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WEF: Big energy CEOs just don’t get the renewable revolution Updated for 2026

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The World Economic Forum’s ‘The Future of Electricity‘ report on power generation makes depressing reading.

Perhaps the pessimism about new technologies is predictable given that Davos represents large companies, not the innovative companies at frontier of energy transformation.

Even so, to say that renewable power sources, excluding hydro, are projected to generate less than a quarter of OECD electricity by 2040 is a strikingly conservative. The percentage is probably about 8% today.

Part of their pessimism seems to derive from a very outdated view of the economics of solar power. Take a look at the chart (right). It shows WEF’s estimates for the costs of electricity generation now and in the future.

The yellow line at the top, starting off the scale, is solar PV. A megawatt hour is said to cost well over $200 in 2016 (about £130). Even by 2030 it’ll be over $110.

PV in Dubai is already at half the price WEF predicts in 20130

I think the people in Davos may have been imbibing too much of the local homebrew. Today, in overcast Britain, groups of installers are racing to put panels on the ground as fast as they can across the southern counties to ensure that they get the current subsidy rates.

The price they get for a medium-sized commercial field? A subsidy of about $100 a megawatt hour (6.38 pence per kilowatt hour) plus the wholesale price of electricity. Let’s call that $70 a megawatt hour in addition.

So even in one of the least attractive parts of the world, PV is already cheaper than WEF says, and by a large margin. More tellingly, one of the latest auctions for installing PV, in Dubai in November last year, produced a figure of about $65 a megawatt hour.

Just to be clear: an installation firm promised to install a large PV farm if it was paid less than a third of the price that WEF says is the underlying cost of solar in 2016 – and about half the price it predicts for 2030.

Open a newspaper in most parts of the world today, and you’ll see optimistic references to the prospect of ‘grid parity’ for the best suited renewable in the local market, whether it is biomass, onshore wind, storage or PV.

A business-oriented organisation like WEF should spend more time in the outside world, sensing the excitement about the rates of progress of low-carbon technologies rather than unquestioningly repeating the five year old wisdom of its leading sponsors.

Perhaps most surprisingly, WEF’s cost figures are approximately 50% higher than those produced by the International Energy Agency, long a sceptic about the progress of PV. And its figures for onshore wind are equally wrong.

By now, I would have thought that at least parts of big business would have recognised the inevitability of the transition to renewables (with storage) and begun to look at how it could profitably participate.

WEF: what are your sources?

None of the projections, estimates or calculations in the report are given a source. We cannot check their accuracy or even the provenance of their figures.

I’m sure that the writers of the document have tried to use reasonable data. But the report is stacked full of statements made without any support or justification, many of which look highly contentious.

We are expected to believe, for example, that “wholesale electricity prices are expected to continue to rise by 57% in the EU” between now and 2040 at the same as retail prices are expected to stay the same. It doesn’t need an economist to say that such a combination is impossible.  

My confidence in the report’s recommendations was further shaken by WEF’s assertion that the EU had wasted $100bn by siting wind and PV in the wrong countries.

“It is obvious to most European citizens that southern Europe has the lion’s share of the solar irradiation while northern Europe has the wind”, says the report – before concluding that Germany has installed too much PV and Spain too much wind.

Wong again. 2013 estimates from the IEA suggest that the average productivity of a Spanish turbine was 26.9% of its maximum capacity, but only 18.5% in Germany. Spain’s wind turbines are almost 50% more productive than Germany’s. In fact Spain managed slightly more than the worldwide average and was only just below the UK or Denmark in average output.

The real stories the WEF missed

Actually, it isn’t that ‘northern Europe has the wind’ but rather that westerly coasts have high wind speeds, making Spain and Portugal’s Atlantic turbines better than almost any inshore areas in northern Europe.

There’s a second reason why Spain should have wind turbines: wind speeds are relatively poorly correlated with the winds in northern Europe. For a more secure European supply, turbines in Spain have a high value, particularly when interconnection with France is improved.

 And in the case of Germany, which does have much lower output from PV than Spain, the argument that it should have left the solar revolution to its southern neighbours is a remarkably ahistorical conclusion.

Without Germany’s very costly support of PV a decade ago we would not currently be looking at grid parity for solar across much of the world.

 

 

Chris Goodall is an expert on energy, environment and climate change and valued contributor to The Ecologist. He blogs at Carbon Commentary.

The report: ‘The Future of Electricity – Attracting Investment to Build Tomorrow’s Electricity Sector‘, written in collaboration with Bain & Company, “outlines recommendations to attract the needed investment and grasp these new opportunities.”

This article was originally published on Carbon Commentary.

 

 




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Blinded by the lights? How power companies just stole £1 billion – from us Updated for 2026

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So, the presents have been opened and the over-eating survived. What now remains of your ‘spirit of Christmas’? For me, the answer is always the same – it’s the lights.

Since childhood, they have fascinated me. I would wander the streets, marvelling at efforts people made to light up their houses and neighbourhoods.

It didn’t have to be much; just a symbolic willingness to do something that illuminated far more than it lit up. This has always been my ‘spirit of Christmas’.

Societies need their lights to be guided by, never more so than today.

I have been trying to find some of the same altruism or mysticism in the government’s own leap into ‘keeping the lights on’ politics. This has taken the form of the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s (DECC’s) first round of ‘capacity market’ auctions.

Remember Enron? It’s a game …

An idiots guide to capacity markets would tell you they are essentially a game for idiots. You can’t auction the unknown. It becomes a game for gamblers not legislators.

So, predictably, in the first round of auctions Santa (ie the public) threw a £1bn (pre-Christmas) subsidy to big energy companies and they agreed to pocket it.

The nominal deal also included Big Energy agreeing to keep Britain’s lights on. DECC breathed a sigh of relief and went back to writing its own letters to Santa.

For most people, keeping the lights on remains a pretty important test of government competence … and energy companies know this. That is why, a couple of years ago, they started mothballing existing gas power stations (and permissions to build new ones).

On the surface, the explanation was that power prices were too low for the stations to remain viable. But behind the scenes, energy companies were already preparing to ‘game’ the system – and needless to say, keep the suckers (that’s us) in the dark.

Power companies ‘manufacturing insecurity’

If you can manufacture the prospects of a shortfall, you can manufacture the case for a new subsidy system to avoid it. Big Energy invented the idea of capacity markets and sold it to civil servants in DECC.

The embarrassment is that the government fell for such an obvious sucker punch. It wasn’t as though parliament lacked other / better choices.

In various sectors of a modern economy, maintaining reserve capacity is just a legal obligation. Major data centres – particularly those dealing in credit referencing and financial transactions – have to operate every second of every day. Heavy fines, market disqualification and / or imprisonment would follow a failure to ‘keep their own lights on’.

Similarly – until they were allowed to convert into casinos – all the major banks were obliged to maintain robust ‘reserve requirements’, sufficient to keep the banking ‘lights’ on too.

Moreover, I’m astonished at how quickly governments have forgotten the motivating effect that ‘the avoidance of going to prison’ can have in their discussions with corporate executives.

If this sounds too brutal, the government could just as easily have sequestrated the generating capacity that was being mothballed. If falling power prices (never passed on to the public) were making gas power stations uneconomic, the government could have bought them for a song.

Subsidies or safety nets?

The UK was never short of more coherent alternatives. The problems began with how we defined the problem.

In any economy, back up energy capacity is always difficult – if only because you never know how often, or how much, you will need it. The government’s most dubious assumption, however, was that this provision had to be marketised.

Once upon a time, such back-up generation power would have been referred to as Britain’s ‘strategic reserve’; a back-up, held and operated by the State, providing society with a safety net, not a market.

Today, a different version of the same thinking could have taken the form of building more interconnectors, particularly with Europe. These would have been much cheaper (and quicker) than an everlasting round of bribes and bungs.

Within a more imaginative mindset, the government could have financed measures promoting reduced energy consumption rather than increased energy production.

One of the minor / major tragedies of the UK’s first round of capacity market ‘auctions’ was that less than 1% of the contracts went into such ‘demand reduction’ measures.

Politicians could easily have changed the nature of the auction by specifying that 50% of the contracts would go into an energy politics designed to consume less … but they didn’t.

Instead, they actually made it harder for ‘demand reduction’ providers to compete by limiting their contracts to just one year, when new power generation contracts last up to 15 years (see ‘UK’s unlawful £35 billion support to fossil fuels in ECJ challenge‘).

No less boldly, they could have set a carbon ‘cap’ on where this energy came from, or a minimum proportion that had to come from renewable sources … but they didn’t do that either.

Britain’s capacity auctions were designed by and for energy producers; a point apparently lost on our political leaders – freshly returning from Lima discussions about cutting carbon emissions, rather than maintaining carbon subsidies.

Clean connections before dirty

Interconnectors could have offered Britain a much cleaner energy-balancing act than the capacity market auctions. Norway, Iceland and increasing parts of the EU can already offer renewable energy surpluses through the use of their interconnectors.

In the EU, what also matters is that retail electricity prices are 50% lower than in the UK. An increased use of interconnectors could keep Britain’s lights on and cut electricity costs at the same time. But none of this would have propped up the rewards to Britain’s Old Energy cartel.

To get out of the trap Britain is in, we have to start looking for a new source of ‘illumination’, and within a different mindset. The good news is that this is where many of today’s brightest ‘guiding lights’ are already working.

Seasonally, perhaps I should have gone looking for three Wise Men to offer you, but maybe two and two halves will suffice.

Following yonder stars

The two ‘halves’ are different organisational ‘stars’ Britain should be taking its bearings from.

The first is a collection of academics based around the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. Fraunhofer has just completed its latest scientific audit about Germany’s transition plans towards a clean/green energy economy. The Audit’s conclusion is as stark as it is inspirational –

“It is economically to our [Germany’s] advantage to move as quickly as possible to a system of 80% renewable energy”, said Eicke Weber, the institute’s director and a professor of physics at Freiburg University.

80% ?!… Britain’s current political leaders would have palpitations about Committing to half this amount … in their political lifetimes! Yet what the Germans seem to grasp is that this is as do-able as it is desirable. But it involves a fundamental shift in mindset about what ‘keeping our lights on’ actually means.

Aiding and abetting this collectivity of German scientists and engineers is the Twitter-site of their Energy Transition movement – @EnergiewendeGER. The site offers a constant stream of energy insights that are tragically missing from the UK energy debate.

But it is to the smaller ‘lights’ that we might want to direct the most heartfelt Seasonal blessings to. They are the equivalent of the individual houses whose Christmas lights I gazed at as a child, and whose lights seemed to capture the sense of vision and hope that politics often lacks.

An American abroad

The first of these ‘lights’ is Craig Morris (a refugee Americam living in Germany). Against all odds, Morris has maintained a broadsheet that many in the Environmental movement have come to rely on.

Operating beneath the banner of ‘Petite Planete‘ his Renewables International internet platform constantly analysed (and corrected) all the garbage, misinformation and ‘dark light’ put out by climate-denying lobby organisations.

His has been a David and Goliath endeavour – buttons versus billions – that defied the might of money and power. Yet even Renewables International has its limits.

Faced with a dwindling supply even of buttons, the continued existence of RI itself is now in question. If there was ever a case for crowd-funding something that consistently ‘keeps the lights on’ about brighter choices, this is it.

No less ‘illuminating’ is the work of my second wise man – Jeremy Leggett, the founder of Solar Century and now SolarAid. Leggett came back from Lima with a plan to replace every oil-burning lamp in Africa with a solar lamp, by 2020.

Into the darkness of continued global oil and coal subsidies, Leggett wants us to shine the light of renewable energy into the lives of those least able to do so for themselves. Re-writing Aladdin, he promises to swap new lamps for old, clean for dirty.

Whilst global leaders continue to throw money at an unsustainable past, Leggett (and others) want us to ‘light up’ a different future.

New lights for old

My guess (and hope) Is that society Is looking for new lights to follow. And these lights will be sustainable, accountable, open and equitable: with new voices leading where today’s Leaders fear to go.

These are ‘lights’ that would have us invest in a future we can survive in, dis-invests in the one that is destroying us, and which remembers that this ‘Petite Planete‘ of ours is the only one we’ve got.

I guess that, as a child, this was the ‘illumination’ I began looking for as I gazed in over garden gates.

As the year ends, yet another report, Renewable energy versus nuclear power – comparing financial support – details the way that consumers, across the EU, could see their electricity bills cut by 37% (and more) if government’s shifted support from nuclear to renewables.

It is unlikely even to register in a British debate that remains trapped in backward looking, ‘Dim vs Dimmer’, energy politics. For brighter choices, we need to get out more; taking greater notice of the ‘lights’ outside, and less of the lobbying inside.

Have a Brave New Year!

 


Alan Simpson is a recovering politician, Energiewende admirer, advisor on energy policy, climate change and fuel poverty.

Twitter: Alan tweets @AlanSimpson01.

This article was originally published at Evernote.

Video: ‘Lights’ by Ellie Goulding.

 




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The UN climate talks just failed – now for the real battle Updated for 2026

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The annual UN Climate Talks ended on Sunday in Lima, Peru. In case you were wondering, nothing happened.

In fact, possibly worse than nothing happened. Instead of being on track to sign, in December 2015 in Paris, a binding agreement to cut harmful emissions backed by all nations, we are forcefully sliding towards an agreement for each nation to do what it wants, including nothing.

There is a new acronym at the UN jargon university for this: ‘Intended Nationally Determined Contributions’, or INDCs. It’s a code-word for everyone to do what they please, in two steps.

  • First, key governments worldwide will maybe (or maybe not) outline, by March 2015, what actions (i.e., INDCs) they intend to take under a global agreement.
  • Second, the INDCs are intended to be added up into an agreement in Paris and compared against what we need to do to limit temperature increases to 2 degrees, the accepted climate change speed limit.

But because these INDCs amount to nothing, we already know that any agreement in Paris will also amount to nothing. INDCs won’t have binding (legal) consequences, aren’t subject to review and don’t come with transparent, strong monitoring obligations.

Two consequences are clear, as they have been for some time.

  • First, emissions will continue to rise as the rot from a failed UN process spreads to every corner of the world.
  • Second, as I argued previously, instead of wasting resources on a failed UN process, we should target the 90 companies which are responsible for two-thirds of the harmful emissions generated since the industrial age began. Eighty percent of their reserves need to be locked away underground to avoid a catastrophe.

This tiny number of large companies, lobbying to prevent action on climate change, are at the heart of our current carbon-intensive model. They know that their business model is not under threat from the UN climate talks.

Shell – leveraging the climate debate

In Lima, Shell’s top climate advisor was comfortable enough to admit that Shell enjoys its relationship with the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a shadowy shop specialised in aggressive efforts to counteract emissions reductions and regulations.

This is the same ALEC which, in the words of Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, is “literally lying” about climate science.

Big Oil is fighting a broader battle, trying to influence public opinion and governments at a national and community level.

I experienced their tactics far away from Lima last week, when I had the displeasure of attending National Geographic‘s ‘Big Energy Question’ round table event in New Delhi, India. This invitation-only forum convened 40 experts on air pollution in India, to examine its causes, its impacts on the environment and health, and possible solutions.

Four of these experts were from Shell, a prominent member of history’s top 90 polluters. Shell was also paying the costs. Its logo was everywhere, cuddling alongside National Geographic‘s.

Well, the predictable happened: The event was hijacked by Shell, ensuring that the Government of India didn’t hear of any solutions which did not prominently feature oil and gas.

The first word, last word, and most of the words in between

I wanted to see first-hand Big Oil in action, co-opting respected brands, academics and experts, throwing its money around. In New Delhi, Shell sprinkled its representatives around the room, controlling the debate as well as extracting the right to the last word.

As it turns out, Shell got the word after the last word too. After the proceedings closed, a heretofore undisclosed Shell representative felt he had to emphasise the company’s commitment to powering India.

That presumably includes significantly worsening its already dreadful pollution levels. According to the World Health Institute, six of the top ten most polluted cities in the world are in India.

There was not a word about Shell’s support for groups opposing climate regulations; for Arctic drilling; for covering up the extensive destruction of the environment in the Niger Delta; or for the fact that over the past 10 years, Shell’s potential emissions from tar sands (oil produced from tar sands is the world’s dirtiest and most environmentally destructive) increased by five times, according to a new report by New York based Fossil Free Indexes.

What Shell was doing in India was pernicious: It was leveraging all the goodwill associated with National Geographic‘s brand (“inspiring people to care about the planet since 1888”) to subvert real climate action.

The one power big enough to take on Shell, and its like

Big Oil knows that the international capital markets are the only power which can force them to keep their reserves in the ground, by increasing their financial cost of capital to a level commensurate with their destructive activities.

What better way to ensure the capital markets don’t turn against them than by co-opting innocent brands like National Geographic to dilute expert opinion?

Rising investor and regulatory voices (including that of the Bank of England) want to know what happens if untapped deposits of oil, gas and coal become stranded assets – because extracting them dooms us – and this movement is gaining traction from Wall Street to the City of London. That’s the real threat to Big Oil’s business model and Shell knows it.

We need to stop Big Oil’s efforts to silence the substantive debates experts are trying to have around the world about the most effective way to shift to 100% clean energy by 2050.

And it’s time for the likes of National Geographic to do their part by refusing Big Oil’s corrupting money.

 




388163

New technologies can help poor farmers – just not the ones you’re thinking of Updated for 2026

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During recent years we’ve become used to hearing that the answer to looming food security challenges is technology. For example, more sophisticated pesticides, genetic modification and machinery to grow food at ever-greater scale.

It is an especially believable narrative because – broadly speaking – this what has delivered some level of food security to most people during the period of explosive population growth that started during the 20th century, and continues today.

But while marking a success at one level, there are serious downsides, not least seen in how modern farming is responsible for driving several worsening global ecological trends.

These include climate change caused by the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; the progressive pollution of ecosystems (especially aquatic and marine ones) with excess nitrogen and phosphorous; and the loss of biological diversity, caused by both of the above and habitat loss, mostly driven by conversion of more natural ecosystems to farmland.

Agriculture is also responsible for depleting resources that are vital for its own future – not least soils and freshwater.

That we cannot go on like this is not in doubt. The question is, will more technology present solutions that will actually work? The answer to that is an emphatic ‘yes!’ – although perhaps not the kind of technology many generally associate with farming policy.

A glimpse as to what technologies might work better in producing more food while protecting the natural systems we depend upon was glimpsed this week at the Slow Life Foundation‘s Slow Life Symposium taking place in the Maldives.

Digital technologies supporting India’s farmers

Rikin Gandhi is Chief Executive of an organization called Digital Green, and he presented to Symposium participants some of the methods being successfully deployed by his organization in dramatically increasing yields among small-scale farmers.

His basic idea is to exploit a particular fact of life that is seen right across the world. It stems from where most farmers get most of their new ideas from: namely other farmers.

Government training and information schemes can make an impact, so can advice from agrochemical companies (albeit biased at times), but by far the most convincing source of new ideas is other farmers.

Working with this reality Digital Green set out to improve yields through helping farmers make videos that would be shown to other farmers nearby.

Using off-the-shelf equipment including pocket video cameras and pico projectors, Digital Green assists farmers to generate content for use among tribal communities living in remote areas without electricity. (see photo)

Battery powered video and projection enables best practice to be shared even among illiterate groups where the written word is near to useless. Gandhi got results with better farming methods adopted more quickly and more cost-effectively than earlier attempts to do the same.

Indeed, Digital Green has demonstrated that for every dollar spent, the system persuaded seven times as many farmers to adopt new ideas as an existing official program of training and visits.

Twice the rice, half the water

Another measure of success is how many farmers have been empowered through new knowledge to the point where they are producing twice as much rice with half as much water – thereby helping to address the twin emerging challenges of food and water security, while keeping people on the land (and out of the fast expanding cities) by increasing their incomes.

And when farmers have more knowledge about soil health and the role of composts as at least a partial alternative to commercial fertilisers then opportunities are presented to cut costs while reducing environmental impacts.

Other technologies can complement this basic means of sharing ideas, including mobile phones. Although most farmers are still not yet connected in this way, the proportion that are is growing fast, in turn offering the prospect to lever further value from existing agricultural resources in terms of people and land through, for example, sharing of information about market conditions and weather forecasts.

There is of course a cautionary note to strike, as Gandhi observes: “During the Green Revolution era it was all about agricultural technology being transferred to farmers. That did boost yields but had issues coming with it.

“The same thing can be said about information technology. This is powerful but also needs to be supported through partnerships and working with social organisations. We need to think about the context for the technology, and the people using it, not just the technology.”

The new ‘intensification’: producing more, from less

Alongside a flipping of the narrative relating to agricultural technology is a change in tone regarding the very concept of intensification. For decades that idea has been associated with ever more chemical inputs, with all the attendant consequences as seen for example in resource depletion and greenhouse gas emissions.

Those close to the emerging challenge of how best to achieve food security while maintaining ecological integrity see a new definition here too.

‘Intensification’ is now regarded as empowering farmers to use their ingenuity and local resources more effectively, rather than being based on strategies to import energy intensive inputs.

David Monsma, Executive Director at the Aspen Institute‘s Energy and Environment Programme, emphasised that “Smallholder farmers remain the backbone of food supply systems in most low income and many middle income countries.”

Their “awareness of and access to agricultural technologies and techniques is often lacking”, he added, but that fact opens up a huge opportunity for sustainable growth in both food supply, and rural incomes:

“Training in production techniques and technologies that conserve soil and water, or that reduce waste and loss of crops, communications tools such as cellphones and videos and organizational innovations such as setting up market-oriented farmer based organisations, can lead toward more sustainable intensification while broadly increasing food security.”

The smart money is backing this new and more joined up farmer-focused approach, with big funders such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (also see here) and the Clinton Development Initiative ‘going local’ and backing strategies that help small actors do better.

Technologies for farmer empowerment

Among the approaches delivering results are those that improve storage and market access, thereby cutting food waste in the agricultural landscapes where food is grown.

Micro-finance and micro-insurance are proving vital facilities for many farmers in enabling them to make investments and to manage risk. Farmer empowerment via training is also increasingly seen as a vital plank for future food security.

Perhaps this shift of emphasis toward communications technologies and intensification based on farmer empowerment marks the opening of a new chapter in our multi-millennial efforts to ensure we have enough to eat.

It comes not a moment too soon. The days when technology could be thrown at the challenges linked with feeding ourselves and it assumed that the ecological damage was an acceptable price to pay for cheap food are over.

No longer is it feasible to trade one set of priorities at the expense of the others, for if nature doesn’t function neither will our food system. One vital strategy for navigating these tight straits is the empowerment of small scale farmers.

 

 

Tony Juniper is a campaigner, writer, sustainability advisor and leading British environmentalist. For more than 25 years he has worked for change toward a more sustainable society at local, national and international levels. His website is at tonyjuniper.com.

 

 




386927

New technologies can help poor farmers – just not the ones you’re thinking of Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




During recent years we’ve become used to hearing that the answer to looming food security challenges is technology. For example, more sophisticated pesticides, genetic modification and machinery to grow food at ever-greater scale.

It is an especially believable narrative because – broadly speaking – this what has delivered some level of food security to most people during the period of explosive population growth that started during the 20th century, and continues today.

But while marking a success at one level, there are serious downsides, not least seen in how modern farming is responsible for driving several worsening global ecological trends.

These include climate change caused by the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; the progressive pollution of ecosystems (especially aquatic and marine ones) with excess nitrogen and phosphorous; and the loss of biological diversity, caused by both of the above and habitat loss, mostly driven by conversion of more natural ecosystems to farmland.

Agriculture is also responsible for depleting resources that are vital for its own future – not least soils and freshwater.

That we cannot go on like this is not in doubt. The question is, will more technology present solutions that will actually work? The answer to that is an emphatic ‘yes!’ – although perhaps not the kind of technology many generally associate with farming policy.

A glimpse as to what technologies might work better in producing more food while protecting the natural systems we depend upon was glimpsed this week at the Slow Life Foundation‘s Slow Life Symposium taking place in the Maldives.

Digital technologies supporting India’s farmers

Rikin Gandhi is Chief Executive of an organization called Digital Green, and he presented to Symposium participants some of the methods being successfully deployed by his organization in dramatically increasing yields among small-scale farmers.

His basic idea is to exploit a particular fact of life that is seen right across the world. It stems from where most farmers get most of their new ideas from: namely other farmers.

Government training and information schemes can make an impact, so can advice from agrochemical companies (albeit biased at times), but by far the most convincing source of new ideas is other farmers.

Working with this reality Digital Green set out to improve yields through helping farmers make videos that would be shown to other farmers nearby.

Using off-the-shelf equipment including pocket video cameras and pico projectors, Digital Green assists farmers to generate content for use among tribal communities living in remote areas without electricity. (see photo)

Battery powered video and projection enables best practice to be shared even among illiterate groups where the written word is near to useless. Gandhi got results with better farming methods adopted more quickly and more cost-effectively than earlier attempts to do the same.

Indeed, Digital Green has demonstrated that for every dollar spent, the system persuaded seven times as many farmers to adopt new ideas as an existing official program of training and visits.

Twice the rice, half the water

Another measure of success is how many farmers have been empowered through new knowledge to the point where they are producing twice as much rice with half as much water – thereby helping to address the twin emerging challenges of food and water security, while keeping people on the land (and out of the fast expanding cities) by increasing their incomes.

And when farmers have more knowledge about soil health and the role of composts as at least a partial alternative to commercial fertilisers then opportunities are presented to cut costs while reducing environmental impacts.

Other technologies can complement this basic means of sharing ideas, including mobile phones. Although most farmers are still not yet connected in this way, the proportion that are is growing fast, in turn offering the prospect to lever further value from existing agricultural resources in terms of people and land through, for example, sharing of information about market conditions and weather forecasts.

There is of course a cautionary note to strike, as Gandhi observes: “During the Green Revolution era it was all about agricultural technology being transferred to farmers. That did boost yields but had issues coming with it.

“The same thing can be said about information technology. This is powerful but also needs to be supported through partnerships and working with social organisations. We need to think about the context for the technology, and the people using it, not just the technology.”

The new ‘intensification’: producing more, from less

Alongside a flipping of the narrative relating to agricultural technology is a change in tone regarding the very concept of intensification. For decades that idea has been associated with ever more chemical inputs, with all the attendant consequences as seen for example in resource depletion and greenhouse gas emissions.

Those close to the emerging challenge of how best to achieve food security while maintaining ecological integrity see a new definition here too.

‘Intensification’ is now regarded as empowering farmers to use their ingenuity and local resources more effectively, rather than being based on strategies to import energy intensive inputs.

David Monsma, Executive Director at the Aspen Institute‘s Energy and Environment Programme, emphasised that “Smallholder farmers remain the backbone of food supply systems in most low income and many middle income countries.”

Their “awareness of and access to agricultural technologies and techniques is often lacking”, he added, but that fact opens up a huge opportunity for sustainable growth in both food supply, and rural incomes:

“Training in production techniques and technologies that conserve soil and water, or that reduce waste and loss of crops, communications tools such as cellphones and videos and organizational innovations such as setting up market-oriented farmer based organisations, can lead toward more sustainable intensification while broadly increasing food security.”

The smart money is backing this new and more joined up farmer-focused approach, with big funders such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (also see here) and the Clinton Development Initiative ‘going local’ and backing strategies that help small actors do better.

Technologies for farmer empowerment

Among the approaches delivering results are those that improve storage and market access, thereby cutting food waste in the agricultural landscapes where food is grown.

Micro-finance and micro-insurance are proving vital facilities for many farmers in enabling them to make investments and to manage risk. Farmer empowerment via training is also increasingly seen as a vital plank for future food security.

Perhaps this shift of emphasis toward communications technologies and intensification based on farmer empowerment marks the opening of a new chapter in our multi-millennial efforts to ensure we have enough to eat.

It comes not a moment too soon. The days when technology could be thrown at the challenges linked with feeding ourselves and it assumed that the ecological damage was an acceptable price to pay for cheap food are over.

No longer is it feasible to trade one set of priorities at the expense of the others, for if nature doesn’t function neither will our food system. One vital strategy for navigating these tight straits is the empowerment of small scale farmers.

 

 

Tony Juniper is a campaigner, writer, sustainability advisor and leading British environmentalist. For more than 25 years he has worked for change toward a more sustainable society at local, national and international levels. His website is at tonyjuniper.com.

 

 




386927

New technologies can help poor farmers – just not the ones you’re thinking of Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




During recent years we’ve become used to hearing that the answer to looming food security challenges is technology. For example, more sophisticated pesticides, genetic modification and machinery to grow food at ever-greater scale.

It is an especially believable narrative because – broadly speaking – this what has delivered some level of food security to most people during the period of explosive population growth that started during the 20th century, and continues today.

But while marking a success at one level, there are serious downsides, not least seen in how modern farming is responsible for driving several worsening global ecological trends.

These include climate change caused by the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; the progressive pollution of ecosystems (especially aquatic and marine ones) with excess nitrogen and phosphorous; and the loss of biological diversity, caused by both of the above and habitat loss, mostly driven by conversion of more natural ecosystems to farmland.

Agriculture is also responsible for depleting resources that are vital for its own future – not least soils and freshwater.

That we cannot go on like this is not in doubt. The question is, will more technology present solutions that will actually work? The answer to that is an emphatic ‘yes!’ – although perhaps not the kind of technology many generally associate with farming policy.

A glimpse as to what technologies might work better in producing more food while protecting the natural systems we depend upon was glimpsed this week at the Slow Life Foundation‘s Slow Life Symposium taking place in the Maldives.

Digital technologies supporting India’s farmers

Rikin Gandhi is Chief Executive of an organization called Digital Green, and he presented to Symposium participants some of the methods being successfully deployed by his organization in dramatically increasing yields among small-scale farmers.

His basic idea is to exploit a particular fact of life that is seen right across the world. It stems from where most farmers get most of their new ideas from: namely other farmers.

Government training and information schemes can make an impact, so can advice from agrochemical companies (albeit biased at times), but by far the most convincing source of new ideas is other farmers.

Working with this reality Digital Green set out to improve yields through helping farmers make videos that would be shown to other farmers nearby.

Using off-the-shelf equipment including pocket video cameras and pico projectors, Digital Green assists farmers to generate content for use among tribal communities living in remote areas without electricity. (see photo)

Battery powered video and projection enables best practice to be shared even among illiterate groups where the written word is near to useless. Gandhi got results with better farming methods adopted more quickly and more cost-effectively than earlier attempts to do the same.

Indeed, Digital Green has demonstrated that for every dollar spent, the system persuaded seven times as many farmers to adopt new ideas as an existing official program of training and visits.

Twice the rice, half the water

Another measure of success is how many farmers have been empowered through new knowledge to the point where they are producing twice as much rice with half as much water – thereby helping to address the twin emerging challenges of food and water security, while keeping people on the land (and out of the fast expanding cities) by increasing their incomes.

And when farmers have more knowledge about soil health and the role of composts as at least a partial alternative to commercial fertilisers then opportunities are presented to cut costs while reducing environmental impacts.

Other technologies can complement this basic means of sharing ideas, including mobile phones. Although most farmers are still not yet connected in this way, the proportion that are is growing fast, in turn offering the prospect to lever further value from existing agricultural resources in terms of people and land through, for example, sharing of information about market conditions and weather forecasts.

There is of course a cautionary note to strike, as Gandhi observes: “During the Green Revolution era it was all about agricultural technology being transferred to farmers. That did boost yields but had issues coming with it.

“The same thing can be said about information technology. This is powerful but also needs to be supported through partnerships and working with social organisations. We need to think about the context for the technology, and the people using it, not just the technology.”

The new ‘intensification’: producing more, from less

Alongside a flipping of the narrative relating to agricultural technology is a change in tone regarding the very concept of intensification. For decades that idea has been associated with ever more chemical inputs, with all the attendant consequences as seen for example in resource depletion and greenhouse gas emissions.

Those close to the emerging challenge of how best to achieve food security while maintaining ecological integrity see a new definition here too.

‘Intensification’ is now regarded as empowering farmers to use their ingenuity and local resources more effectively, rather than being based on strategies to import energy intensive inputs.

David Monsma, Executive Director at the Aspen Institute‘s Energy and Environment Programme, emphasised that “Smallholder farmers remain the backbone of food supply systems in most low income and many middle income countries.”

Their “awareness of and access to agricultural technologies and techniques is often lacking”, he added, but that fact opens up a huge opportunity for sustainable growth in both food supply, and rural incomes:

“Training in production techniques and technologies that conserve soil and water, or that reduce waste and loss of crops, communications tools such as cellphones and videos and organizational innovations such as setting up market-oriented farmer based organisations, can lead toward more sustainable intensification while broadly increasing food security.”

The smart money is backing this new and more joined up farmer-focused approach, with big funders such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (also see here) and the Clinton Development Initiative ‘going local’ and backing strategies that help small actors do better.

Technologies for farmer empowerment

Among the approaches delivering results are those that improve storage and market access, thereby cutting food waste in the agricultural landscapes where food is grown.

Micro-finance and micro-insurance are proving vital facilities for many farmers in enabling them to make investments and to manage risk. Farmer empowerment via training is also increasingly seen as a vital plank for future food security.

Perhaps this shift of emphasis toward communications technologies and intensification based on farmer empowerment marks the opening of a new chapter in our multi-millennial efforts to ensure we have enough to eat.

It comes not a moment too soon. The days when technology could be thrown at the challenges linked with feeding ourselves and it assumed that the ecological damage was an acceptable price to pay for cheap food are over.

No longer is it feasible to trade one set of priorities at the expense of the others, for if nature doesn’t function neither will our food system. One vital strategy for navigating these tight straits is the empowerment of small scale farmers.

 

 

Tony Juniper is a campaigner, writer, sustainability advisor and leading British environmentalist. For more than 25 years he has worked for change toward a more sustainable society at local, national and international levels. His website is at tonyjuniper.com.

 

 




386927

New technologies can help poor farmers – just not the ones you’re thinking of Updated for 2026

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During recent years we’ve become used to hearing that the answer to looming food security challenges is technology. For example, more sophisticated pesticides, genetic modification and machinery to grow food at ever-greater scale.

It is an especially believable narrative because – broadly speaking – this what has delivered some level of food security to most people during the period of explosive population growth that started during the 20th century, and continues today.

But while marking a success at one level, there are serious downsides, not least seen in how modern farming is responsible for driving several worsening global ecological trends.

These include climate change caused by the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; the progressive pollution of ecosystems (especially aquatic and marine ones) with excess nitrogen and phosphorous; and the loss of biological diversity, caused by both of the above and habitat loss, mostly driven by conversion of more natural ecosystems to farmland.

Agriculture is also responsible for depleting resources that are vital for its own future – not least soils and freshwater.

That we cannot go on like this is not in doubt. The question is, will more technology present solutions that will actually work? The answer to that is an emphatic ‘yes!’ – although perhaps not the kind of technology many generally associate with farming policy.

A glimpse as to what technologies might work better in producing more food while protecting the natural systems we depend upon was glimpsed this week at the Slow Life Foundation‘s Slow Life Symposium taking place in the Maldives.

Digital technologies supporting India’s farmers

Rikin Gandhi is Chief Executive of an organization called Digital Green, and he presented to Symposium participants some of the methods being successfully deployed by his organization in dramatically increasing yields among small-scale farmers.

His basic idea is to exploit a particular fact of life that is seen right across the world. It stems from where most farmers get most of their new ideas from: namely other farmers.

Government training and information schemes can make an impact, so can advice from agrochemical companies (albeit biased at times), but by far the most convincing source of new ideas is other farmers.

Working with this reality Digital Green set out to improve yields through helping farmers make videos that would be shown to other farmers nearby.

Using off-the-shelf equipment including pocket video cameras and pico projectors, Digital Green assists farmers to generate content for use among tribal communities living in remote areas without electricity. (see photo)

Battery powered video and projection enables best practice to be shared even among illiterate groups where the written word is near to useless. Gandhi got results with better farming methods adopted more quickly and more cost-effectively than earlier attempts to do the same.

Indeed, Digital Green has demonstrated that for every dollar spent, the system persuaded seven times as many farmers to adopt new ideas as an existing official program of training and visits.

Twice the rice, half the water

Another measure of success is how many farmers have been empowered through new knowledge to the point where they are producing twice as much rice with half as much water – thereby helping to address the twin emerging challenges of food and water security, while keeping people on the land (and out of the fast expanding cities) by increasing their incomes.

And when farmers have more knowledge about soil health and the role of composts as at least a partial alternative to commercial fertilisers then opportunities are presented to cut costs while reducing environmental impacts.

Other technologies can complement this basic means of sharing ideas, including mobile phones. Although most farmers are still not yet connected in this way, the proportion that are is growing fast, in turn offering the prospect to lever further value from existing agricultural resources in terms of people and land through, for example, sharing of information about market conditions and weather forecasts.

There is of course a cautionary note to strike, as Gandhi observes: “During the Green Revolution era it was all about agricultural technology being transferred to farmers. That did boost yields but had issues coming with it.

“The same thing can be said about information technology. This is powerful but also needs to be supported through partnerships and working with social organisations. We need to think about the context for the technology, and the people using it, not just the technology.”

The new ‘intensification’: producing more, from less

Alongside a flipping of the narrative relating to agricultural technology is a change in tone regarding the very concept of intensification. For decades that idea has been associated with ever more chemical inputs, with all the attendant consequences as seen for example in resource depletion and greenhouse gas emissions.

Those close to the emerging challenge of how best to achieve food security while maintaining ecological integrity see a new definition here too.

‘Intensification’ is now regarded as empowering farmers to use their ingenuity and local resources more effectively, rather than being based on strategies to import energy intensive inputs.

David Monsma, Executive Director at the Aspen Institute‘s Energy and Environment Programme, emphasised that “Smallholder farmers remain the backbone of food supply systems in most low income and many middle income countries.”

Their “awareness of and access to agricultural technologies and techniques is often lacking”, he added, but that fact opens up a huge opportunity for sustainable growth in both food supply, and rural incomes:

“Training in production techniques and technologies that conserve soil and water, or that reduce waste and loss of crops, communications tools such as cellphones and videos and organizational innovations such as setting up market-oriented farmer based organisations, can lead toward more sustainable intensification while broadly increasing food security.”

The smart money is backing this new and more joined up farmer-focused approach, with big funders such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (also see here) and the Clinton Development Initiative ‘going local’ and backing strategies that help small actors do better.

Technologies for farmer empowerment

Among the approaches delivering results are those that improve storage and market access, thereby cutting food waste in the agricultural landscapes where food is grown.

Micro-finance and micro-insurance are proving vital facilities for many farmers in enabling them to make investments and to manage risk. Farmer empowerment via training is also increasingly seen as a vital plank for future food security.

Perhaps this shift of emphasis toward communications technologies and intensification based on farmer empowerment marks the opening of a new chapter in our multi-millennial efforts to ensure we have enough to eat.

It comes not a moment too soon. The days when technology could be thrown at the challenges linked with feeding ourselves and it assumed that the ecological damage was an acceptable price to pay for cheap food are over.

No longer is it feasible to trade one set of priorities at the expense of the others, for if nature doesn’t function neither will our food system. One vital strategy for navigating these tight straits is the empowerment of small scale farmers.

 

 

Tony Juniper is a campaigner, writer, sustainability advisor and leading British environmentalist. For more than 25 years he has worked for change toward a more sustainable society at local, national and international levels. His website is at tonyjuniper.com.

 

 




386927

A Solar Revolution Updated for 2026

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One of the very first big pieces of research that Forum for the Future conducted was for BP in the late 1990s, looking at the prospects for the growth of solar PV in the UK; BP had its own solar business in those days. Prospects were good, we argued, just depending on the speed with which costs in manufacturing PV could be reduced and average efficiencies in the solar cells themselves increased. I’m sorry to say that our report made little impact, and BP axed its solar business just as soon as it could.

Since then, as we all know, costs of solar PV have plummeted, primarily because of Chinese manufacturers driving them down. Efficiencies (in converting that solar radiation into electricity) have also improved, though much more slowly. More importantly, costs are continuing to come down by an astonishing 6–8% per annum. Most experts in the industry believe that this will continue for quite some time to come, as will be the case with the inverters and other bits of kit associated with any PV installation, be that roof-mounted, ground-mounted, embedded in building materials (roofing tiles, cladding, and so on), grid-connected or off-grid.

Solar energy brings instant benefits
So let’s cut to the quick here: the Solar Revolution that has been talked about for so long is with us here and now. It’s not ‘for the future’, or ‘just over the horizon’: it’s our reality today – which explains a new-found sense of excitement about the global implications of this technology-driven transition.

All sorts of mainstream organisation (such as the World Bank and the International Energy Agency, as well as various UN agencies) are now talking up the prospects for solar, especially for the hundreds of millions of people who are not connected to the grid. Policy think tanks are increasingly interested in modelling the potential impact of this transition on all sorts of bigger economic, social and cultural agendas. Could capitalism itself – eventually – be transformed?

What makes this so compelling is the universality of the benign impacts of mass solar roll-outs, both in the rich world and in developing and emerging countries. It’s impossible not to be moved by the instant, dramatic improvements in the lives of some of the world’s poorest people: light where there was once darkness; refrigerated vaccines where there was once death and disease; access to markets (via solar mobiles) where there was once ignorance and poverty.

Most governments just don’t get it
But it’s a big deal too in the rich world. I had a chance to see this at this year’s Large-Scale Solar Conference in the UK. From a standing start, 4,000MW of ground-mounted PV has been installed over the last couple of years, with the strong support of both farmers and local authorities – an 81% success rate on planning applications shows just how acceptable this particular form of renewables has become. And there’s every prospect of this growing to 20,000MW within a few years.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, as ever, it’s not quite as easy as that. The biggest threat to this unfolding revolution is ineffective, backward-looking and increasingly dysfunctional policymaking by governments. Most governments – even now – just don’t get it, and most politicians (particularly here in the UK) still see solar power as ‘a nice little niche’ to distract people’s attention from the still grim reality of their dependency on fossil fuels.

Fracking jeopardizes investment in renewables
That continuing collective idiocy has been compounded by the fracking fantasy that is now sweeping the world – even to the extent of some companies describing fracked gas as “renewables-lite”! There’s no doubt that, as a less carbon-intensive source of energy than both coal and oil, gas can help reduce overall greenhouse-gas emissions, especially where it helps to kill off coal – but, sadly, that’s not what’s happening.

More often than not, fracked gas comes on stream in addition to coal, not as an alternative to it. And that’s already jeopardising both the speed and the scale of new investments in renewables – at exactly the time where the rate of uptake is making even the most sceptical investor sit up and open up those fossilised brain circuits. I can pretty much guarantee that the following data points (from the USA) will be unknown to all but a tiny minority of Resurgence & Ecologist readers:

•    Wind and solar provided 80.9% of new installed US electricity-generating capacity for February 2014.
•    For the first two months of 2014, renewable energy (biomass, geothermal, solar, water and wind) accounted for 91.9% of the 568MW of new electricity-generating capacity installed.
•    Coal, oil and nuclear provided none, while natural gas and 1MW of ‘other’ provided the balance.
(My thanks to Ben Adler of Grist for directing my attention to those figures from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.)

Don’t panic – the transition to renewables will happen
So we shouldn’t panic. In the worst of all worlds, a short-lived, over-hyped fracking bubble will just slow the transition to solar and other renewables. That transition will still happen – though from the perspective of accelerating climate change, it is of course a big deal whether it happens in the next 5 years or the next 15 years. As costs fall and efficiencies rise, some of those much-touted laws of competitive markets will eventually kick in. It’s not necessarily governments, fixated as they still are on fossil fuels, that will call the shots. It’s more likely to be capital markets.

Subsidy-free solar will reshape the energy system
And there are all sorts of positive signals here. Back in May, Barclays downgraded the bond market for the whole electricity sector in the USA on the grounds that over the next few years all electric utilities will be threatened by “a confluence of declining cost trends in distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) power generation and residential-scale power storage”. Paul Barwell, the Chief Executive of the UK’s Solar Trade Association, said at the time: “In the USA, the penny has dropped. We are up for the challenge of ‘properly costed’ policy, based on fact, not emotion. The simple fact is that with stable, logical policies, solar should be competing with fossil fuels by the end of this decade. When it does, subsidy-free solar will fundamentally reshape the energy system.”

Paul is being appropriately conservative here. The truth is that solar PV is already competing with fossil fuels in many countries – especially when you take account of the insane subsidies that fossil fuels still receive. This all-important indicator continues to move in the right direction year on year.

Companies like BP once had a chance to be on the right side of this historic, destiny-driving divide. Unfortunately, BP made the wrong choice, and to all intents and purposes, it is now dead in the water.

And, frankly, as one amongst many who tried hard to point to the extra‑ordinary significance of that decision, all I can say is good riddance.

Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future. His latest book is The World We Made (Phaidon). www.forumforthefuture.org

 

 




383787

We must protect our seas! Updated for 2026

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I’ve just completed the first long-distance swim in the seven Seas of the ancient world. I’ve experienced some things I will never forget. And seen some things I wish I could erase from my memory, but which will haunt me for the rest of my days.

I will never forget the people I met along this journey, the literally hundreds of people from all walks of life who helped us and supported us and jumped in the sea to swim with us, just to be part of this mission, just for their love of the sea.

And then there are the things I would rather forget. Such as the sea floor under me as I swam the Aegean, which was covered with litter. I saw tyres and plastic bags, bottles, cans, shoes and clothing – but absolutely nothing that qualifies as ‘sea life’.

Turtles and jellyfish – but where were the sharks?

In the Arabian Sea I swam through vast shoals of turtles, which was spectacular. They do belong there. But so do many, many other fish species, and those were nowhere to be seen.

I never saw any fish bigger than the size of my hand, in any of the seven Seas. The larger ones had all been fished out.

The Black Sea was full of jellyfish. This is not a good thing, because they don’t belong there – they were brought in with the ballast on visiting ships and wrought havoc on an ecosystem that was already unbalanced.

In the entire four weeks I did not see one shark, anywhere.

As I was about to jump in the water for the Red Sea swim I asked the boat’s skipper whether I should keep a look out for sharks. He told me not to worry, because the sharks have all been fished out. That’s exactly what does worry me. A healthy ocean is an ocean with sharks.

Suddenly, the Red Sea came to life

But I did see something astonishing in the Red Sea. It was when I swam through a Marine Protected Area, and experienced a sea as it was meant to be: rich and colourful, teaming with abundant life.

And then, just two kilometres on, outside of the protected area, the picture changed again. There was no coral and there were no fish. It looked like an underwater desert.

If I had needed more proof that Marine Protected Areas really work, that was it. Everything I knew about how MPAs allow marine life to recover, how they protect and restore fish stocks, how they provide income-generating livelihoods for local people, how they boost ecotourism and ensure long-term sustainability, was all there in front of me.

Many of the people I met along the way have experienced it too. They have seen their seas changing. They know that there is a serious problem. And they have seen that the problem is reversible, IF we take urgent action and create Marine Protected Areas.

Thinking ahead

There’s a reason we ended our final North Sea swim at the Thames Barrier. It’s a highly symbolic example of foresight and visionary design. When it was built 30 years ago, its engineers had no idea how crucial it would be. They thought it would be used two or three times a year.

But this last winter it was used 48 times. Where would London be today without the Thames Barrier? In a word: underwater.

I don’t want to imagine what the world will be like in 30 years time if we don’t protect our marine resources today.

The world’s waters are changing. The seas and oceans are in a state of crisis. And we rely on these seas and oceans – all of us on this planet, wherever we live – for our very livelihood.

I am well aware that the world is caught up in a number of serious global political and humanitarian crises right now. It is certainly not my intention to trivialise any of these. But in focusing solely on the current state of global hyper-conflict, we run the risk of losing sight of something that is going to affect our children and grandchildren.

Protecting resources fosters peace

The biggest risk the world faces right now is what is being done to the environment, and a large part of that is what’s happening in our seas.

When Desmond Tutu came to wish me well at the outset of this expedition, he reminded me of something fundamental. He reminded me that so many of the world’s conflicts are over resources. When we fail to protect our resources, we set the stage for conflict. But when we protect our resources, we foster peace.

I dream of a peaceful world of well-managed Marine Protected Areas, protecting our coastlines and extending across our high seas. Of abundant oceans teeming with fish, big and small, with turtles and whales and sea-birds. Oceans filled with sharks.

Now is the time to make that dream happen. To reverse the rampant devastation of our marine resources, to provide them safe havens that allow them to regroup and recover.  Too many species are dying out, hunted to near extinction, slipping through our fingers, like sand.

Let’s stop fighting. And start giving our seas a fighting chance.

 

 

Lewis Pugh is an ocean advocate and a pioneer swimmer. In 2010 he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and in 2013 he was appointed Patron of the Oceans by the United Nations Environment Programme. http://lewispugh.com

This article was originally published on Lewis’s blog.

 




383435

Bombs Ahoy! Why the UK is desperate for nuclear power Updated for 2026

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The UK’s proposed support package for the Hinkley C nuclear power station in Somerset is gigantic. Estimates of its cost range up to £100 billion or so.

Of course it’s hard to put a precise figure on it, as the subsidies take so many forms, and many of the commitments represent a guarantee against unknown and unquantifiable eventualities. But to summarise they include:

  • a generous guaranteed purchase price for its electricity, at £92.50 per megawatt-hour – about double the current going rate – also inflation adjusted from now, and lasting for 35 years after it begins to produce power;
  • £10 billion of Treasury guarantees on its construction cost;
  • a guaranteed maximum exposure to the operator, EDF, on its waste management and decomissioning costs;
  • the limitation of EDF’s liabilities in the event of any major nuclear accident at €700 million, when nuclear accidents can impose costs in the $100s of billions;
  • a variety of pump priming exercises to lubricate the nuclear supply chain, and direct support to Sheffield Forgemasters, a manufacturer of nuclear reactor vessels;
  • a panoply of expenditures for nuclear R&D by way of research councils.

And all this just for a single 2.4GW power station that would generate just 20TWh of our 350TWh per year electricity usage.

On the face of it, it’s madness!

The government is busy hacking back at support for renewables such as onshore wind and solar, by a variety of means (from discrimination via the planning system to restrictive spending caps) – just as these technologies approach cost parity with fossil fuel generation.

The government claims, in its submissions to the EU, that the aims of its nuclear power subsidies are to decarbonise the UK’s electricity, while diversity and security of supply.

But just to look at decarbonisation, the electricity price support alone offered to Hinkley C is worth some €250 per tonne of CO2 – while the price of carbon under the EU’s Emissions Trading System is around €5.

What this tells us us that there are existing decarbonisation opportunities there for the taking at €5 per tonne of CO2 – so exactly why would anyone want to invest £100 billion of our money in decarbonising at a price 50 times higher?

The government’s insistence of pushing forward with nuclear power looks insane. But there is another explanation: that they actually have a rational motive – just one they’re keeping quiet about.

What else could it be?

My own considered view is that the UK’s civil nuclear programme is almost entirely motivated by the UK’s wish to maintain its status as a nuclear WMD state.

It is a simple fact that all the ‘permanent five’ members of the Un Security Council are nuclear WMD states: the USA, Russia, China, France and the UK. This status is not one that the UK is about to give up lightly.

But why is a civil nuclear programme so important to having a nuclear WMD programme? Here are some reasons:

  • to maintain nuclear WMD we need a substantial pool of nuclear physicists, engineers, University departments, professors, graduates, technicians, etc;
  • it would be very expensive to sustain this whole nuclear establishment purely for the sake of a WMD programme – far better to spread out the costs with a civil nuclear programme which ends up bearing most of the costs;
  • nuclear science and engineering would offer unattractive and insecure career prospects if tied exclusively to employment on nuclear WMD;
  • it’s important to be able to spread out the costs of the entire nuclear fuel cycle from uranium sourcing and enrichment through to disposal of wastes so that a nuclear WMD programme can piggy-back at low cost on a much larger civil nuclear programme.

The Burning Answer

Reading Keith Barnham’s excellent ‘The Burning Answer‘ I was pleased to find that he reached precisely the same view (see page 92). First, he documents how civil nuclear reactors were deliberately used to provide plutonium for military use right from the outset of nuclear power in the UK.

But now it’s no longer plutonium we need – we have more than enough of that, with our 100 tonne plutonium stockpile. It is, rather, a supply of tritium that’s needed. Produced as a by-product of operating nuclear power plants, it’s essential to maintain supplies as it decays away at about 5% per year.

Tritium is used as a secondary source of neutrons to ignite nuclear fission devices, so boosting the power of a conventional fission bomb by magnifying the early neutron flux and achieving a greater burnup of the uranium or plutonium before the whole assembly is blasted to smithereens.

Additionally tritium is a key ingredient of H-bombs which release colossal volumes of energy by the nuclear fusion of this unstable isotope of hydrogen.

The UK’s military also needs high-enriched uranium as fuel for both Trident and hunter-killer nuclear submarines. The former are the deployment platform for the UK’s nuclear missiles.

Currently, writes Barnham, the UK gets its high enriched uranium from the USA. But this may not always be the case – so it’s important for us to have our own capability to enrich uranium for civil reactor fuel, and then we can use the same equipment and / or engineering expertise to produce high-enriched uranium for nuclear submarines.

Nuclear power and nuclear WMD – two sides of one coin

So what are the implications for campaigners opposting Hinkley C and other new nuclear power plants? First it means that there is little point in trying to change the minds of key decision makers in the UK government and opposition parties about nuclear power.

They already know as well as you do that it’s a disastrous option for power generation. However they will continue to insist how utterly necessary it is for the UK to have nuclear power at more or less any cost, trotting out one absurd and unconvincing reason after another as they have been doing for years.

The same goes, incidentally, for nuclear power in the USA, China, Russia, France and other WMD countries. In all of them civil nuclear power provides the ‘nuclear sea’ in which the ‘WMD fish’ may swim.

However it is worth exposing politicians’ lies for what they are – and making it absolutely clear, on every possible occasion, that the only reason they really want nuclear power is to maintain the UK’s status as a nuclear WMD state.

After all, the fact they are so assiduous in concealing this truth shows it’s one that’s seriously damaging to the case they’re making.

While you’re about it, be sure to explain the nature of the relationship and how the government’s aim is a sneaky and dishonest one – to force the UK’s energy users to pay for the country’s WMD programme in our power bills.

Re-energising campaigns

It also means that the two main anti-nuclear campaigning factions – anti-nuclear power and anti-nuclear WMD – are really a single movement with a common aim. Without either one, the other will become significantly weaker, unviable, and ultimately die.

And this knowledge arms us with an important new argument against the so called ‘nuclear greens’ such as George Monbiot, Mark Lynas, Bryony Worthington and Stephen Tindale. They may sincerely believe that nuclear power is the answer to climate change – however hard it may be to understand quite how they reached that counter-factual conclusion.

But point out to them that by supporting nuclear power they are actually backing nuclear weapons – and in the process a discredited, outdated, genocidal world order based on the capacity of nuclear WMD states to destroy the world – and their proposition rapidly gets a whole lot less sustainable.

The other thing we must do is to give our relentless support to renewable energy, which has emerged as nuclear power’s greatest and deadliest enemy as it progressively undermines its madhouse economics.

Every solar panel or wind turbine is a direct attack on nuclear power – and on the nuclear weapons it exists to support.

 


Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

Keith Barnham is Emeritus Professor of Physics at Imperial College London, and author of The Burning Answer: a User’s Guide to the Solar Revolution, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 01373-463-822.

 




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