ISIS Press Release 15/06/06
The Slow Burning Fuse of Sustainability
Alan Simpson MP offers a future vision when an interconnected network of local energy sources will
serve the nation and great ideas on how to get there
Revolution in
energy policy that began 200 years ago
It is very British that a revolution that will change our lives
profoundly over the coming years actually began its course almost 200 years
ago. This is a revolution in energy policy.
The change is in a shift from assumptions
that energy systems are about big power generation that must struggle to keep
up with insatiable consumer demand, to a recognition that the future will
be shaped within a national system of local energy networks; a system where
every part of our existence – our home, our roads, our workplaces, schools
and hospitals – are generators of sustainable energy rather than just consumers
of it.
This isn’t ‘pie-in-the-sky’ thinking.
It is already happening now; and being driven by local visionaries and engineers
who have metamorphosed into eco-engineers, holistic scientists and sustainability
designers. The more I became immersed in the construction of my own eco-house,
the more I entered a world that is both humbling and exhilarating. Some 80
percent of new buildings in Berlin have solar powered energy generators.
Holland has installed ‘hot road’ energy systems
under asphalt road surfaces that provide heating or cooling for local houses.
(Every 1 km of road heats about 400 houses). Toronto is replacing energy guzzling, air
conditioning systems in modern buildings, with a cooling system that circulates
(and returns) water from Lake Ontario. Woking, in England, has installed its own local wiring system, generates
135 percent of its own energy needs, and will be coming off the National Grid
in the next few years.
On an even bigger scale, the Mayor of London’s Climate Change Programme aims
to make London energy self-sufficient within a decade,
and up to twenty global cities are in discussions with London about doing the
same. When
you consider that London currently consumes more energy than
the entirety of either Portugal
or Ireland, you realise the scale of the revolution
we are talking about. And not one bit of the energy will come from nuclear
power.
‘Gas and Water’
socialism began in 1817
I turn the clock back to where it all began. The year was 1817,
and at the junction of Water Street and what was to become Gas Street, the City of Manchester built the country’s first gasworks.
The revolutionary body behind this was the Manchester Police Commissioners
who, eleven years earlier, had asked a local manufacturer to fit a gas lamp
over the entrance to the police station. Crowds would gather at night to marvel
at the piddling little flame that lit the entrance. But the Commissioners
became convinced that this was the answer to their street lightning problems.
In reality it became so much more.
By the time Joseph Chamberlain led
Birmingham into an era that championed municipal
democracy and ‘Gas and Water’ socialism in the 1870s, there were already forty-nine
municipal gas companies around the country. Leeds and Glasgow had joined Manchester as the early pioneers in a movement that grew from
local visionaries rather than the national parliament.
What all of these
cities did was to recognise they could deliver energy security for their citizens
and use profits from the gas
undertakings to fund an infrastructure of civic amenities that dramatically
enhanced the quality of life for their people.
Between
1852 and 1861 sufficient profits were passed from the municipal gas company
to the Improvement Committee for Manchester to install its first
decent public water supply system, along with the drains and sanitation network
to support it.
By 1884, Birmingham had cut the price
of gas to its citizens by 30 percent in the ten years since its Gas Company
had formed. It had also built a new recreation ground and was using gas profits,
through the Municipal Water Committee, to deliver a public, clean water system.
How did all this happen? Without doubt
it tapped in to a strange combination of socialist vision and the vulnerability
of capitalism at the time. Then, as now, big businesses wanted access to secure
and cheap energy supplies. Britain was emerging from an era of ‘shopocracy’ in which the
over-riding obsession of the Establishment was low taxes.
The result was low investment, short-termism,
slums, cities that were health nightmares and a level of illiteracy that blighted
society as much as individual lives. In exchange for energy security, industry
had reached the stage where it was happier to see gas profits municipally
re-invested in local infrastructures than pocketed by outside speculators.
That is what Woking and the Mayor of London are seeking to do now.
Sustainability
Bonds
Virtually all of the cities pioneering this Gas and Water socialism
either raised the initial money in local taxes (the Rates) or in issuing Public
Bonds. If cities today offered ‘Sustainability
Bonds’ to do the same we would see a flood tide of money to support them.
From individual households who wanted to become stakeholders in a sustainable
energy future, to pension funds that wanted to protect their members from
another dot.com debacle, there would be no shortage of backers. The
result would be a revolution of unimaginably exciting proportions. And it
is already beginning to happen.
In 1997, the small island of Samso was designated Denmark’s ‘renewable energy island’. Now its straw and woodchip
district heating plants, its wind turbines and solar power systems provide
all the island’s energy needs.
Exciting possibilities
now
Today’s argument is about what system replaces incineration.
Do you go for gasification of wood chips, or bio-digesters (producing gas
and a ‘residue’ of high grade garden fertiliser) or bio-reactors (offering
gas and bio-fuels)? Is the answer to look into a different direction combining
wind or solar generators and hydrogen cells? It is a debate I am excited about.
It is the way we think about today’s
energy systems that is hopelessly out of date. Look at any power station you
pass and the billowing plumes of steam they emit are testimony to the 60 percent
of energy inputs they throw away into the sky. Then, energy gets fed into
a National Grid that leaks like a sieve. By the time the electricity gets
through the ‘distributor’ and ‘supplier’ charges in the network, four fifths
of the original energy input has disappeared. We could run the British economy
simply on the energy we throw away – if only we produced and distributed it
differently.
New municipal energy
companies could sell energy services rather than energy consumption. In much
the same way that big companies now lease their computers rather than buy
them, the new energy companies could offer energy services packages to the
public. For a fixed price (tied only to inflation) you could be offered micro-generation
systems for your own home, alongside upgrading the energy efficiency of the
home itself. If the energy company kept the surplus energy generated it might
even pay them to offer to install low energy appliances throughout the house
as part of the package.
It is a vision no more (and no less)
radical than that offered by the Gas and Water socialists of the 19th
century. Today’s challenge is to create networks of local energy systems,
safe from terrorist attacks, able to survive environmental change, and light
in the ecological footprint they impose on the century ahead.
In the coming month, Manchester will have another landmark. The 400ft
Cooperative Insurance tower will display the largest array of solar panels
anywhere in the country. As one commentator put it, the building will generate
enough energy to make 9 million cups of tea a year. But its significance will
be as a symbol not as the solution.
The tower stands alone. If its heating
and cooling still depend on air conditioning then the developers should be
sacked. It if ignores the issue of water recycling it will fail to make the
connections that City leaders made two centuries earlier. But it will still
be a reminder of where we should be going if we are to catch up with European
partners.
In the Netherlands, acoustic barriers along motorways
are topped with solar panels that provide energy for housing and industry.
Wind turbines along their A15 motorway will generate 60MW of electricity for
the Gelderland province by 2010. All of the motorways
in Britain could easily be lit by solar and wind
energy if we simply had the vision and the political will to do so.
And that’s the rub. Today’s parliament
is no more than a 19th century shopocracy. Obsessed with empowering
the individual, it has lost sight of the collective. However, the fate of
the 21st century will be shaped by the politics of interdependency
and not of individualism. The pioneers and visionaries who would build our
New Jerusalem’s are no longer waiting for a government that will not come.
They are driven by an excitement that fuels itself. Grasp it, and we too may
yet say:
“Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven”;
All we need is to harness the youthfulness of our dreams rather
than of our limbs. And the best thing is that we can do it together.
This paper was circulated
for the Launch Conference as Alan had a last-minute alternative engagement
he could not refuse. A version of this paper was previously published in Resurgence.
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