Britain’s wind energy industry increased its call for state aid yesterday, after new figures showed that investment in the sector has collapsed by nearly 80 per cent.
The amount invested in British renewable energy schemes, including wind, solar and wave power, fell from £377 million during the first three months of last year to £79 million during the same period this year, according to figures from New Energy Finance, a research group that monitors industry trends. The figures have raised fresh questions over the Government’s ability to fulfil its pledge to slash Britain’s carbon emissions and produce more than one third of the country’s electricity from green energy by 2020.
Adam Bruce, the chairman of the British Wind Energy Association, (BWEA), said that the figures reflected the need for the Chancellor to introduce new measures to support the industry, which is struggling to secure finance because of the credit crunch. It is also suffering from the weak pound, which has driven up the cost of turbines and other equipment — most of which is produced outside Britain — and the falling price of coal, oil and gas.
There were signs yesterday that the Government was considering the inclusion of measures in the April 22 Budget to prevent the cancellation of large projects such as the London Array, a £3 billion scheme to build the world’s largest offshore wind farm in the Thames Estuary, which Gordon Brown has backed.
Its developers are already seeking a bailout from the European Investment Bank to allow the scheme to proceed. Its 341 turbines would produce enough electricity for 750,000 homes.
Paul Golby, chief executive of E.ON UK, one of Britain’s “big six” energy companies and one of the project’s backers, told The Times he now thought that it would be impossible for the country to meet its target of generating 15 per cent of total energy from renewable sources by 2020, which amounts to 35 per cent of its electricity. The target is a key part of Britain’s promise to cut its carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.
Lord Smith of Finsbury, chairman of the Environment Agency, said that it was crucial to Britain’s future in the renewables sector that more funding, including public funding, was made available. “We’ve already seen some companies pull out. We will see more of these things happening if we don’t improve the funding,” he said. “Over the past 10-15 years we have tended to come too late to the table, as a country, when it comes to the development of renewable energy.”
Although investment in renewable energy has been falling everywhere in the recession, the British decline was unusually steep. Globally, investment fell by 53 per cent to £9.1 billion in the first three months of this year, compared with £19.3 billion at the start of last year, according to New Energy Finance. Delays securing planning consent and access to the national grid have compounded the problems.
The news comes as the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) prepares to publish a report next week that will warn that Britain must act now if it is to take the opportunity to build a thriving offshore wind energy industry that could employ as many as 70,000 people. The institute said that only 700 people were employed in the sector at present.
The BWEA is calling on Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, to introduce incentives and grants to support the industry in the Budget. It also urged the Government to accelerate planning decisions and reduce the cost to developers of hooking up schemes to the national grid.
Some companies, such as BP and Shell, have already left the wind industry, while others, such as Iberdrola Renovables, the world’s largest wind-farm operator, have cut their investment programmes.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change said that Mike O’Brien, the Energy Minister, was exploring options to help the industry.
Green energy feels the chill in harsh economic climate
Ice loss sparks new climate change fears
Evidence of ice loss from both poles this week has sparked fresh fears that global warming is progressing faster than scientists had predicted.
Arctic ice has thinned dramatically, as well as shrinking in area, according to US research. Thin seasonal ice, which melts and refreezes each year, now makes up about 70 per cent of the Arctic winter ice, up from about 40 to 50 per cent in the 1980s and 1990s, leaving far less of the older, thicker ice that is harder to melt.
In the Antarctic, an ice bridge connecting an island to the Wilkins ice shelf – a sheet of ice about the size of Northern Ireland – shattered as scientists monitored it through satellite observations.
“What we’re seeing is very dramatic,” said Andrew Fleming, remote sensing manager at the British Antarctic Survey. “It’s very worrying.”
Scientists believed the effects were linked to the “very strong warming” at the poles, he said. The Antarctic peninsula has warmed by more than 3ºC in the past 50 years. “That’s a staggering rate of warming, and it’s still going up,” said Mr Fleming.
Ice shelves take centuries to form, but when they start to break up it can be sudden. The bridge at the Wilkins ice shelf was a 40km strand of ice, at its narrowest point a few hundred metres wide, connecting the shelf to Charcot and Latady islands.
Last year, scientists from the BAS landed on it in an aircraft to examine the ice. They had known for some time it was under strain, but it remained intact until at the end of last week satellite images showed new cracks appearing.
The next day, the ice sheet had “exploded from the centre outwards”, said Mr Fleming, who was monitoring the break-up through satellite images from the European Space Agency.
“It was very fast, very dramatic,” he said. “It’s now completely shattered.”
The break-up of the ice bridge alarms scientists because it could accelerate the break-up of the rest of the Wilkins shelf. This was at least the 10th shelf to start disintegrating quickly in recent years, said Mr Fleming, and several more were in danger.
Rapid melting of polar sea ice is of particular concern for two reasons: disappearing ice leaves areas of open sea that are dark, and – unlike the reflective ice – absorb the sun’s heat, accelerating the warming process; the break-up of ice shelves exposes glaciers that then begin to move faster to the sea.
The Arctic and some of the Antarctic float on the sea. Ice takes up more space than water, and when this floating ice melts, it does not directly raise sea levels, in the same way that the melting of ice cubes in a full glass of water would not cause the glass to overflow.
However, the glaciers of the Antarctic peninsula are on land, so when they tumble into the sea, they contribute directly to rising sea levels. In the north, the Greenland ice sheet is also on land, and its glaciers are flowing faster to the sea.
If Greenland’s ice sheet melted, it would raise sea levels by seven metres, and if both the east and west Antarctic ice sheets went, the figure would be 10 times higher. That would take hundreds of years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Long before the land ice disappeared, however, sea levels would rise significantly – a 1 per cent loss of the Antarctic land ice would probably raise levels by 65cm, estimates the Norwegian Polar Institute.
Two conferences this week were addressing the problems of the poles and climate change. At a joint meeting of the Antarctic Treaty and the Arctic Council in the US, Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, said the news of the Wilkins ice shelf showed “global warming has already had enormous effects on our planet, and we have no time to lose in tackling this crisis”.
In Bonn, governments met for the first meeting to thrash out the details of a successor to the Kyoto protocol on climate change.
One factor that could help to slow the melting of the Arctic, but which has not yet received serious consideration internationally, would be to cut the amount of “black carbon” – soot – that we spew into the air. Black carbon darkens ice when it falls, causing it to absorb more heat, and may be responsible for half of the warming effect in the Arctic, according to research. Cutting soot would not only remove large amounts of air pollution, but, say some scientists, could be quicker and easier than cutting carbon dioxide emissions.
