(PA)
Prof David MacKay warned the market would gravitate to gas power
A massive building programme which would “industrialise” large swathes of the countryside will be needed if Britain is to meet its own energy needs from renewable sources, an academic who has recently been appointed a Government adviser warned today.
Professor David MacKay, of Cambridge University, said there could be blackouts by 2016 unless new sources of energy are developed to replace power stations which are due to be decommissioned over the coming years.
He said public opposition to developments such as nuclear power plants, windfarms and tidal barrages was partly to blame for the prospect of electricity shortages.
Left to itself, the market would probably fill the energy gap by building new gas-powered stations, which would put the Government’s climate change targets at risk, warned Prof MacKay.
He said: “The scale of building required is absolutely enormous.
“If we want to have a plan that mainly relies on renewables, then we need to be imagining industrialising really large tranches of the countryside or, if we don’t want to industrialise our countryside, other people’s countryside - places with lots of sunshine and places that can do a good job of growing energy crops more productively than us.
“If we don’t want to industrialise the whole countryside, then we have a big building project to build the alternative to renewables, which is nuclear and so-called clean coal, which is as yet an unproven technology.
“There is a worry that in 2016 there might not be enough electricity. My guess is that the market might fix that just by making more gas power stations, which isn’t the direction we want to be going in.
“So we really should be upping the build rate of the alternatives as quickly as we can.”
Cutting Britain’s carbon footprint as ministers want will require legislation to enable construction of renewable energy facilities on a large scale, he added.
The only alternatives were significant lifestyle changes to reduce energy consumption or buying in electricity generated abroad from renewable sources, such as solar panels in the desert.
Prof MacKay, who takes up a role as special adviser at the Department for Energy and Climate Change next month, set out his warnings in a book entitled Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air.
“We need to engage the public in understanding the numbers,” he told the BBC.
“We need to move the conversation on from the Punch and Judy show over anti-wind and anti-nuclear to a quantitative discussion where we say how much energy do we want to consume and where do we want to get the energy from?
“The biggest options for Britain are wind and nuclear and solar power in other people’s deserts, and there are major lifestyle changes that could reduce our energy consumption significantly.
“People need to understand the numbers and understand the choices we need to make and then I think it would be easier for Government to go ahead and help industry build what needs to be built to get us off fossil fuels.
“We have got a big problem at the moment, that the public is anti-everything. There is a strong anti-wind movement, there’s a strong anti-nuclear movement, they are against a barrage in the Severn estuary, they are against waste incinerators and they are not that keen on electric cars and insulating their houses.
“We have got to stop saying no to these things and understand that we have a serious building programme on our hands.”
Prof MacKay said individual householders could make a significant difference to their own carbon footprints - cutting bills by up to 50% - by turning down their thermostats by as much as five degrees in the winter and wearing more sweaters.
But he warned that some of the lifestyle changes often discussed as a method of cutting electricity use, such as unplugging phone chargers when they are not in use, made so little difference they were like trying to “bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon”.
He added: “The big picture is that we need countrywide action.
“We have got to introduce legislation so that green technology is favoured. We have got to favour more efficient vehicles. We have got to have a big roll-out of retro-fitting insulation into buildings and make changes to planning regulations.”