Today we visited a biomass (wood-burning) power plant in Lockerbie, Scotland, which is about 2 hours south of Edinburgh, almost to the border with England. (For those of you that need a primer on your British Government structure, the United Kingdom is made up of 4 different "countries" - England, Scotland, Wales, and Nothern Ireland. The first three are all on the same Island - known as Great Britain. The counties almost seem like states in the US, although with less power - though they certainly wouldn't want to say that - they have a lot of "national," historic, and cultural power. Still lots of Scots who HATE the English.) . The bus ride was beautiful - lots of rolling hills and sheep-filled grasslands. Made me want to get the golf clubs out...the landscape is just so inviting to my golfer's eye. Perfect grass. It also gave me the chance to use my noise-reducing headphones (thanks Pops!) and read a few more chapters in my book on Scottish history.
It was a pretty interesting visit - the plant was built a few years ago by a large international (German-based) electric utility called E. On. Their staff took us through E. On's plans for expanding renewable energy - they already have over 2000 MW of renewables worldwide, and over 1000 in North America. They want to get 5 times this amount by 2015. Mostly wind (they have 57 big wind farms in the US and 6000 more MW in the pipeline), but they're also looking at biomass and biogas. Testing large scale solar and wave but don't believe it's commerically viable yet.
The renewables are made financially viable in Great Britain with a renewable energy obligation on utilities similar to the RPS that I worked on in Michigan last year. Their ROC (renewable obligation certificate, which they get for each megawatt hour of renewable energy they produce) prices are pretty high - around £40 ($56) per megawatt hour right now, which almost doubles the revenue they get from selling electricity normally. The British government is thinking about toying with their RPS a little this year...giving more REC's (1.5 or 2) to certain technologies like wave and solar, and less than a full REC to others that don't need as big a subsidy (like wind, perhaps). It's going to be interesting to see how this impacts investments - if people can't count on REC values remaining relatively stable, I wonder how they'll value the risk that the government pulls the rug out from under their investment. Or maybe they'll grandfather in the REC streams for existing plants and only tweak things for new plants.
This plant cost about £90 million ($180 M then). £18 million was a government grant from the U.K. lottery. The plant has a 44 MW capacity, which serves about 70,000 homes. This is a little bigger than the 6 biomass plants we have in Northern Michigan. They run the plant as a merchant plant, with no long term contract to sell the electricity to another utility or to themselves. Instead, they just sell all the electricity into the British grid, which apparently is pretty profitable for them when combined with the REC subsidy. The fuel is mostly forestry "waste" - they contract with a supplier to provide them all of their fuel and are located directly adjacent to 2 big forest product factories. The "waste" looked like whole giant logs to me, but according to our guide, these logs are parts of trees that wouldn't otherwise be used. The plant has 26 direct staff, and they estimate they help to support about 400 jobs in the area.
E. On. also mentioned it takes 12 times as long to get a wind farm permitted in the UK as it does in Texas. In the UK, the permitting process and public opinion are pushing more windfarms offshore into the ocean, because it's so hard and controversial to site them on land. It's interesting, in the U.S. so far it's been just the opposite - but I guess we have a lot more farmland and farmers who welcome the investment on their properties than they do in Scotland. They said that the offshore farms thus far aren't really hurting tourism thus far, and may actually be helping it - they get a lot of people in their visitor's center near one of their offshore wind farms. And a recent study said there was only one bird kill in 5 years at one offshore wind farm.
E. On has also submitted plans to build a supercritical pulverized coal plant in Great Britain, which has resulted in huge outcries from the environmental community. The permit has not yet been approved by the British Government (and 6 other proposed coal plants are waiting to see what happens before they submit their permits).
Last week we met with members of Scotland's Parliament and some civil servants in the Government's Climate Change Division. Very interesting. Their system and their politics are quite different than ours - multiparty system, no separation between the executive and legislative branches, complete civil service without political appointees, a hard-to-understand "devolved" system that leaves most power with the UK government in London but grants some authority (primarily spending power, from what I can tell) to the Scottish government. That said the energy policies and technologies they are pursuing are the same - energy efficiency upgrades and building codes, more renewable energy requirements, cap and trade schemes for greenhouse gas emissions, mass transit, and they're hoping our automakers get electric vehicles right so they can rely on them.
The Green Party has only 2 members in Parliament, but they hold a crucial swing vote, so it looks like the Scottish budget will be approved shortly only by agreeing to a Green Party demand to fund a massive energy efficiency program of £1 Billion ($1.4 B). It would install about £500 pounds ($700) of insulation in1.8 million homes across Scotland. Instead of providing a tax cut to people who choose to make efficiency upgrades, the Scottish government will essentially go door to door and say, we're going to insulate your house for you - let us know when we can schedule it. Everybody benefits because they lower the country's energy demands and therefore don't need to pay to build new power plants. They also put a lot of people to work putting in the insulation, and combat greenhouse gas emissions while they're at it. Very interesting idea.
The more surprising revelation was that in Scottish politics, there's actually a competition amongst the various political parties to out-green the other with even more aggressive climate change policies. The politicians and civil service say this is driven by an electorate that is really engaged in climate change, and that the business community is not really opposing it additional climate action, and many businesses embrace it.
The other very interesting thing we learned was that the Scottish Government is attempting to use a carbon assessment tool that applies to the government budgets - so that Parliament can see how their budget decisions impact greenhouse gas emissions. This is an extremely complicated endeavor, and the details are still being worked out (huge questions like - do you only count direct emissions from government, or do you count indirect things like building roads leading to more auto emissions, or paying for health care leading to electricity emissions for hospitals - or even longer lives of people using more energy?). I don't envy the guy whose job it is to figure out how to draw these lines (he's actually quite funny about it), but I am interested to see what he comes up with.
The other classes have been quite interesting as well. I'm learning a great deal about the politics, design, and operation behind the European Union's cap and trade regulatory scheme for greenhouse gases. There's a hufe focus and fascination over here on the international agreements necessary for a global climate change accord. Much more interest on this than we have in the U.S., where (as usual) we look much more inwardly at our domestic issues. Everyone loves speculating on what Obama might do, what China and India might do, and whether there is a chance for success at the big Copenhagen conference at the end of 2009. I'm picking up quite a bit - this hasn't been a huge focus for me previously, and the international politics of getting to a deal are fascinating. Okay, on to a couple of pictures from today.
The plant from outside the gate.
Biomass being stored in a giant shed and ready to be burned in the boiler.
Conveyor belt from the shed up to the boiler.
Pipe out of the boiler that takes steam down to a steam turbine that makes electricity.
Control room - very high tech gadgets.
Group shot outside Scotland's Parliament.
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