Eco Bollocks Award: Heat and Energy Strategy

Another consultation has landed on our desks from the government. This is the long promised one about the existing stock, called the Heat and Energy Saving Strategy Consultation. It’s a stinker. It’s so awful that I am awarding it an Eco Bollocks award. The only other document to get the award was Ken Livingstone’s London Climate Change Action Plan (nearly two years ago) and I have to say this is worse, much worse. Here’s why.

Those of you familiar with these government consultation exercises will immediately feel at home here. For a start, it’s much too long, weighing in at 144 pages and asking no less than 29 questions. The idea being that these questions will prompt you to respond to the matters in the text. Amazingly, six of these questions ask for supporting evidence, just as they might if you were doing an A level. For example:

Q20: Besides removing the threshold for consequential
improvements, which will be considered in the consultation
on changes to the Buildings Regulation in 2009, are there any
other options for wider building regulation that you would
like to see considered in the longer term? Please support
your answer with evidence for the effectiveness of your
suggestions.

Would Wikipedia do? Or would you lose marks?

The fact that they are asking for citations is a major clue to what this is all about. They are looking for expert witnesses who will be able to finesse what is already there. They don’t want Joe Public just chiming in with his sixpence worth, they want serious professionals who live and breathe district heating and energy rating schemes. But this will necessarily include many professionals who make their living by promoting district heating or energy ratings. The whole exercise is thus coded so that only those with a vested interest can make sense of it, or will bother to answer the questions.

Now that would be OK if this was a well balanced and thought provoking document. Which it isn’t. It lurches from one assumption to another, and nowhere is there an analysis of just how much carbon is going to be saved by the different measures. Nor, crucially, how much will be met by energy saving measures, and how much by creating renewable energy sources.

That of course is the $64,000 question that no one can yet answer.

To be fair to this document, it does ask the question once, in a backhand sort of way:

Q26: As electricity generation overall becomes much less carbon
intensive than today, the advantages of CHP powered by fossil fuel in reducing carbon emissions will diminish, although it will continue to be a cost-effective energy efficiency measure. When do you think CHP powered by fossil fuels will no longer help to reduce emissions because the alternatives are less carbon intensive?

The background is examined in just one paragraph. The Committee on Climate Change has suggested that, once the carbon intensity of electricity falls below 200gCO2/kWh, it will be more carbon efficient to use electricity to produce hot water and space heating, rather than by through a condensing boiler, even when using established technologies such as electric bar or storage heaters.

It really does all boil down to this, the carbon intensity of electricity. Get this down to below 50gCO2/kWh and we are saved. Leave it up where it is now — around 430gCO2/kWh and we are doomed. That is the challenge. The lower (and quicker) we reduce this figure, the less we have to worry about energy saving measures. For instance, there is no point spending (yet more) billions on building district heating systems if, by 2025, they are rendered redundant because the carbon intensity of grid electricity has fallen below the level which makes sense for fossil-fuel based district heating.

The problem is that all of us are hamstrung by this dilemma. If we want to keep society running smoothly and we want our great grandchildren to go on enjoying a reasonable standard of living, then we have to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. But does that mean we have to use less energy or might we find ways of making energy without producing CO2? Or a bit of both?

No one knows the answer to this conundrum. It’s like trying to predict where the FTSE 100 or house prices will be in 2025. It’s all speculation.

This consultation document doesn’t even address this dilemma. And, unlike Livingstone’s plan for London, it doesn’t even place any figures into the mix. It’s an over lengthy Word document when what is needed is an Excel spreadsheet.

As such, it goes into far too much detail about issues the government frankly shouldn’t even be concerned with like CHP focus group websites and Heat Market Forums. It’s a symptom of this government’s desire to micro-manage, when it’s role ought to be setting broad frameworks.

In particular, the government should be busy setting new tax signals with the aim of redesigning our energy usage. There are a number of very obvious steps it could take, similar to those seen with vehicle taxation, which would reward people who green their buildings and penalise those who don’t. A re-engineered tax system, based on carbon emissions, wouldn’t happen overnight, but could be introduced over a period of time, and related to how quickly or slowly we were simultaneously managing to green our electricity supply. What’s desperately needed is Treasury involvement with this process, but it’s just not there. Which suggests to me that, once again, that the real economic masters of the universe are still only paying lip service to the problem. They are still desperately pursuing that currently elusive goal of economic growth, which is precisely what has caused all our climate problems in the first place. Until the Treasury is completely on board, consultations like this will never be more than green window dressing.

By the way, it’s interesting to compare this document with the one written last year by Gavin Killip for the FMB, Building a Greener Britain. Killip’s is a far better read: his 18 policy recommendations (summarised in one page, bless him) make far more sense than anything in this consultation document. What’s more you can read it and feel hopeful. In contrast, wading through the Heat and Energy Strategy fills you with gloom. And a sense of foreboding.

Maybe it’s the pictures of Ed Milliband, Hazel Blears and Margaret Beckett in the Foreword, each with that “Trust Us, We Know What We Are Doing” expression on their faces. That’s enough to give anyone the creeps.