Energy policy needs to tackle hard questions

Business Opinion: Anyone who watches The Simpsons on a regular basis will be familiar with the constant praise Homer lavishes upon nuclear energy from his vantage point in a control room at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. In one scene he shouts out: "And Lord, we are especially thankful for nuclear power, the cleanest, safest energy source there is. Except for solar, which is just a pipe dream."

The plant poor old Homer works in is a disaster. The creators of the animated series play heavily on the poor safety record of the nuclear industry. In various episodes luminous rats are seen running around the bowels of the building, pipes leak radioactive waste, waste is disposed of in a playground, plutonium is used as a paperweight and in the opening credits a bar of some radioactive substance is trapped in Homer's overalls and later disposed of in the street.

The humour plays to the prejudices of most Irish people too. Nuclear energy here is deeply unpopular and considering our proximity to Sellafield likely to remain so. Politicians queue up to proclaim their anti-nuclear credentials and to highlight the problems of storing nuclear waste and decommissioning plants.

It's not even simply a case of one party, at a particular time, being anti-nuclear. A section of the Electricity Regulation Act 1999 specifically precludes the use of nuclear fission for the generation of electricity in the Republic and only the Oireachtas has the power to change that situation.

All of this is very laudable, but there is a sense that our aversion to nuclear energy is masking a deeper policy vacuum concerning our national energy requirements. It is in many ways easy to be anti-nuclear, it does not require too much complex thinking.

While the opposition to nuclear power is more than reasonable, we have done little as an economy over recent years to develop alternative forms of thinking. We have been content to simply mouth platitudes about how dangerous nuclear power is, without articulating any greater vision about how we plan to deal with our own dependence on oil, gas and coal, most of it imported.

This dependence is staggering, particularly on the oil front. The Republic is reckoned to be the third most oil-dependent economy in the EU. We are consuming over nine millions tonnes of the stuff every year.

Even though we have become fossil fuel junkies, we have decided not to face up to the painful choices that arise from this addiction. We need a developed energy policy. At present the economy is operating based on a few wafer thin assumptions - nuclear bad, green good, petrol bad.

An energy policy which knits together what various departments and agencies are doing is what is needed. Noel Dempsey, the Minister for Natural Resources, is working on an Energy Green Paper at present, but one wonders why successive Ministers before him never got around to publishing one?

If the new energy policy is to get beyond the usual platitudes, it has a range of more pragmatic questions to grapple with. One of these is obviously the Corrib gas field in Co Mayo. When future fields develop, should our policy be that the resulting gas be processed off-shore or on-shore for instance?

There is another question nobody has so far satisfactorily answered and that is the core economic problem in the area of renewables. The chief drawback of renewables is their cost compared with conventional energy sources. The cost of generating electricity from wind turbines is approximately five cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), for example. Solar or wave power is even worse, costing at least 18 or 20 cents per kWh. The cost of electricity from conventional sources, comes in at between three and five cents per kWh.

Clearly this gap can be bridged. Rising oil prices will probably help, but the other way to bridge that gap is by either assisting renewables via subsidies, or taxing or penalising more expensive polluting forms of energy.

But our record in this area is mixed - at best.

Two years ago the Government decided a carbon tax was not acceptable and the "polluter pays" principle would only stretch so far. Since then the ESRI has tried to re-open the debate, but nobody in political circles, apart from the Greens, has shown much interest.

As for assisting the renewable sector to bridge the "cost gap", work has been done on this and a new regime has been put in place. Mr Dempsey hopes renewables will make up 15 per cent of total electricity output by 2010.

However, the connection of wind farms to the national grid remains backed up and the EU is investigating whether the whole regime may be discriminatory in favour of fossil fuel plants.

With little progress being made on cutting our oil, coal and gas dependency (in fact Sustainable Energy Ireland figures suggest our dependency is set to grow massively), attention has switched to the much maligned motorist. Maybe the motorist could use less energy, or at least less polluting energy.

The motorist and lorry driver is expected to behave better by using ethanol in his fuel tank rather than petrol. All very worthy stuff again. But what is not often said is that you need four gallons of most typical ethanol products (E85 for instance) to travel the same distance as you get with three gallons of petrol. Again there is a cost gap.

There is also the wider issue of just how much benefit will flow from ethanol in environmental terms? According to a study by the University of California, Berkeley, published in Science magazine, today's ethanol production processes cut overall greenhouse gas emissions by only about 13 per cent compared with petrol.

These sort of questions and dilemmas will hopefully be answered in the forthcoming policy paper. It is no longer sufficient to simply say no to a carbon tax, no to nuclear power, no to petrol, and say "let us come back to you" when faced by more difficult and far reaching problems.