Fuel, Power

Peter Hitchens writes:

I was shaken from my Sunday morning Radio-4-induced doze by what could not have been thunder (the weather was all wrong). I worked out very quickly that what I had heard was the demolition of the last cooling towers of Didcot ‘A’ power station, around ten miles from my home.

I’d known it was coming, but I still felt a grim sense of foreboding. I watched, as an Oxford townie teenager, as Didcot ‘A’ was built. Didcot ‘B’ still continues as a gas-fired plant, for now. I have many times been amazed by how far away it can (or could) be seen, from the southern spur of the Chilterns near Ewelme, from the Wittenham Clumps or, most astonishingly, from south of the Berkshire Downs north of Newbury, where the top of its 650-foot chimney can still be seen above the line of the hills, puzzling until you have worked out what it is.

It is not as thrilling as the huge northern power stations I used to admire as I travelled to and from York by train in my student days – Ferrybridge and Drax. But it was an expression of peaceful power and developed civilisation, and a sign that somebody somewhere had planned intelligently for our national future.

I’ve never thought it especially ugly. Didcot was never a beauty spot. Windmills on previously unravaged moors and hills offend me far more. I visited it in the early 1970s when it was new and was impressed by its size and force, outdone for me only by the white-hot controlled fury and danger of steel rolling mills and the thunder of the old Daily Express rotary presses in Fleet Street.

The Didcot turbines, in those pre-EU days, were built by the once-great British engineering firm Parsons, long ago swallowed up by Siemens. I remember passing it daily during Arthur Scargill’s kamikaze summertime coal strike, noticing that it continued to run undisturbed. It’s a feature of my daily journeys to and from work. 

Since 2014, it has been less of one as the first three cooling towers and the enormous turbine hall were demolished by high explosive. This morning it was less still. It’s one of the few bits of Britain’s deindustrialization that I have watched in real time (the others are the old Morris and Pressed Steel factories in Cowley, on the eastern side of Oxford), rather than discovering on return visits that places which were once familiar are now unrecognisable.

That great chimney is next for the demolition men, and the thought of its inevitable destruction makes my heart sink, as it would to watch the disarming of some valued warship or regiment, as part of a surrender. In this case we are surrendering common sense and taking the yoke of a dogma that does not even make sense on its own terms, as I shall explain. 

I wonder if we could even build such a thing any more, if we ever realise our mistake. The immensely costly and delayed electrification of the Great Western railway line, and the surprisingly poor service which has resulted, does not fill me with confidence. I recall reports that a former worker at the coal-fired power station, who had been there from its 1970 opening and who was asked to switch it off in March 2013, confessed that he felt there was something wrong about closing it.

I agreed. It seemed to me to be an act of dogmatic self-harm, to shut down a modern, efficient generating station, which could easily have been modernised to make its emissions cleaner. Its entire capacity, 1,440 MW (1.44 gigawatts) is as nothing beside the gigantic and ever-expanding capacity of China’s coal-burning generation. An enormous 259 gigawatts of new capacity are under development in China, in such a way that central government can disclaim responsibility for them when it goes to Climate Change conferences. That’s on top of the 993 gigawatts (that is, I think, equivalent to 690 Didcot power stations) of coal-burning capacity China already possesses. 

The new stations which are to be built to achieve this increase will have the same capacity to produce electricity as the USA’s entire array of coal-fired generation stations. For details, see here. The UK’s whole electrical generation capacity, in all forms of power, is 85 gigawatts. If we gave up using electricity entirely, it would make no difference to the impact of Chinese coal burning, fuelled by enormous new coal fields in Inner Mongolia. I have seen the mile-long, frequent coal trains which thunder ceaselessly from this area to the rest of China.

If we completely abolish all our fossil-fuel generation, it would likewise not matter in the slightest. We are electrical hedgehogs next to China’s electrical elephant. China’s planned increase in coal power, alone, is three times the size of our whole electricity generation industry. If you believe that global warming is man-made (and I am not even going to bother to discuss this contention on this occasion, for it is irrelevant to my argument, so please don’t try to tempt me), then Britain’s coal shutdown will make absolutely no difference at all to the outcome you fear. 

On its own terms, the closure of coal-fired stations such as Didcot is futile, an act of puritanical self-flagellation, as weird as tying barbed wire garters round your thigh, except that you’re tying them round other people’s thighs as well, by bringing about power cuts that disrupt their lives and endanger everything from hospitals to traffic, not to mention food storage, the computers which supply vital information to all parts of our civilisation and govern our communications, and transport itself.

How fitting, in a way, that all this should happen less than a fortnight after the still-mysterious major UK power cut of Friday 9th August. Since then, it has emerged, as I wrote in my column, that power companies were boasting that they were approaching 50% wind generation, only a few minutes before the fuses blew and a large part of the UK was blacked out. Were these things connected? I doubt we shall ever know. There is, as far as I know, nobody non-partisan in the power industry or the government, who is prepared to examine the facts without worrying about upsetting the state dogma of warmist fanaticism. But I have read several articles by people who know more about this than I do. 

Yesterday my Mail on Sunday colleague Helen Cahill wrote this. It begins, ‘National Grid had evidence that the shift to renewable energy was putting Britain's electricity supply at risk months before the biggest blackout in a decade, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. The company, which is responsible for keeping the lights on, has downplayed the role of wind energy in the power cut that caused widespread chaos earlier this month.

‘John Pettigrew, chief executive of the FTSE 100 firm, described the outage as a “once-in-30-years” event and said there was “nothing to indicate there is anything to do with the fact that we are moving to more wind or more solar”. ‘Yet in April, National Grid published research warning that using more renewable power sources posed a threat to the network's “stability”.’ 

Today, Monday 19th August, there is one in The Times, alas behind a paywall, by Emily Gosden, the paper’s energy editor. It suggests that power generated by coal or gas possesses more ‘inertia’, and is therefore more resistant to fluctuations in frequency, than either wind power or power sucked into this country through the connectors which supply us with power from France (mainly nuclear), Belgium (heavily nuclear) and the Netherlands (which I believe is largely fossil fuel, but my information may be out of date). 

Ms Gosden writes that when demand is low and many big power stations are not running, ‘the system is particularly fragile’ because ‘unlike traditional plants, neither interconnectors, nor wind farms provide “inertia” or resistance to the change in frequency on the grid. That means frequency tends to be more volatile.’ She adds, ‘If frequency drops very rapidly, as it did on August 9, there may not be enough time for back-up plants to start up before it gets dangerously low. A rapid drop can also make other plants trip off, exacerbating the problem’.

As I said in my Sunday MoS column, there have been three near misses in three months before the recent cut. See here. We are far closer to major energy trouble than politicians, industry chiefs or many in the media, all lost in a fog of dogma, seem to have realised, though I, along with my friend, the late Christopher Booker, have been predicting power cuts for ages. I half expect to hear reports of sarcastic laughter from Christopher’s grave in Litton churchyard, Somerset.