Will nuclear power be the trade-off against carbon emissions that Britain chooses to make in the sustainability debate fuelled by climate change? It’s the hot question in the energy sector and Andy Duff is not going to duck it. Duff, 48, is chief executive of RWE npower, the German-owned British power company. Parent RWE operates nuclear power stations in Germany but he knows public opinion is divided in Britain, where the government is expected to publish its White Paper on nuclear power next month, Telegraph.co.uk reported.
“My views on nuclear power are that it’s not certain yet that our population is convinced that it’s the right solution to our sustainability and environmental challenges,“ he says carefully.
“The question for us is whether we believe the known risks around nuclear are worth taking in order to give us time to deal with the potentially very substantial risks in relation to climate change and long-term energy security.
“Across the country people are very, very much more aware of the threat posed by climate change and see the impact in more volatile and freak weather conditions, which increases their awareness.
“But I don’t yet know whether that takes them to the point where they’re willing to make difficult choices over the supply of energy, the way they use energy and their lifestyles, for example access to cheap holiday flights and so on.“
Duff seems to be saying that people might get so scared by the prospect of climate change that nuclear power, hitherto regarded as the unacceptable face of power generation, could suddenly seem less frightening.
Might there be a choice to make between emitting unsustainable amounts of carbon and taming our fear of nuclear in the UK?
“I think that certainly is the case,“ he replies. “But I also think that, given the complexity and time and changes around investment in the nuclear power plant, there are a range of other technologies that may emerge that will form a part of the solution as well.
“It’s a public debate that needs to happen. We as a responsible energy company not only inform that debate but we will respond to where we think the weight of public opinion is.“
Duff is much more comfortable talking about other shifts in his industry. One of them is the way that npower has been transformed from a former publicly owned power monolith into a commercial enterprise.
When he arrived in 1998, Duff admits he thought the then National Power had made the difficult transition from public to private sector and was poised to become a leading global power player.
“Actually it was anything but secure in the UK,“ he says. “Its business model was weak; its strategy was limited. It was trying to manage its own decline in the UK from an over-dominant position in generation. And it had no access to the retail market and customers that were going to be necessary in a deregulated competitive market.“
The solution was the 2000 division of National Power’s domestic and worldwide operations into Innogy and International Power.
Between 1998 and 2002, National Power and then Innogy sold half of its generation portfolio and acquired retail electricity customers in Yorkshire, the North East and the Midlands. Then in 2003, Innogy was bought by RWE. “There was just a phenomenal amount of structural change,“ says Duff, who was born in Leeds but brought up in Bangkok, where his father was an oil lubricant salesman.
He didn’t particularly want to follow suit but says he got drawn into energy because it’s such a “difficult, complicated, challenging business“ requiring trade-offs and compromises between shareholder returns, large-scale, high-risk investments and social and environmental challenges. “It’s highly political, highly strategic, and it’s also a highly competitive industry. I’m very competitive by nature so all of those things conspired to attract me to the industry,“ he says.
Duff worked for BP in the Far East, joining National Power in 1998 in time to encounter another major shift--the way the climate change debate has transformed the power industry agenda. Serious investment is now needed to cope with the emission reductions needed to comply with EU legislation, says Duff.
“The speed of change in environmental awareness, regulation and the expectation of our customers and society has been dramatic.
“As a nation, we’re no longer content to burn coal unconstrained and to emit the levels of CO2 we were emitting by the end of the 1990s. I don’t think anybody in 2000 saw it moving that quickly.“ RWE npower is spending more than 1.7 billion euro on renewing and modernizing its UK infrastructure to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by one third by 2015, compared to 2000.

The Road Energy System is one of the most unusual ways scientists and engineers are trying to harness the power of the sun.

If you’ve ever blistered your bare feet on a hot road you know that asphalt absorbs the sun’s energy. A Dutch company is now siphoning heat from roads and parking lots to heat homes and offices.
As climate change rises on the international agenda, the system built by the civil engineering firm, Ooms Avenhorn Holding BV, doesn’t look as wacky as it might have 10 years ago when first conceived, AP reported.
Solar energy collected from a 200-yard stretch of road and a small parking lot helps heat a 70-unit four-story apartment building in the northern village of Avenhorn. An industrial park of some 160,000 square feet in the nearby city of Hoorn is kept warm in winter with the help of heat stored during the summer from 36,000 square feet of pavement. The runways of a Dutch air force base in the south supply heat for its hangar.
And all that under normally cloudy Dutch skies, with only a few days a year of truly sweltering temperatures.
The Road Energy System is one of the most unusual ways scientists and engineers are trying to harness the power of the sun, the single most plentiful, reliable, accessible and inexhaustible source of renewable energy--radiating to earth more watts in one hour than the world can use in a whole year.
But today, solar power provides just 0.04 percent of global energy, held back by high production costs and low efficiency rates.
Solar advocates say that will change within a few years.
Other renewable sources have drawbacks: Not every place is breezy enough for wind turbines; waves and tides are good only for coastal regions; hydroelectricity requires rivers and increasingly objectionable dams; biofuels take up land once used solely for food crops.
“But solar falls everywhere,“ says Patrick Mazza, of Climate Solutions, a consultancy group in Seattle, Wash.
Compared with other energy sources, “solar comes out as the one with the real heavy lift. It’s the one we really need to get at,“ he said.
Ooms’ thermal energy system is actually a spin-off from attempts to reduce road maintenance and costs.
A latticework of flexible pipes, held in place by a grid, is covered over by asphalt, which magnifies the sun’s thermal power. As water in the pipes is heated, it is pumped deep under the ground to natural aquifers where it maintains a fairly constant temperature of about 68 F. The heated water can be retrieved months later to keep the road surface ice-free in winter.
Though it doubles the cost of construction, the system is designed to provide longer life for roads and bridges, fewer ice-induced accidents and less need to repave worn surfaces.
But the same system can pump cold water from a separate subterranean reservoir to cool buildings on hot days.
“We found we were gathering more energy in summer than we needed, so we asked a building contractor what we can do with the extra energy,“ said Lex Van Zaane, the commercial manager. The answer was to construct buildings near the tarmac and pipe hot water under the floor.
The water usually isn’t hot enough on its own, and must go through an electricity-powered heat pump for an extra boost, Van Zaane said. The installation cost is about twice as much as normal gas heating, but the energy required is about half of what would otherwise be needed. That translates into lower monthly heating bills and a 50 percent savings in carbon emissions.
Rooftop solar water heaters have been standard in some countries for decades. In 1954 Bell Labs created the first photovoltaic cells, which use sunlight to create electric current.
But it is only in the last decade that researchers have begun raising the efficiency of photovoltaic cells to economically generate electricity, and new technologies aim to make them commercially competitive without subsidies from taxpayers.
Experimental technologies involve new methods to concentrate the sun’s energy by using mirrors or lenses, or devices that track the sun’s path across the sky. New materials are being developed to make better cells. And scientists are working with electrochemical cells using a liquid rather than a solid component to absorb light.
“The prospect of relying on the sun for all our power demands is finally becoming realistic,“ says report in New Scientist.

Corn futures prices are up from about $2.50 a bushel a couple of years ago to $4.50-$4.80.

A broad energy law signed by President Bush requires a major increase in corn-based ethanol and other biofuels to combat global warming and reduce US dependence on imported oil. But it won’t come without a cost.
The law calls for production of 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel by 2022. That includes 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol, about double current production ability. There also are incentives for biodiesel from products such as soybeans and cellulosic fuels from switch grass, wood chips and other sources, Usatoday.com reported.
But the ethanol mandate is drawing the most attention, and contention, as critics from the United Nations to US livestock producers and food processors question whether it makes sense to devote about a third of the US corn crop to fuel when world grain stocks are at a 30-year low and prices at historic highs.
Wheat and soybean prices have basically doubled, and livestock production costs have shot up as farmers increased corn production in the past year. Even non-food crops such as cotton are affected as US growers switch into more lucrative grain crops.
The commodity price and supply situation should remain volatile when the energy law foresees 9 billion gallons of US biofuel use, which will have to come largely from corn-based ethanol.
“The arrival of biofuels means the world grain and oilseeds market has fundamentally changed forever. We have a worldwide biofuel demand,“ says Michael Whitehead, vice president of Rabobank America, which focuses on the agriculture industry. “That’s not going to go away. That’s going to mean continued upward price pressures.“
Ethanol prices have swung widely in the last year but have surged since the energy legislation passed. Corn futures prices are up from about $2.50 a bushel a couple of years ago to $4.50-$4.80.
The US food price inflation rate jumped from 2.1 percent in 2006 to 5.3 percent this year. But that’s muted compared with the rate in developing nations where consumers rely more on unprocessed goods and spend a larger share of income to eat. The UN warns of food shortages in developing nations.
Bob Dineen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, which represents the ethanol industry, says food manufacturers “accustomed to cheap corn“ are placing too much of the blame for food price increases on ethanol. He says they are ignoring factors such as drought in important exporting nations, rising worldwide demand for grain and high energy costs.
He says the industry should have no problem meeting the mandates. “We’re already producing 7 billion gallons today, with another 7 billion (in capacity) that is under construction and will be online shortly. There’s little question we’ll be able to meet the needs.“
But Chris Hurt, Purdue University agricultural economist, says that with production ramping up so quickly, the ethanol industry may not be able to acquire enough corn from the 2008 crop to run at full capacity.
“At the start of 2006, the ethanol industry had a production capacity of 4.3 billion gallons, and by the end of 2008, that could be up to 13.4 billion,“ Hurt says. “We had excess world (crop) production capacity that we could draw on at first. That is gone, and ethanol and other biofuels are growing by leaps and bounds.“
The corn supply question partly hinges on export demand and whether the livestock industry can make more use of distillate grains, a byproduct of ethanol, for feed. Jesse Sevcik of the American Meat Institute says distillate grains have some feedstock value but not as much as touted. “There are definitely a number of factors coming into next year that could É make a bad situation worse for livestock and poultry.“
There’s also an expected political battle over extending a 51-cents-a-gallon tax credit for blending ethanol with gasoline and preserving a 54-cents-a-gallon import tariff on ethanol. The pressure for biofuels production also intensifies debate over how to increase yields, including use of genetically modified crops.