Right for England? Setting the record straight on public support for onshore wind

New polling finds Conservative MPs are out of step with their constituents’ support for onshore wind

While national polling shows strong and growing support for onshore wind, the Government has suggested that wind projects often fail to win public support – particularly in England, where opposition is often assumed to be highest. On this basis, since 2015, the Government has prevented onshore wind from accessing the long-term price guarantee contracts available to other technologies, and has erected unique planning barriers in England. Despite Government efforts to drive clean growth, new onshore wind capacity is consequently set to reduce dramatically next year – as the current pipeline of legacy projects dries up.

New polling commissioned by 10:10 Climate Action suggests that the Conservative MPs who first called for these blocks to be put in place are now out of step with their constituents’ opinion on the issue. This suggests it is time for MPs to get behind onshore wind as a key part of the low-carbon future, particularly as the Government indicates it could move toward a more supportive position on the technology.

What does the polling tell us?

The polling was conducted across the 79 mostly English constituencies of Conservative MPs who signed a public letter to the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, in 2012, which called for cuts in government support for onshore wind.

While one might expect opposition to wind to be highest in these constituencies, the polling shows that three quarters of these MPs’ constituents actually back the technology. Perhaps surprisingly, 73% of respondents would also be happy to live within five miles of turbines.

These figures are consistent with the Government’s own statistics – which show that 76% of the British public now support the use of onshore wind. They are further backed up by polling commissioned by 10:10 Climate Action at the end of 2017, which indicates that 70% of people living in the south of England, excluding London, would be happy to host local wind projects – slightly higher than levels of support for local turbines in Scotland.

Nine out of ten constituents of the MPs who signed the letter opposing wind are unaware of the fact that the Government is blocking onshore wind – and only one in five would support a block on turbines.

These findings are significant in light of the fact that onshore wind is currently under a double lock in England – first because projects cannot access long-term price guarantee contracts, and second because planning barriers introduced in 2015 have led to an almost total cessation in applications for new wind projects. Analysis of the Government’s renewable energy planning database shows a 94% drop in new applications for wind since 2015 – covering everything from single turbines to larger projects.

As the basis for these planning blocks is an assumption that communities in England do not want local projects, this new evidence raises further questions as to why the blocks are still in place – particularly when onshore wind has been shown to be popular in the very places Conservative MPs fear it is not.

What does this mean for MPs?

The 2012 letter to David Cameron was signed by MPs over six years ago. Since then, the context has shifted dramatically. Most significantly, turbine costs have tumbled – with the result that onshore wind is now our cheapest source of new-build electricity. Widely accepted modelling by Baringa shows that some new onshore wind contracts would be agreed at a price lower than the wholesale cost of electricity – meaning projects could be classed as ‘subsidy-free’ and pay back millions to the government over their lifetimes.

Controlling the cost of energy bills for consumers is a priority issue for MPs, as is driving forward clean growth and tackling climate change – with dozens of Conservative MPs recently signing a letter calling for the Prime Minister to back the introduction of a new net zero emission target for 2050. As the cheapest source of clean energy, onshore wind should be at the heart of furthering this agenda – and MPs should be seizing such opportunities as the first steps in moving towards zero emissions over the coming 30 years.

Conservative MPs are also aware of the fact that they will need to perform better among younger voters to regain their majority at the next election. Bright Blue polling has found that climate change is the top issue 18-28 year olds want to hear politicians discussing more, and the second top issue for under 40s. Overall, Conservative voters have been shown by Bright Blue to favour onshore wind over gas, nuclear and coal, and 59% of them support onshore wind provided it receives no subsidy – a statistic that is increasingly significant in light of rapidly falling costs.

This new polling, together with onshore wind’s well-evidenced popularity among the British public on both the right and the left, tells MPs that it is time for them to get behind wind power. Blocking it risks being left on the wrong side of their own constituents – particularly the younger voters they will seek to win over in the next election.

Onshore wind is a hugely popular source of energy – even in the places where some MPs fear local communities do not want it. In light of this, blocking our cheapest source of clean power alongside government efforts to rapidly decarbonise our energy system looks increasingly untenable. Surely Conservative MPs now owe it to their electors to assure Ministers they are ready to see a change in the way the wind is blowing.

Ellie Roberts is the Campaign Manager at 10:10 Climate Action, a UK based charity that brings people together to take positive, practical action on climate change.

The views expressed in the article are those of the author, not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

Blowing in the wind: are kites the next big step for renewable power?

To most people in Britain, kites are probably things of a childhood pastime – perhaps conjuring up memories of hours spent on less-than-tropical beaches. Yet, the very same principles which underpin kite flying are now being touted as a serious and exciting means to generate renewable electricity.

As with other forms of electricity generation, kites capture energy and use it to rotate a turbine. Each kite has a steel tether which is attached to a turbine, and as a kite harnesses wind energy, it ascends up into the sky. This in turn spins the turbine, which generates electricity. Kites often operate in tandem, with one rising and the other falling at the same time, which ensures energy generation is more constant. In addition, some kites will have rotor blades attached to them which generate electricity, too, in the same way that traditional windmills do.

A technology with the wind in its sails

Given that they both harness the wind as their source of power, kites are often compared to conventional wind turbines when assessing their potential to be a viable method of producing electricity. However, as beneficial for the environment as wind turbines are and have been for the UK, it would appear that kites could offer several potential advantages.

To start with, consider that the strength of the wind – and hence energy generation potential – steadily increases with altitude, with high-altitude winds having twice the velocity of ground-level winds. Moreover, not only do winds blow more forcefully at higher elevations, they do so more predictably, too. Combined, these two facts mean that kites can exploit a stronger and more reliable stream of energy to convert into electricity, relative to turbines on the ground or out at sea.

Another compelling argument in favour of kite generated energy is cost. We know that renewables like solar and wind turbines have, especially recently, seen their costs fall dramatically due to improved economies of scale and technological learning. Yet companies who are in the kite energy sector believe their blossoming technology has the potential to be even cheaper.

Kites use fewer materials in production, are cheaper to build and set up, are easier to maintain once running, and have the potential to last longer. If as a result of stronger and more predictable winds they produce more energy too, then they effectively become all the more inexpensive because of the crucial cost per megawatt hour of energy produced equation by which all generating technologies are judged. Indeed, one kite energy company believes it could install a 100 megawatt capacity wind farm and begin delivering electricity significantly less expensively than £44.50 per megawatt hour.

As with any new technology, however, kite energy generation must be able to transfer its promising potential on paper into the real world. Cost estimates such as the one cited above are certainly eye-catching, but need to be backed up by hard evidence gathered through doing. At the moment, regulatory uncertainty abounds, and investors would want to be sure that any money they put into the hitherto commercially untested technology is not too much of a gamble.

That kites use fewer materials relative to wind turbines also has important environmental consequences. Often made from carbon-fibre, kites do away with literally thousands of tonnes of infrastructure associated with conventional wind turbines – the massive blades and tower, plus the concrete foundations, for instance – thus meaning that they require fewer resources to fabricate, and hence contain less embodied energy. Indeed, the steel and concrete used to build wind farms are some of the most energy and water intensive production materials around – although it must be said that they and other renewables like solar are still much less carbon intensive, relative to conventional fossil fuelled power stations.

Another key selling point for kite generated energy is that kites can be deployed in a wider variety of locations, often where other forms of generation could not be. Conventional wind turbines are limited as to where they can be placed because they must be able to reliably tap into ground windspeeds of at least five meters per second. Consequently, this rules out much of the land across the world. However, higher altitude wind speeds are considerably more constant – regardless of the location 500 or so meters below, where the kites would be anchored. In addition, because of their nature, kites could operate in locations where it is unviable to erect conventional wind turbines because of complex terrain, for instance.

Interestingly, one location where kite energy wind farms could be constructed is on the offshore pilings on which current wind turbines – soon due to be decommissioned – stand. As modern wind turbines are now much larger, the existing pilings have effectively been rendered redundant, and thus replacement ones would have to be (relatively more energy and resource intensively) built, should newly proposed wind farm projects get the go ahead.

Possible turbulence?

Despite impressive credentials, kite energy is not without its drawbacks. From a safety perspective, some have expressed concern about what happens should a kite’s tether snap. Furthermore, others have pointed out the natural susceptibility to lighting strikes which kites will have, flying so high up in the sky. This could not only damage the kite itself, but more importantly knock out the small but vital computers in the kite which control it. 

Yet perhaps the greatest challenge with which kites could possibly be faced will be securing regulatory permissions to ascend to such high altitudes. It is not hard to imagine authorities expressing hesitation over agreeing to a series of kites being deployed anywhere close to residential areas, or airspace in the proximity of flightpaths, for instance.

The almost inevitable opposition from the small but vocal minority who already campaign against wind turbines on visual grounds could be a final stumbling block for kite generated electricity. Indeed, it is foreseeable that kites could engender even more opposition than conventional turbines – for whilst some claim that kites in full flight will be virtually invisible, even an ardent believer in renewable energy may not relish the idea of a network of cables extending hundreds, even thousands, of feet up into the sky.

Conclusion

Conventional wind turbines have undoubtedly helped the UK in reducing carbon emissions and decelerating climate change through the way in which they have provided a clean alternative to dirty, fossil fuelled power stations. In the years since their inception, the turbines have become more efficient, and the blades that power them ever bigger. Despite this, it is not unreasonable to look at the developing sector of kite technology and think that the future of renewable energy generation might lie a little higher above our heads than first imagined. 

Eamonn Ives is a Researcher at Bright Blue

Nuclear reactors: is big beautiful?

Nuclear power has long been a controversial source of energy. Detractors point to high infrastructure costs and difficulties associated with storing nuclear waste, amongst other concerns. Advocates, however, view it as a clean and reliable alternative, which the grid requires as the country steadily shifts away from coal and other fossil fuels which we have relied upon for decades.

But last week, the car giant Rolls-Royce released a report on small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), outlining how they think the technology – first developed several decades ago to power submarines – could foreseeably bridge some of the differences in opinion between pro- and anti-nuclear voices, and usher in a “once in a lifetime opportunity” for Britain to be at the forefront of nuclear technology. Such bold claims, however, require scrutiny – given Rolls-Royce’s commercial interest in the technology’s adoption, and also the relatively untested nature of SMRs as part of the energy system.

Typically defined as nuclear reactors which can generate up to 300 megawatts of electrical power, and can be produced in a single factory on a repeated basis – i.e., ‘modularly’ – SMRs have been touted by their supporters as a way for the UK to tap a reliable source of energy, able to ensure the lights stay on when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.

One of the main selling points of energy generated by SMRs – at least compared to conventional large-scale nuclear projects such as Hinkley Point C in Somerset – is cost. An economic fact true of most goods and services is that increased and repeated production has a tendency towards falling average unit costs – what economists would call economies of scale. For larger nuclear projects, which are effectively produced as ‘one offs’ every few decades or so, designers have been unable to exploit the potentially lucrative economies of scale because the actual technology involved typically changes to such a significant extent with each project. However, for SMRs, the opportunity to do so is theoretically much greater. Owing to the fact that a factory may fabricate many several SMRs, financial savings in materials and alike allow for a lower cost per reactor to be achieved, ultimately manifesting itself as a lower cost per unit of usable energy generated.

Others have highlighted the fact that financing SMRs could be more attractive to investors, relative to large-scale nuclear plants. Reasons for this are broadly twofold: on the one hand, capital expenditure costs will be lower given that the reactors will be much smaller – allowing a more diverse pool of investors to consider financing a project; on the other, the asset will begin generating dividends far sooner, because it can be built and operationalised more quickly, again, due to its smaller size. This could therefore mean that investors might agree to a lower strike price for their energy generated, given the fact they will not have to factor in more of a guarantee on their return on investment.

SMRs may not just make financial sense, but they could also play a vitally important role in expanding our nation’s ‘energy flexibility’, through helping to decentralise energy production. Decentralisation of energy can be advantageous for the environment because when energy is consumed close to where it is produced, transmission losses are minimised. Developments in other energy sources have already been heading in this decentralising direction for some time now – consider, for instance, solar photovoltaic panels atop people’s houses. Some have also suggested that because SMRs require less water for cooling than their larger cousins, they are more environmentally friendly in this respect, and could also help in bringing energy security to remote areas which may not be located close to seas or large rivers.

Nevertheless, questions do remain about SMRs. In this very blog, much of the financial case for them is based upon the theoretical assumption that economies of scale will be realised – and realised in sufficiently large proportions to warrant a revolution in the energy sector. Because the technology is so untested as a commercial source of electricity generation, estimates about how far costs will fall are difficult to accurately make at this stage.

Environmental NGOs have also criticised SMRs, largely on the basis that they are not strictly speaking a renewable form of energy generation – certainly, SMRs will still inevitably call for the intermittent disposal of spent nuclear fuel. Even if one is not inherently opposed to nuclear energy, it has been pointed out that nuclear waste is an area where large-scale plants have the upper hand over SMRs, because the latter would face a challenging coordination problem stemming from several nuclear sites all needing to dispose of individually lesser, but cumulatively equal, amounts of nuclear waste.  

Yet perhaps the foremost factor which could jeopardise the roll out of SMRs is the remarkable fall in the cost of certain forms of renewable energy, such as solar and wind power. Incidentally, these are technologies which have already very much felt the virtuous cycle of economies of scale themselves, as the costs of their parts have tumbled as they have become more and more widespread. Coupled with ongoing learning about how best to deploy renewables, and a fine tuning of the technology they utilise, wind and solar farms are now more efficient, and more cost-effective, than ever.

Indeed, in the aforementioned Rolls-Royce report, it is somewhat ambiguously claimed that they are “working towards” the medium-term target of £60 per megawatt hour of energy generated through SMRs. Initially, Rolls-Royce even concede that a figure of around £75 per megawatt hour is more likely. This would be noticeably more expensive than the £57.50 per megawatt hour of wind generated power, recently agreed to by two companies in the most recent Contracts for Difference auctions.

In 2015, the then Chancellor, George Osborne, signalled the Government’s ambition to explore new nuclear technologies – pledging £250 million into a nuclear research and development programme. Since then, it has launched a competition to invite engineers to submit their plans for the best value SMR design for the UK. As the nation continues its transition away from dirty and polluting fossil fuels, there is an ongoing debate about which technologies will power the UK forward. In theory, SMRs could have a number of potential benefits, relative to large-scale nuclear. But they also come with certain disadvantages, not least of which is their relatively untested nature.

Eamonn Ives is a Researcher at Bright Blue

Wind keeps powering on

Wind power reached a significant milestone last week. For the first time ever, onshore and offshore wind together generated 10 GW of electricity in the UK, three times the power expected from Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, and around 23% of the country’s demand at the time. Of course this was a particularly windy day: the usual figure is just over 9% of the mix. But it demonstrates that the grid can successfully integrate large amounts of wind power.

Offshore wind continues to grow in strength

Last week also saw Greg Clark, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, travel up to Hull to open the new Siemens factory. Siemens has invested £310 million in a new plant that will manufacture the blades for offshore wind turbines. Almost 800 new jobs have been created, with the majority filled by local Hull residents. This kind of investment in the domestic supply chain for renewables is what the forthcoming industrial strategy will seek to encourage.

The offshore wind sector is set to continue its expansion: last month, the Government released further details of the next two auctions for new offshore wind in the early 2020s. Although the Government has set ambitious cost-reduction targets, projects commissioned in other European countries, such as the Netherlands and Denmark, have had impressively low prices. So there is every reason to be confident the UK industry can meet the challenge.

Onshore wind faces turbulence

The situation for onshore wind is much less optimistic. The Conservative Party manifesto for the 2015 general election contained a pledge “to halt the spread of subsidised onshore wind farms”, by ending “any new public subsidy for them” and ensuring “local people have the final say on windfarm applications”. These commitments were swiftly met following the election through the Energy Act 2016 and revised planning guidance to local authorities.

Yet this technology has potential to contribute to meeting the UK’s energy needs. Earlier this month, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) published updated cost estimates for the different generation technologies. For projects commissioning in 2020, onshore wind is forecast to be the cheapest way to make electricity. Their models predict that, including the carbon price, onshore wind projects will generate electricity for £63 per MWh, while highly efficient combined cycle gas turbines (CCGTs) – the next cheapest technology – will produce power for £66 per MWh.

Currently, long-term contracts (Contracts for Difference), which guarantee a fixed revenue stream for developers of new energy infrastructure, are only being awarded to nuclear and offshore wind. Onshore wind, despite being much cheaper, is not eligible to bid. Consumers’ energy bills are starting to rise again, largely due to rising wholesale costs from a weaker pound. But the annual cost of supporting renewables, which is added to consumer bills, is forecast to increase significantly in this parliament, from £5.2 billion this year to £8.4 billion by 2020/21. Excluding onshore wind will cause the subsidy bill to increase more than is necessary, as contracts for new capacity will instead be awarded to more expensive technologies.

The future for onshore wind

Given the political discourse around them, it is surprising that polling shows broad public support for onshore wind farms, even in rural areas. ComRes data from October 2016 shows 73% of the British public support onshore wind. In rural areas, where people are more likely to directly experience turbines, they enjoy 65% approval. Further research is required into what Conservatives in particular think about onshore wind, and whether they object more to the subsidy element or their own potential proximity to turbines. Bright Blue will shortly be publishing new polling, conducted by Populus, to try to answers these questions.

Some have proposed ‘community energy’ schemes to overcome local opposition to new developments. These involve local residents either receiving some payment from the developers in return for their consent, or taking a stake in the project themselves. Renewables company Good Energy has proposed building a new onshore wind farm in Cornwall, which would be co-financed by local residents. This would be the first onshore wind farm constructed without government subsidy. They hope the community financing for the project will demonstrate to the planning committee that it enjoys local support.

Technological innovations could also improve onshore wind’s prospects. For instance, Shell, EON, and Schlumberger have recently invested in a new high-altitude kite technology that generates electricity from the wind. The firm developing this idea is based in Essex. The technology is expected to have much lower capital costs by dispensing with the expensive towers and blades used by conventional wind farms. Two kites pull in opposite directions to create a rotating motion while tethered to a turbine on the ground to produce electricity.

Conclusion

There is a strong case that onshore wind should no longer receive subsidy: it is a mature technology that has had an opportunity to become cost-competitive. However, as we argued in Green and responsible conservatism, it is important to distinguish between a subsidy and a long-term contract. A project is only subsidised when the total lifetime payments it receives under the long-term contract exceed those received by other conventional generators.

No new, capital-intensive energy infrastructure can be built in the UK without a long-term, government-backed contract. Even new gas plants will only be built if they can secure a 15-year contract through the Capacity Market mechanism, which is the Government’s policy for guaranteeing security of supply. Allowing onshore wind to compete for fixed contracts against other technologies could help keep down consumer bills. And this could be done without subsidy and without removing control over planning decisions from local communities.

Sam Hall is a researcher at Bright Blue