Originally published @ 3:32 pm, Tue 14th Sep 2010
Nottingham City Council yesterday adopted an energy strategy for the local council and the city.
I spoke in the debate and the notes below are based on what I said.
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One of the defining features of the Con Dem government is their lack of ambition for the British people. Accept high unemployment rather than keep people in work.
We should try to keep the ambition high in all we do, and in adopting an energy strategy for a city, with elements that address the concerns of climate change, this shows a continued ambition.
I was seconding the report, so it fell to Cllr. Katrina Bull to explain the 15 page report and the 96 page strategy.
My role was more celebrate the ambition and the challenges to be met (hoping that this will inform informing the mini Stern review for Nottingham), touch on some of the technologies being embraced.
The challenges.
What do we know?
Certain trends in the world are facing us that we have to take up as both a challenge and an opportunity.
Those trends are globalisation, an ageing society, climate change and peak oil.
The big debate is
- whether we acknowledge those challenges,
- how we let our values determine the nature of our response to those challenges and
-ï in particular, the extent to which we believe markets will determine that response, as opposed to using planned interventions to shape the market and enable our response (social and socialist interventions, and green or environmental interventions).
The strategy shows how a city council, showing care and consideration for all and the environment can create a series of initiatives that help this city meet the challenges of the 21st century.
Economic considerations
Globalisation has meant for some time that we have had to increase the value we add to the quality of our manufactured and produced goods for us to continue to sell.
Developing clusters of commerce and expertise is one of the important responses to this challenge.
Nottingham has had a number of clusters. In time people will come to be astonished at how Nottingham changed from a city of lace, bicycles, cigarettes and medicines to a city of commercial data, games software, bio-technologies and medicines.
The strategy considers that the city has some potential to add an environmental technologies cluster to our portfolio.
An ageing society and the risks of heat-waves
Considering the social challenge, our ageing society, one of the concerns that I have tried to speak up on previously is that of the heat-wave.
One such killed thousands of people in France (mainly elderly) around 10 years ago, and some hundreds in Britain (possibly around 3 in Nottingham).
And of course it’s been a bit ironic in an era of global warming that our recently summers have not had anything close to a heat-wave.
It’s possible that climate change for us has meant the air stream that usually takes the rain to Iceland in the summer has been diverted to used in recent years.
But we have lost some of the basics in the design of housing, such as the awnings over windows that kept summer sunshine out of houses and allowed winter sunshine in.
We’ve driven on with insulation (the warmfront projects and the like have been very extensive in Nottingham).
Britain has struggled in embracing some of the options that North Europeans and Scandinavians have been much more comfortable with getting on with such as ground source heat pumping (allowing one system to both warm houses in winter and cool them in summer) for very little running cost. Partly of course because Britain had coal and had the empire – and that mindset permeates our thinking still – we can trade out way out of any crisis.
Maybe that thinking should stop. We’ve seen the Russians use gas supplies as a diplomatic weapon and we might wonder if it really is in our interests to be so dependent on them.
Maybe the same goes for future reliance on others for supplies of oil.
Peak Oil
What peak oil has shown is not a steady, continual growth in oil prices, but markets taking over, adding a premium to the purchase of oil for reserves (which took demand for other products away just at the time that the global bubble in mortgage lending and the associated re-selling of mortgages burst).
Peak oil was a factor in the global recession and we do need to be less dependent on oil.
Climate Change
The world has had been through dramatic changes in climate in the past, but never at such a time of human investment in our cities, towns, villages and infrastructure.
An Al Gore’s movie – “An Inconvenient Truth” – shows the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere projects a much larger change in climate than has been measured for the past (hundreds of ) thousands of years.
Changing to using the energy from the sun. Photo-voltaics.
So for reasons of globalisation, public health, climate change and national security, we do need to use energy better.
We should be able to keep going on this planet for as long as the sun allows.
And yet I understand we only use one half of a per cent of the energy the sun provides directly for our energy use.
That has to change.
And it’s exciting that through our drive on climate change, we’ve created a market whereby households can be reward for using photo-voltaics, and that the City Council could drive their use for our financial advantage too.
The risk to this approach is political.
Just as the last government’s green credentials were most severely tested when oil terminals were blockaded, the scheme to reward people for micro-generation of regeneration and sale to the grid is at risk from someone, somewhere saying it pushes up the domestic energy bills and we should let the market decide.
Green energy solutions
I’m proud of the green ambition that this city has shown on green solutions for the city; be it
- incineration of waste rather than land-fill;
- a district heating system that trumps other systems in the country or scale of service and for the temperature of water provided;
- the drive on insulation of homes in this city on a scale no-one else in the East Midlands is matching;
- on conviction for mass transport particularly in the fields of buses, and
- the iconic tram system started in partnership with the private sector.
Green ambition has served this city well and I pay tribute to the councillors and local politicians who have shown the imagination to be green and the steel to see it through.
I’ve also enjoyed the blue-sky thinking of Nottingham Development Enterprise, a partnership set up to act as a catalyst by promoting new ideas to tackle the challenges facing Nottingham.
I love the green ambition of Nottingham City Transport, who use bio-fuels sourced from processes developed in Sweden that turns wood in gas and charcoal, and charcoal into heat and ash fit for use as fertiliser.
And sometimes, you just wish that some of the innovations taking place, like the ability to break down wood for motor fuel, had been pioneered by Britain?
If it’s right that the University of Nottingham played a key part in the design of third generation wind turbines, why didn’t more of that translate into British light engineering production?
Are we fast enough on the implementation and roll-out of fuel cells that are far more efficient in producing energy from natural gas than burning?
Why can’t we do more with anaerobic digestion? Can’t we produce methane (natural gas) to the quality that allows it to be pumped directly into the mains?
Why couldn’t we be faster in produced the insulation for solid walls that can use the gypsum produced locally, but in combination for a product that only needs 5 mm depth instead of the inch and a half that the more traditional approach takes.
This city has thousand of properties built with walls without a cavity. We could readily use a product that requires for the walls only to be redecorated, rather than for all the electrical points and lighting points to be re-fitted, but it seems such products have been pioneered and made in France and Germany.
Having again worked with the national partnership, set up as a result of the Rio convention, to encourage the private sector to embrace green innovation, it is at times frustrating to see the opportunities that the British private sector have let pass by.
Maybe some would argue that the 600,000 jobs that are about to be released from the private sector will create the opportunity and the energy for the private sector to get on with such initiatives. I have my doubts and am much more inclined to believe predictions that what will happen is that we will lose 700,000 jobs in the private sector.
We need some kind of business focus to get more done on this and Nottingham, through NDE, had a model for showing how some of this could get done.
Mini-Stern review
And maybe, things likes a mini Stern Review for Nottingham could trigger the kind of focus and urgency we need.
I went to the Treasury on the day of the publication of the Stern Review, trading on the reputation Nottingham because we launched the local government declaration on climate change.
Something David Miliband was quick to celebrate when launching the Al Gore Movie in the UK. (Yes, I’m voting for David.)
Maybe Nottingham could encourage other authorities to do green energy strategies and mini-Stern Reviews as well.
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Both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats spoke for the strategy.
The Lib Dem spokesperson ventured the line – vote blue and yellow and get green.
I didn’t get chance to venture some ripostes, including complaining about them scrapping the Sustainable Development Commission and the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.
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