Analysis: The new energy Green Paper points out the dangers for the future of our energy supplies, writes Dick Ahlstrom
Towards a Sustainable Energy Future for Ireland is long on aspiration but short on answers to our complex energy future.
One of the best things it does is highlight the difficulties we face given our near complete dependence on imported energy supplies. It provides only limited consolation, however, in its suggestions on how we might overcome these problems.
It rightly describes the "three pillars" of energy policy as security of supply, environmental sustainability and energy market competitiveness. It also proposes ways of ensuring these pillars do not come crashing down upon our heads, setting a time horizon no further away than 2020.
Unfortunately, too many of the proposals are based on unproven technologies and aspirational targets.
For example, it correctly points to fuel diversity as a means of ensuring security of supply, highlighting that without diversity more than 70 per cent of our electricity will come from gas-fired power stations by 2020. "That is clearly not sustainable," Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources Noel Dempsey said at the launch.
It expects that development of renewable sources such as wind and biomass will help get us away from this dependency, but this is predicated on special energy price supports for renewables paid for with State money. The Minister says that projects initiated under this scheme will add another 600 megawatts of power to the grid, but acknowledges that 98 per cent of this will be unreliable wind power.
He would hope to have 30 per cent of all energy demand coming from renewables by 2020, but aside from wind this would have to come from tidal and wave power and from biomass.
Another hoped for technology is new "clean coal" power plants. There are massive reserves of easy-to-reach coal in politically stable countries, but coal is a notoriously dirty fuel, belching out carbon, nitrogen compounds and sulphur.
Promoters of clean coal technology expect all of these difficulties to be overcome but this has yet to be delivered and it is not clear when it might be made to work.These technologies are in their infancy and have yet to prove they are economically viable. Their introduction solely as an alternative to gas could drive up energy costs and raise prices for consumers.
Transport fuels are another problem area for the Green Paper. It promotes biofuels as a clean alternative fuel that can reduce the polluting effects of petrol and diesel. But the Minister said just 5.5 per cent of transport energy would come from biofuels by 2010. This will have little impact on the strictures we face under the Kyoto agreements.
The Green Paper also pushes the interconnector agenda and suggests we could have 1,000 megawatts available via north-south and east-west connections by 2012. It also suggests that we could have an interconnector to the Continental grid by 2020.
These would greatly improve our energy picture and can be achieved in a relatively short period. They would provide substantial base load electricity that could act as a back-up to less reliable wind energy and wave/tidal, if indeed these technologies can be made to produce electricity at a reasonable cost.
The Green Paper and the Minister also point to a substantial 20 per cent savings on energy usage possible via energy efficiency measures. Mr Dempsey launched the Government's "Power of One" campaign last week, a two-year initiative to cut energy waste. This too is aspirational however because it is predicated on changing people's behaviour.
The Green Paper and the Minister put a major emphasis on energy market competitiveness as a way to keep adequate supplies in place and prices down. The goal here is to tempt new entrants in to the power market by guaranteeing energy tariffs, making lands including closed ESB sites available for new generating stations, and tinkering with fuel excise duty to encourage the production of biofuels.
Companies will only enter the market if they can see clearly defined costs with a high expectation of profits. The hope is that regulatory controls will be modified to make energy production pay and so bring in more competition for the ESB and lower prices. This simple formula doesn't always work, however and players on the market are always inclined to push additional costs on to the consumer.
It is worth pointing out however that despite the Green Paper's limitations, it remains a document for discussion. A two-month period of debate and consultation now begins, the Minister said.