Wylfa nuclear newbuild favoured by Welsh Government; EDF abandons Heysham

Cardiff has announced that it expects to power Wales' future with a diverse range of low carbon technologies, including nuclear power, just as news emerges that EDF has cancelled plans for a new nuclear power station at Heysham, Lancashire.

The French company has annulled an agreement with the National Grid to set up any new connection to the grid from Heysham; all its plans for new stations are now focused on their sites at Sizewell and Hinkley Point.

Meanwhile, Wales expects to deploy new nuclear power at Wylfa on Anglesey as part of its transition to a low carbon economy, according to its new energy strategy, Energy Wales published yesterday.

This key policy document sees gas as the key transitional fuel because greenhouse gas emissions from it are "less than that of coal subject to the method of extraction". In the long term, it foresees the addition of carbon capture and storage to gas plants.

The document focuses almost exclusively on electricity, and to a lesser extent waste, almost neglecting the areas of heat and transport. It does share the UK Government's opinion that more electricity will be used in the future for transport and heating.

Its most controversial aspect is its support for nuclear power, the first time that the Welsh Government has been so unequivocal on this point.

Nuclear Wales

Energy Wales says the Cardiff Government supports the development of a new nuclear power station on Anglesey, which is being taken forward by Horizon Nuclear Power, a joint venture between E.ON UK and RWE npower.

The document uncritically repeats Horizon's claims that building a new nuclear power station at Wylfa B would "create around 800 permanent jobs and up to 5,000 during construction".

However, Horizon has not yet appointed the contractor to build a reactor on the site.

Both Areva and Westinghouse are in the running for this job. Westinghouse has warned that if Areva wins the contract it may call for an investigation under competition law because it would mean that Areva would secure the market monopoly, being already selected to build reactors for EDF Energy.

In addition, Westinghouse, owned by Toshiba of Japan, claims this would have a detrimental effect on jobs in Wales.

"It will have a permanent and significantly negative impact on the UK nuclear industry, jobs, manufacturing skills, supply chains and SMEs. Westinghouse have pledged to 'buy where they build' and source 70% UK content, Areva have existing supply chains in France and their UK commitment would be significantly less," says a legal document prepared on its behalf.

“There are undoubtedly risks associated with nuclear power but the risks posed by climate change are now so serious that we cannot dispense with a key proven low-carbon technology,” says the Energy Wales report.

This commitment was immediately criticised by Friends of the Earth Cymru, which said that it was the first time the Welsh Government had supported nuclear power in full.

"To believe that nuclear power can help build a prosperous Wales is misguided – renewable energy provides far more jobs than nuclear power per unit of energy generated,” said Gareth Clubb, its director.

Anglesey was the site over the weekend of a protest to mark the first anniversary of the Fukushima disaster in Japan by a group called People Against Wylfa B (Pawb).

But the energy document and support for nuclear power has won support from Plaid Cymru leadership contender Dafydd Ellis-Thomas and William Powell, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for Environment and Sustainable Development, who said the party accepted that non-renewables would continue to play an important role in Wales’ energy mix.

The international engineering and project management company AMEC has today been appointed by the Isle of Anglesey County Council as chief consultant for the Energy Island Programme, in a four-year contract with an unspecified value.

It will provide the Council with capacity and expertise in areas such as planning policy and development management, environmental impact assessment, consultation, Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC) process and procedure as well as socio-economic regeneration aspects. The appointment recognises AMEC’s environmental, planning and engineering strengths in renewables and in the nuclear sector.

It is anticipated the programme could contribute nearly ￡2.5 billion to Anglesey and the North Wales economy over the next 15 years.

Renewables and energy efficiency

Energy Wales also sees a role for every other kind of renewable energy including the introduction of renewable bio-methane into the gas supply from anaerobic digestion, as well as for greater end use and conversion efficiency in space and water heating to reduce overall demand.

But little mention is made of Wales' vast resources of forestry timber for biomass generation of heat in the context of community heat and power generation.

The policy document vows to "relentlessly pursue energy efficiency so that we do more with less", but also exploit the principality's huge resources for marine and offshore wind power.

The Welsh Government is developing a Wales Infrastructure Investment Plan in which it will set out the strategic priorities for investment of what it sees as around ￡50 billion-worth of necessary low carbon electricity projects by 2025.

It expresses frustration that whereas some aspects of its legislature are devolved, such as planning, responsibility for large-scale energy development (above 50MW onshore and 1MW offshore) as well as the electricity transmission network that connects them, lies not with Wales but the UK Government.

It has commissioned Hyder to review current energy consenting systems, and its report is expected in the summer. Any necessary legislative changes will be fed into the Planning White Paper and subsequent Planning Bill. In the meantime it will continue to press for greater devolution of energy consenting powers.

Gerry Jewson, the chief executive of onshore wind energy firm West Coast Energy, said that the report showed that the Government "has listened to the representations of all stakeholders in Wales’ renewable future and has a real understanding of the issues" and called on "Cardiff to deliver action, not just aspiration".

He said that "specific and unambiguous commitments to targets for renewable technologies will be essential to focus the minds of planners and developers alike and catalyse the industry otherwise this good intent could be lost."

Other assets

Wales holds several major assets which are essential to the entire UK economy, such as the two LNG terminals at Milford Haven which are linked by a controversial pipeline to England.

It also holds deep sea ports which are potentially useful for establishing offshore energy infrastructure.

Although Energy Wales says that we "believe the development of the grid in Wales can and should be carried out in a way that is sensitive to its impact on our natural environment," no direct reference is made to the prospect of burying grid connection cables from onshore wind farms, a highly sensitive subject in Wales.

While the administration is opening its doors to developers to take advantage of a skilled workforce already with a tradition of the steel and coal industry, it expects developers to return the benefits of the investment to communities in Wales in the form of jobs, training and a share of the returns.

It sees a particular advantage in the fact that it can draw match funding from Brussels, such as through the European Regional Development Fund.

It points to its 'arbed' program and support the Anglesey Energy Island programme as examples of successful pilot projects, and sees that nuclear power on Anglesey as well as marine, solar, biomass, hydro and others can all play a part.

Launching ‘Energy Wales: A Low Carbon Transition’, the First Minister Carwyn Jones, said “Last year the renewable and low carbon sectors supported 29,000 jobs in Wales.

"I want to see these figures increase and see Wales securing the highest possible number of the 250,000 additional jobs predicted for the energy sector in the UK in the coming years."

Although renewable energy supplies only a little over 5% of Wales' electricity, 62% of this comes from wind and solar with a further 25% coming from thermal renewable generation and 13% from hydro generation.

Existing windfarms have a capacity of 562 MW, which will more than double next year when Gwynt y Môr offshore windfarm comes onstream to join a further 263MW from onshore developments.

On energy efficiency, Wales already has a comprehensive supply-chain, from manufacturing to installation, within its boundaries.

Insulation measures and micro-generation technologies are made in Wales by businesses including Rockwool, Knauf, Kingspan, and Sharp.

Wales' new solar, heat pump, building tech centre

A £6.5 million project to investigate and produce the next generation of low carbon whole building solutions has been opened in north Wales.

The Sustainable Building Envelope Centre (SBEC) at Shotton, Deeside, is a partnership between the Low Carbon Research Institute (LCRI), Tata Steel and the Welsh Assembly Government which over three years will research and monitor solar thermal and photovoltaic technologies and their use together.

Various combinations of technologies will be evaluated, and the solutions arrived at will be relevant not only for new-build, but also for retrofit of large public, industrial or office structures.


The SBEC's director, structural engineer Daniel Pillai, says that the focus on the building envelope (external and internal roofs and walls) is important because it has the potential to play a far more proactive role during a building's life, and provide sources of renewable energy.

"Naturally," he says, "since one partner is Tata Steel, the solution will involve this material, but this focus is far from exclusive. We are looking at a variety of ways in which the envelope can capture, store and release energy."

Transpired solar collectors

Tata bought Corus Steel in 2010. One of the products Corus had developed and which the SBEC is researching is a transpired solar collector (TSC). This involves an equator-facing wall clad with steel that is coated with special solar absorbing paint. The cladding, mounted a few inches from the wall, is perforated with thousands of tiny holes.

The sun heats up the metal, and fans at the top of the gap draw up the heated air into a Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system with heat recovery. Ducting transmits the heated air around the building.

"The building has four environmental chambers," Pillai explains, "with which we can experiment with different combinations using the TSCs. One is a workshop, where the system includes fan driven air heaters, and we expect the TSCs to contribute about half of the heating requirement, supplementing gas blowers.

"The upper floors and ceilings are made of concrete mixed with a powder called Micronal. Made by BASF, these are tiny capsules containing wax, a phase change material, which melts at 23o, absorbing surplus heat from the room," Pillai continues. "At night when the room cools, the wax solidifies and releases the heat, stabilising the internal temperature."

A new take on air source heat pumps

"The other three chambers are office areas, with variations on a theme," he adds. "Air source heat pumps will boost the pre-heated air from the TSCs and send it to underfloor heating. They can also work backwards in the summer to cool the building."

Air source heat pumps have come under some criticism lately for not being sufficiently efficient to warrant use. But the SBEC hopes that using solar pre-heated air will improve their performance, and will be checking this.

Later in the project they will be investigating other means of cooling buildings, perhaps using solar thermal heat engines to drive adsorption chillers.

Pillai says that the building will undergo blower tests in a couple of weeks to test their airtightness, which he hopes will be under 3m2/hr, but they are not aiming for the Passivhaus standard, which is one third of that level.

Embodied carbon

The insulation around the building includes polystyrene and mineral wool, the former of which has high embodied energy. I asked him whether the project will examine the embodied carbon in the materials and products used. Pillai responded positively.

"Absolutely. This is one of the unknowns in the field at the moment, and can be quite controversial. So we hope to work with as many people as possible to get reliable figures on how much energy is used to make the products, so we can choose the most efficient."

Steel is usually associated with high embodied energy, but Pillai counters that because much steel is recycled this need not be so.

Pillai said the collaborative approach extends to all the SBEC's work and invites potential partners. "We want to work with industry and customers to find the best solutions that are easy to install," he said.

SBEC has been designed by the Design Research Unit of the Welsh School of Architecture (WSA).

The Low Carbon Research Institute, housed in the building, is a team of 18 people drawn from Tata Steel, LCRI, Welsh School of Architecture and other industry specialists, partly funded by the Higher Education Funding Council For Wales (HEFCW) and £34m from the Welsh European Funding Office (WEFO).

Their work includes developing pre-finished steel products that deliver efficient energy functionality, and turning them into roof and wall components that will work on all building types. They're also R&D-ing PV, marine, hydrogen and other low carbon technologies.

Dye-sensitised PV

An additional and connected centre, the PV Accelerator Centre is developing a photovoltaic pre-finished steel product and its manufacturing process. It is using the next generation of dye-sensitised PV technology, which works on a principle similar to photosynthesis in plants.

This product performs well in all light conditions and will hopefully make solar electricity much cheaper and easier to use. This £11m project has operated jointly with Australian company Dyesol, funded by £5m from the Welsh Assembly Government.

Let's run the banks like e-Bay and Wikipedia

Let’s not despair that human nature always causes ruin just because the banks are collapsing. Individuals can make a fantastic difference, and together, given a leap of imagination, can find a solution to global financial inequality in an unexpected place.

In a week when capitalism's Goliaths have fallen so swiftly, not by the action of many Davids, but because they were made rotten to the core by their own rapacity, I have been gleaning potential solutions to some of the world's most pressing economic problems from a quite different quarter.

I am researching a book on links between individual and communities in Africa and Wales. This means I am travelling around Wales talking to people who are changing the lives of others thousands of miles away, and whose lives themselves are being transformed in the process. Individuals like Angela Gorman, who, just because she saw a BBC documentary in 2005 about women dying in Chad during childbirth for want of a simple and cheap compound, has given up her job to raise money to help them, and as a result slashed the mortality rate from 17% to under 2.5%, exceeding a Millennium Development Goal. These drugs cost just 60p a pop, and a woman would need five to seven of them. Yet they had, until her straightforward intervention, been dying by the hundred. In short she has achieved in a year what the United Nations failed to, so much so that they have asked her to repeat her success in neighbouring Liberia. [http://www.hopeforgracekodindo.org/]

On Wednesday I met Denise Lord from Pen-y-Craig, in the Rhondda, an ex-coal-mining area classed as 'deprived' in the lexicon of EU or government grant-dispersing bodies, and which has had millions poured into it in an attempt to help its children. Although Denise says the kids she runs workshops for are "materially rich, with their mobile phones and Sky boxes" compared to those she has visited in the slums of Cape Town, the problem is that compared to the Cape Town kids they are "spiritually poor, while the Cape Town kids are spiritually rich and materially poor". [http://www.valleyskids.org/news_details-13198.html]

I asked her to explain. "We have so much to learn from these people," she replied, "And I think among the most important is humility. The kids there have to struggle to get to school so they value it. The kids here take it for granted, so they don't. They bunk off and think it's cool to drop out and get into trouble."

'We have so much to learn from these people' is a phrase I've heard from every one of these extraordinary-yet-ordinary individuals I have talked to so far. But Martha Musonza Holman is one apart. She left her two sons, aged 9 and 12, behind when she fled Zimbabwe in 2001 to come to Wales, where she now resides running a fair trade business called, appropriately, I Love Zimbabwe [http://ilovezimbabwe.co.uk]. She and her partner David struggle to import crafts made by people from her community back there to sell here, so she can send the profit back.

It might be easier to trade in hedge funds. To start with she has to contend with officials in Zimbabwe who demand a cut which puts the price up. "You may think they're corrupt," she says, "like some financial traders. But they're just trying to survive themselves in the worst of economic conditions. However we have a consignment of ceramics that has been sitting in a port for three months and we can't bring it here to sell."

The bankers on Wall Street and in the City, who paid themselves billions of dollars in bonuses, don't have the excuse that they were just trying to survive.

"The last consignment we received cost us £1130 to bring here, but I can only sell it for £1200," she complains. Furthermore, sometimes she sits in the Abergavenny market all day and sells nothing. "People in Zimbabwe think it's simple. We are all rich in the West, they believe, so it's easy for me to sell their crafts. But it is not!" The market decides what sells. If no one buys, or if the profit is miserable, her people back home will starve, fair trade or not.

Here is a clear case where the market needs intervention, to help the poorest. That is exactly why the Welsh Assembly Government has commissioned me to write this book and help Martha and all the others to find a bigger market.

Fair Trade is about transparency. Those who pay can see, should they choose, that their money benefits the community where the producers live, and that the producers receive a fair wage. Should not all trade be fair? Should not all banks be transparent? Why do we expect one system to apply to one type of financial transaction, and another, of supposedly far greater import, to be shrouded in secrecy and occluded by hopelessly obscure rules?

The few exceptional people I am meeting are passionate, inspirational, hard-working and often unpaid, as they try in every way they can to help people so far away. Why do they do it? Because their own spirits are enriched and their lives gain meaning by doing so - without the need for religion.

I struggle to understand human nature when I compare their generosity to the insatiable greed of the equally exceptional few bankers who have sucked dry the trough that millions, also far away, are now unable to feed from.

So what is the solution I am advocating, besides transparency, fairness and humility? I believe that it is glaringly obvious. It's a solution dreamed up by ordinary people and millions use it every day. It is a model which others have proselytised for other spheres of human endeavour but few have dared suggest could equally apply to the financial world. When I suggest it you will doubtless laugh. You will snort. But after you've done that, consider it further with me.

We all know that a lack of regulation has brought the crisis upon us. We all know that this has encouraged human greed. I believe that particular aspects of human nature, multifarious as it is, are manifested in different environments purely as a result of what is acceptable in that environment. If you approve excess, excess is what you get. If you reward honesty, then that is what you get.

Every day, millions of people use e-Bay and Amazon and other online marketplaces, buying and selling to other invisible individuals whom they will never meet. They do so with trust and faith because they can clearly see their trading history. Bad deals get bad feedback, and we can all read it. Yes, sometimes scams occur, and sometimes people get ripped off because they don't bother to check the trader's history. But compared to the majority of transactions these are rare.

If, thirty years ago, I had told you that in the future people would trade to this extent with others whom they would never meet and, by and large, have faith that they would not be defrauded, you would have called me hopelessly idealistic. You would have said that such a thing was only possible in a small community where everyone knew everyone else and the high probability of repercussions for bad behaviour would help to curb it. Yet here we are, and, thanks to simple rules, effective monitoring, and modern technology, it happens all the time and millions of dollars change hands every day.

Furthermore, Credit Unions [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_Unions] and community banks trade cash and help individuals and communities bootstrap themselves up without recourse to high interest rates or rapacious moneylenders. In these constituted environments individuals or groups invest money, and other individuals or enterprises borrow it, in a transparent way. They are owned and controlled by their members. The average U.S. credit union has $93 million in assets versus $1.53 billion in assets for the average U.S. bank, so they are commonly smaller - not a bad thing, since if one fails it is not the end of the world.

So here is my horribly naive, simplistic and obvious solution, in outline, to the problem of global financial ineqality and the dark side of capitalism. Here is my mad plan to render these monstrous predatory dinosaurs of banking and insurance extinct once and for all. Here is the route to allow small and medium sized traders - everyone in the world, eventually - access to capital fairly and in confidence: use modern technology, e-Bay type rules and checks and balances, transparency and fairness, to apply a credit union style model to mutual one-to-one exchanges.

Even if those traders be large concerns, they must still follow the same rules of transparency. Everyone's credit history will be visible to all. And if you can see your own history so plainly, would you not be more prudent yourself?

The same rules would apply to everyone, not one set of rules for us and another for the bankers. As with peer-to-peer networking, file-sharing, and indeed Wikipedia-style collaborations of any sort, we would all be bankers, whether lenders or borrowers. If millions of otherwise unconnected people working together can build something as essential and huge as Wikipedia or e-Bay, why can't they build lending institutions, independent of banks? I am not an accountant, or a banker. I can't work out the nitty-gritty of how it would work. i don't need to. I believe in human nature - someone else will, or a crowd of people working together.

If this were done then maybe, just maybe, we might learn some spiritual wealth and humility; by doing things the slightly harder way - and following some simple rules that we collaborate on to make up.

Largest biomass plant in world will import timber

From where I sit, I look out of the window and can see coniferous and mixed forests. In fact much of Wales is woodland. Most of this is exported to England, where value is added to it by turning it into something more useful. The Welsh economy thus sadly misses out.

So when Energy Secretary John Hutton announced yesterday a green light for a 350MW wood-chipped fuelled electricity generating plant in Port Talbot, south Wales, it seemed to be good news for Wales and a sustainable local market for local timber.

But where is the timber coming from? Apparently, "Sustainable sources in the US and Canada".

The fuel will be wood chips coming by sea only (or potentially in the future by rail).

"This will be the biggest biomass plant in the world," he trumpeted, "generating enough clean electricity to power half of the homes in Wales.'

Great news.

"When completed at the turn of the decade, the £400m plant from developer Prenergy, will contribute around 70% of the Welsh Assembly's 2010 renewable electricity target."

A big sigh of relief from anti-windfarm campaigners.

"And with biomass generation it will be able to produce continuous, base-load electricity for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year over the 25 years of its expected lifetime."

We accept that Wales alone couldn't provide all of this fuel. But - talk about taking coals to Newcastle (which of course we don't talk about anymore - this used to be a metaphor for doing something silly - delivering a product to a place that already had plenty of it. I'm sure coal probably is delivered to Newcastle these days!). Surely Wales can provide some of it, and what is the carbon cost of harvesting it in N. America and shipping it across the sea?

I am currently trying to get further information from Prenergy.