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Renewable Energy (S&T Report)

My Lords, any energy   debate is bound to cover a wide range of issues, both in saving power and producing it through environmentally beneficial means. I shall focus on one rather narrow, but possibly far-reaching, aspect. I want to draw your Lordships’ attention to a form of renewable energy that could play as large a part as wind power, but in a non-intermittent form, while at the same time virtually removing the costly and harmful need for any landfill of waste in this country. That is killing two birds with one stone; or a double-whammy, as the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, would say. Noble Lords might think that is an ambitious proposition. A small company called Compact Power in Avonmouth, in my neck of the woods, is showing the way. For the avoidance of doubt, I do not have any shares or any other connection with the company. Compact Power has developed and put into commercial operation a world-leading small-scale pyrolysis and gasification plant that is capable of extracting renewable energy from all non-inert wastes except nuclear wastes. The Renewables Obligation Statute allowed for,"““Newer, cleaner technologies such as pyrolysis and gasification to generate electricity that would qualify for ROCs to the proportion of the waste used that was non-fossil fuel derived””." For example, when processing municipal solid waste, about 68 per cent would be ““non-fossil fuel derived””. Thus 68 per cent of the electrical output would earn ROCs. As noble Lords will be aware, electricity generated by incineration, which has been favoured to reduce our current over-reliance on landfill, does not qualify for ROCs. The UK produces about 80 million tonnes per annum of non-inert waste, of which about 87 per cent is currently landfilled. The existing commercial Compact Power plant at Avonmouth is a single-module cooker, as it were, that can process about 8,000 tonnes per annum. Compact Power is about to build a new four-module plant at Avonmouth, which will process 32,000 tonnes per annum. Possibly the optimum plant size is eight modules, although the great advantage of the modular format is that you can add or subtract modules to fit local circumstances. An eight-module plant can process 64,000 tonnes per annum and generate four megawatts per hour, of which 68 per cent on average would qualify for ROCs. The process produces neither dioxins nor toxic fly ash. The waste is reduced to 15 per cent bottom ash, which is safe for use mixed with aggregates and for certain building materials. There would be near zero landfill, which would greatly reduce the amount of landfill-generated methane, which is deemed to be 21 times more harmful than CO2. A plant of 64,000 tonnes per annum would be ideal for about 100,000 people—a typical district—after the extraction of the maximum amount of waste that could be recycled or composted. With a population of 60 million, the UK could build 600 district level pyrolysis and gasification plants that would generate 2.4 gigawatts per hour, which is about 6.7 per cent of the UK’s average electricity demand. However, a recent report by the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Renewable Power Association shows that the potential electrical yield from those wastes, if processed at the highest yield rate, could account for as much as 17 per cent of total electricity consumption by 2020. They admit, however, that meeting those highest yield rates is an unlikely reality even by 2020. Nevertheless, 10 per cent of our electrical needs would be worth it, especially if we also meet our EU landfill diversion directive obligations and can thus trade our surplus allowances to other member states. Furthermore, those community-level micro power plants would reduce dramatically the amount of electricity lost in transmission from remote sources of   power. That has already been mentioned as a problem. The losses are currently estimated to be about 10 per cent per 100 miles. The plants would also reduce waste haulage; 10 per cent of all trucks on the roads in the EU currently haul waste. Therefore, congestion and vehicle emissions would be helped. The district-level plants are considerably smaller than the mass-burn incinerators, which typically require an 80-metre stack and gravity feed. The district-level plants of the sort that I advocate would sit in a building no larger than a double indoor tennis court, with a small aluminium stack a little more than five metres above the roofline. Construction and commissioning time is 15 months. That compares to a three-year construction time for a large incinerator, which would also take longer in the planning process. The small size of the district-level plants will enable them to be collocated with other businesses in, say, a business park, where best use can also be made of the secondary heat from the processes. Unfortunately, there are still no renewable heat certificates available. Meanwhile, the emissions are a mere 10 to 15 per cent of the new tougher EU waste incineration permissible levels, so the plants make good neighbours. Also, adopting a district-level integrated waste management strategy would achieve the Government’s proximity principle better than a policy based on larger incinerators, with their bigger catchment areas. There is a question about joined-up government here. It is a problem that the DTI handles energy but that Defra is responsible for waste. Even within Defra, there is confusion as the former MAFF part of Defra handles farm waste and has confused biomass for energy crops in the farm slurries, whereas biomass is the biodegradable portion of any type of waste. These compact power plants can take most forms of waste, including old tyres, sewage sludge and clinical and hazardous waste such as half-used pots of paint, used oil and so forth. In rural districts, they could be co-fired by energy crops grown by local farmers—again minimising travel distances. It is worth noting that the normally excessive costs of running power-producing plants purely for such farmers are offset or subsidised by the money charged for handling urban and industrial wastes. I might add that the processes involved avoid the technical problems encountered by the ARBRE plant at Eggborough. I believe that renewable energy from waste could play as large a part as wind power in reducing the UK’s dependence on fossil fuel, while having the advantage of being non-intermittent and virtually removing the need for costly and environmentally damaging landfill in the UK. We undoubtedly need a mix of renewable energy,   ideally with as much as possible that is not-intermittent. But as a proven technology, given the political will, the network of district level plants, which I have described, could be in place by 2010, while other renewable technologies, such as wave and tidal, are developed for the 2010 to 2020 period.