Renewable Energy

STITHIANS AND RENEWABLE ENERGY  
Renewable energy is, pardon the pun, a hot issue in Stithians as well as throughout Cornwall right now and promises to be a hot issue for some time ahead.

WHAT IS RENWABLE ENERGY?
Ultimately all our energy, apart from nuclear energy, comes from the sun.

Energy from the sun comes as heat or light and enables plants to grow. Plants provide nourishment for animals amongst which are the human animals, ourselves.

Large amounts of plant matter have been stored over millions of years and either converted into coal, gas or oil. The stock of those forms of energy is not being added to and so they are fossil fuels.

Renewable energy is energy which does not draw down the stock of fossil fuels. Renewables include wind, solar, tidal, hydro and biomass because the stock is being replaced every day. Because the population of the world is increasing and the consumption of energy per person rising the stocks of non renewable energy are running out. In addition, the use of fuels like coal oil and gas produce greenhouse gasses which are damaging the quality of the atmosphere.

WHY DO WE NEED RENEWABLES?
The upshot of these several factors is that there is a need to diversify the sources of energy which we use, to conserve the available energy and to minimise the adverse consequences from energy use. The need is both economic and environmental.  For today and for the future. Because these are large scale issues, affecting everyone not only in Cornwall or the United Kingdom but the world, Governments  have got in on the act in different ways in different places.

HOW DOES THIS AFFECT US IN STITHIANS?
The most obvious effects of the drive to use more renewable energy are the wind turbines and solar panels which have sprouted in various places in recent years.

The installations range in scale from the domestic to the industrial. A patch of solar panels on a roof here, a wind turbine on the back of a bungalow there. The double glazing, wall foam and loft insulation which many houses now have.

The less obvious effects, although often more painful, are economic. The prices which we pay for energy have risen relentlessly, partly due to demand but partly due to the cost of promoting renewable energy over fossil fuels. Not that many years ago there was an outcry when the Budget put tax on petrol up and its price rose to half a crown a gallon. That is 25 pence for 4,5 litres in today’s money. Petrol at £1,38 a litre, or £6/4/= a gallon in old money, was unthinkable.

However, those who remember petrol at 2/6 a gallon will also remember the oil crisis of the early 1970’s when prices more than doubled over night and then again and fuel was not physically available. In more recent times there have been occasions when the pipelines carrying gas across Europe have not delivered causing serious anxiety about supplies. We have the coal miner’s strikes as well.

WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF DIFFERENT RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES?

ADVANTAGES

• The first and most obvious benefit is that renewable energy sources are renewable and keep on arriving every day from the sun.
• Secondly renewables arrive here directly and so we are not dependant on trade to ensure continuity of supply.
• Thirdly renewable energy is environmentally friendly (or ‘green’) and so does not damage the environment as much as fossil fuel use does.

DISADVANTAGES

• The first and most obvious disadvantage is literally the cost. Renewable energy is more expensive than non renewable energy.
• Secondly the systems for producing or capturing the energy are right here. We see wind turbines and solar panels right here in Stithians. The last coal fired power station seen in Cornwall was at Hayle which went out of business in the 1960’s.
• Thirdly renewable energy competes to a greater or lesser extent for other resources. The land with wind turbines or solar panels on it is not as useful for producing agricultural products as it was without these machines. Land used to grow crops for use as biodiesel or wood or biomass crops such as Miscanthus is just not available for growing food either in the form of crops or grazing for animals.
• Fourthly it is difficult to store renewable energy particularly electricity. It arrives and you can capture it but how do you store it so as to accommodate the changes in demand?
• The fifth cost of renewable is that to a far greater extent than with fossil fuels we as individuals, as families and as a community are involved in their production whether we like it or not. We have to tolerate the presence, the noise and the stroboscopic light flickering where these occur of wind turbines, and the solar panels on roofs or fields.

There is a point at which this would eventually impact on the economy of Cornwall where the natural beauty of the place is a major attraction both to those of us who live here and those that visit. Reduce that and Cornwall is a poorer place than it already is!

WHY IS RENEWABLE ENERGY SO MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE?
You would think that when the energy used in renewable energy production arrives free from nature that the cost of energy from those sources would be less? No mining, no drilling, no transport, no refining, no stocking and handling?

There are three main reasons why renewable energy is expensive. On the one hand there is a need for incentives to people and businesses to change their patterns of production and consumption and the best incentive is higher profits. Unfortunately higher profits for producers means higher costs for consumers.

The second reason why renewable energy is expensive is the cost of producing, or capturing and converting it into forms usable by us as consumers.

Wind turbines only produce usable power about 30% of the time. The rest of the time there is not enough wind or too much wind. That means that for every Kilowatt of energy produced you need three kilowatts of production capacity.

Solar panels only produce electricity (or capture heat for heating water) during the day when the sun is out. The amount of energy which solar panels can capture is also affected by how much is available so on sunny days they capture more because there is more available. If solar panels produced at 100% of their installed capacity you would still need at least two kilowatts per kilowatt produced just to allow for the fact that the sun only shines by day!

The third reason why renewable energy is so expensive is Government policy. To motivate investment in renewable energy Government has set up several policy requirements. On the one hand they now require a proportion of all diesel fuel to be Biodiesel. On the other hand they require the energy companies to pay a green levy on non renewable fuels towards the costs of renewable energy. Thirdly they have introduced the Feed in Tariff for those who produce renewable electricity.

Under this scheme  incentive prices are paid when energy from renewable sources enters the grid. The British Government, like the German Government, appear to have realised that they had overdone the incentives in some cases (like large scale solar panel ‘farms’) and so have applied their traditional remedy, a U turn, and reversed the policy somewhat.

CAN THE PRODUCTION AND MANAGEMENT OF RENEWABLE ENERGY BE IMPROVED?
There is always room for improvement in what ever we humans do.

The management of demand is a sensible and economic approach to the energy conundrum. Use less energy. House insulation through double glazing, loft and wall insulation, more efficient systems for burning fuel (an open fire looks great but more than half the energy goes up the chimney), wear more pullovers and clothes as Edwina  Currie famously advised in the 1980’s.

Select the renewable energy technologies more carefully from a wider menu than just solar panels, wind incinerators and wave power.

ARE THERE BETTER TECHNOLOGIES?

• Hydro electric power has the benefit of being available 24x7 If water was used to drive turbines 100% of the time rather than wind which only produces power 30% of the time this would be more economic. In addition there are thousands of water power sites already established and waiting to be brought back to life. The Kennall River alone from Trethellan Water, in Stithians to Perranarworthal, where it meets the estuary, ran more than 30 waterwheels two hundred years ago. The same water was used and reused 30 times in its passage down no more than five miles of river. Today none of those sites is being used. Wind turbines turn at between 15 and 30 revs per minute not that different to the speeds of waterwheels.
• Using solar panels to capture heat to make water hot for baths and showers is more efficient than photovoltaic use of sun for electricity generation. Once the water is heated up it can be stored in insulated tanks for direct use or to feed into water heaters for further heating thereby reducing the need for fossil fuel.
• Waste can be processed in far more economical and profitable ways than by shipping it to St Dennis and burning it pyrolitically. Has anyone for instance worked out, even roughly, the energy balance between what will be produced and the cost of shipping waste by road to Rostrowrack and the empty lorries coming back for the next load? Does the residual slag have a value or are there costs of disposing of that?      
• A growing portion of waste is directly recycled. Look at your dustbin. How much of what you throw out is plastic packaging? You recycle the glass, some of the plastic, paper, tins, cardboard and paper already. What is not put to good use is the biodegradeable (or putrescible) fraction. The food scraps, potato peelings, chicken bones dead flowers, kitchen rolland the like. We had a good scheme for the disposal of food waste in Stithians run by a local farmer assisted by a lot of worms until someone, allegedly in the EU, decided that worms need to work indoors thereby making the whole thing uneconomic.
• Biodegradeable waste can, however, be used through what is called anaerobic digestion. In this process bacteria use the waste as fuel to make biogas which can be burned either as gas or used to power generators to make electricity. The process happens in closed tanks preferably at sewage works so that sewage can be processed as well. Many houses have waste disposal machines on the sink which grind up the waste so it can go down the sewer and also be processed with the sewage. If sewage and other biodegradable wastes are processed by anaerobic digestion the sludge can safely be used as fertiliser and nothing is left to be dumped at sea. As a result of this the costs of beach cleaning which weigh so heavily on our water bills would also shrink and eventually disappear!!

HOW DO WE SELECT THE BEST TECHNOLOGIES TO USE? 

There are two straightforward questions to ask;

1. What is the return per Pound invested in each technology?
2. What is the cost per kilowatt hour of the energy produced?

Straightforward answers to these questions tell us everything we need to know to choose between one technology and another. By answering these questions you address the whole bundle of issues with each technology in such a way that the answers can be easily and objectively compared. Both questions use common denominators so we are comparing apples with apples not apples with bananas.

Telling us that the average household spends A on gas and B on electricity tells us nothing about how much energy they consume just how much money they spend. We all know you get more miles per gallon out of diesel than petrol engines? Mains gas is cheaper per kilowatt hour than electricity or bottled gas.

You can also take into account the visual impact, noise, smell, vibration, waste heat generation and any other relevant factors. These issues should however be incorporated into the price of producing a unit of energy.

On the basis of the most recent quarterly figures from DECC the costs per kilowatt hour of energy derived from the different sources are;

Electricity 12.92p/kWh
Gas           3.71p/kWh
Coal          5.78p/kWh
Heating Oil 47.3p/kWh

WOW!!! How much better off would we be with mains gas at 3.7i pence a kilowatt hour compared to electric at 12,92pence or oil at 47,3pence? These figures are all in pence per kilowatt hour so that we compare oranges and oranges not oranges and potatoes.

CONCLUSION
Real benefits can accrue to the people and community of Stithians from promoting renewable energy production and consumption in the Parish, both in the short and longer terms.

It is important that informed and reasoned choices are made to ensure that Stithians and its people receive maximum benefits and bear minimum costs.

Would we achieve this from having hundreds of noisy shadow casting wind turbines all over the place producing expensive electricity one third of the time and solar panels all over the fields so that food production falls a lot?

Would we be better off in the economic and environmental senses if all our waste was used locally to produce energy and fertiliser?

How many of the waterwheel sites in the Parish could be brought back to life by their owners to generate electricity all day and night every day and night?

Can off peak electricity produced hydrogen by electrolysis of water to store energy for use in fuel cells?

Can geothermal energy technology developed by Camborne School of Mines at Rosemanowes Quarry at Longdowns provide renewable heat and for homes while generating electricity profitably and cleanly?

How do the costs and benefits of these alternatives compare with the technologies being promoted by the Government and industry now?

Stithians Parish Council has a function in this process to represent and keep the people of Stithians informed to ensure that the Parish and its inhabitants get the best results that we possibly can!