshire (JET). The UK arguably had more and better Tokamak fusion expertise than anyone else (other fusion systems are available...).
The Germans had a functional production Thorium reactor, albeit a poor design. It came on-line very late, was very expensive, and has recently been shut down (or dramatically scaled back its output - can't remember which), largely on safety grounds, I think after the Japanese tsunami containment breaches (Germany is essentially trying to become non-nuclear).
The UK has university-based research teams with new Thorium designs. They remain very under-funded.
*getting more energy out than was put in, albeit for a rather short time.
