[Committee] Green Taxes; Fossil Fuels or Electricity?

[Steve Stretton]

Hello Gunnar,

It's fortunate that now I believe all three main British political  
parties and the greens back some form of carbon taxation. I believe  
this will ensure we can move through quite quickly on green taxes. It  
is important to realise that it is not the cure-all though since there  
will be some who's behaviour isn't affected even by high taxation. I  
have put some technical ideas below on 'escaping fossil fuel  
technological lock-in'. Hopefully I'll see you tonight and you will  
have specific questions.

Best wishes,
Steve


FRAMING THE DEBATE - FOSSIL FUELS OR ELECTRICITY?
In a situation where over 80% of our energy is found using fossil  
fuels, the framing of the Energy debate is not so much renewables  
versus nuclear rather it is: renewable energy versus fossil fuels and  
nuclear energy versus fossil fuels.

I would note that electricity is the major widespread and clean energy  
vector. Hydrogen is a potential for the future but is as yet unproven.

Renewables work best when combined with storage technologies (e.g.  
electric car batteries), otherwise the grid/individual usage would not  
be able to take the load. We can convert to sufficient storage  
technologies, and in doing so we will be able use a clean energy  
vector for most of our use. But it is thermodynamically inefficient to  
use storage technologies when the first source is fossil fuels.

Perhaps combined heat and storage and heat pumps  (rather than CHP,  
which uses scarce, imported gas) may be the way to go?

Anyway, we will need sufficient energy, even with reductions. David  
Mackay's talk last week was on the physical capacity of renewable  
energy (ignoring economics).