Power games

Britain was a world leader in wind farm technology. So why are all our windmills made in Denmark? Because we blew it, says James Meek. As heads of state gather in Bonn to discuss global warming, he asks if we're in danger of making the same mistake with tidal power

Early in the 11th century, King Canute, the Danish ruler of England, decided to show his lickspittle courtiers the limits to kingly power. He had his throne carried to the beach, sat down facing the sea, and commanded the waves to stop. The tide hissed in over the sands, regardless, and foamed around the monarch's feet. "Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings," Canute is supposed to have told his chastened lackeys.

A thousand years later, the Danes' grasp of nature's realities still has Britain foxed. While the nuclear and fossil fuel lobbies, Thatcherite politicians and the rightwing media were sneering at the crackpot idea of electricity being generated commercially from the wind, Denmark got on with making it happen. The outcome is a brutal lesson in the wisdom of perseverance. Electricity can be got from the latest generation of wind turbines as cheaply as from gas, and more cheaply than from coal or nuclear power. The world is queuing up to buy them - from Denmark. Danish firms control more than half a global market worth £2.5bn. The Danish wind energy industry employs more people than the British coal industry. Since 1999, more new wind electricity generation has been built each year than nuclear. In a powerful symbol of the age, 325 Danish turbines are to be placed in a vast wind farm on the site of the old Nevada nuclear weapons test site.

World leaders will gather in Bonn this week for critical talks on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. But their abstruse talk of "carbon sinks" (forests to absorb excess carbon from the air) and "emissions trading" (where polluting countries buy the right to pollute from countries who pollute less) will not be enough to safeguard our futures. The majority consensus among scientists is that without a sharp cut in carbon dioxide emissions from coal, oil and gas, average global temperatures will rise by almost 6C within the lifetimes of babies born today.

The now familiar sight in Britain of dark, gigantic blades cutting through the horizon - like demented bowlers forever fixed to their crease - is a small sign of hope for the world. Every kilowatt of electricity they produce means less carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere. It's also a great sign for the Danish economy. Almost all of the hundreds of wind turbines being installed in the UK, such as the twin giants, 90 metres high, now whirling on metal columns off the coast of Northumberland at Blyth, are Danish. Demand in Britain is so great that the firm that makes them, Vestas, is building a factory near an old Nato base in Scotland to assemble turbines. It means 120 local jobs, but the technology is Denmark's.

Quite how a wealthy, technologically advanced, environmentally conscious nation - which also happens to be one of the windiest places in Europe - lost out to little Denmark in the way it has lost out to Japan, Germany, France and the US in commercialising so many areas of science and engineering is a puzzle whose solution says much about the nature of Britain. Even stranger is that history may be about to repeat itself. A still more attractive renewable energy source for our storm-girded islands - the waves and the tides - is about to be realised. Once again, Denmark could beat us to commercialising the technology. A millennium on from Canute, it seems, we may not have acquired the wisdom of the Danes.

Each year Britain consumes the energy equivalent of about 230m tons of oil - roughly four tons per person. Just over a third of that is in the form of electricity, mostly from gas, coal, oil and uranium; a tiny fraction of that third is renewable energy, mainly hydro power and wind. The rest is spent forever. As North Sea reserves dry up, Britain is doomed to become a net importer of oil. Competition and the dash for gas has brought electricity prices down in the short term, but no less conservative an outfit than the ministry of defence has predicted that by 2020, Britain could be importing 90% of the gas it needs, mainly from Russia, Algeria and Iran. Without wind, wave, tidal and photovoltaic energy generation, the only alternatives to energy dependence on illiberal states are coal and nuclear - each, in their own way, likely to prove too dirty and expensive to be of much help, despite talk of a nuclear revival.

Now, as if the twin threats of climate change and energy dependence weren't enough, the Danes have shown a third reason for backing renewables: jobs and money. The very skills that are strongest in some of Britain's most employment-hungry areas - shipbuilding, offshore engineering, diving, seafaring - would be the skills needed to make wave and tidal energy work.

"I was standing at Southampton the other day, looking out to sea," says Peter Fraenkel. "It's one of the most heavily used areas of water around our coast, but there were only 30 or 40 boats there, occupying a minute part of the sea area. I looked back at the land; thousands of buildings, roads, people. With a bit of imagination you can see that even the busiest stretches of sea are mainly huge empty spaces. To my mind, there's no real, physical reason why you couldn't get a very large proportion of the country's energy out of them."

Fraenkel heads a company based in Hampshire called Marine Current Turbines. It is about to build the first full-scale prototype of a device to draw energy from the water, generated by the ebb and flow of the tides. Designed to be installed in rows offshore, it is, essentially, an underwater windmill. Compared to the technology used for offshore oil platforms, it's laughably simple: a steel column, planted on the seabed and sticking out above the surface, with a three-blade propellor mounted underwater, attached to a turbine inside the column. As the tidal currents flow past, the propellor turns, generating electricity. Simple - but the tidal currents on the Pentland Firth alone, between Orkney and the mainland, could generate 5-6,000 megawatts of power using these devices, the output of six nuclear stations. With many other potential sites - including Devon, Anglesey, the North Channel between Ulster and Scotland, the Isle of Man and the Isle of Wight - tidal energy could provide a fifth of Britain's electricity.

"The beauty of the tides is that they are absolutely predictable, hundreds of years in advance," says Fraenkel. "As long as the moon sticks to its schedule."

He now looks set to get government funding. Whether it will come in time to make up for decades of neglect in wave and tidal energy research remains to be seen. "A few years ago, funding for renewables had sunk to £8m," says Fraenkel. "The government of John Major thought that anything that could be invented had been invented. Now suddenly this government has thrown a huge amount of money into it but you can't reverse things overnight. Money alone won't do it."

In Scotland, the focus of much of Britain's research into marine energy and the location of its stormiest seas, there is a similar air of sudden urgency. Orkney and the Western Isles have been plunged into a bitter lobbying battle to be the site for a wave and tidal energy proving centre, but Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE), the backers of the centre, are aware that the true competition for jobs and technology is between them and countries like Denmark, Portugal and Ireland.

"We've had a strong signal from industry that we need to do something dead quickly, because if we don't, they're going to go elsewhere," says Elaine Hanton of HIE.

British governments have traditionally taken an approach to backing new inventions known to entrepreneurs as "technology push". They pour research and development money into lavish development of new technology for a short time, then sit back and wait for the market to make it commercially viable. Nothing happens; the government cuts off funding in disgust. That's more or less what happened to Britain's abortive wind and wave programmes in the 1970s and 80s.

The Danes found another way, called "market pull". Instead of hosing cash at scientists and engineers, they gave financial incentives to investors to put money into wind turbines at a time when wind energy was not commercially viable. As a result, the Danes gained the experience and economies of scale needed to bring the costs down - and, in the process, 150,000 Danish families acquired ownership or part-ownership of a wind turbine.

Richard Yemm, of the Edinburgh-based wave energy company Ocean Power Delivery, says: "The UK was the leader in wind technology, but because there was no market for the technology, there were never any companies installing large numbers of machines and learning from that."

Yemm's company has designed a device called Pelamis, a snake-like device, 150 metres long, with hydraulic joints, designed to be tethered to the sea bed, head-on to incoming waves. In gentle seas, it will undulate over the crests of the waves, generating electricity from the motion; in rougher weather, it will drive head-first through the waves to avoid being shaken to pieces.

If it can be shown to work - the prototype has yet to be built - a "wave farm" of 40 devices could provide enough electricity for about 15,000 homes. But Yemm's point is that no matter how well Pelamis works, and no matter how much money the government gives to help make it work, the first wave farms will never be built unless the government weaves a sophisticated web of subsidies to entice the first investors into the water.

It was Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher's former press secretary, the self-conscious model of patriotic, rural, northern English bluff common sense, who spearheaded the campaign against wind turbines in the 90s, calling them ugly, inefficient, uneconomic and trivial. Some still argue the first point, but the Danes have proved him wrong on the others, and Britain's marine energy entrepreneurs are not beyond striking a patriotic note of their own. "Wind is sewn up, and solar energy is not looking that promising in the UK as yet, but there's all this spare tidal energy just slopping around," says John Hassard, of the British tidal energy startup RVco. "If we could get our act together, we could really rule the waves again, couldn't we?"

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 903