Delivering a clean and abundant electricity supply is now feasible but our political and financial leaders dither, writes Tony Kinsella
PART OF what makes Barack Obama's election so invigorating is its promise of a return to smart governance where the functions of managing today and preparing tomorrow coexist. Most leaders now in office are products of nigh on 30 years of politics where the priority of today has relegated thinking about tomorrow to a dark, and frequently overlooked, corner. As Martin Kettle warned in the Guardianlast week, "The financial crisis is a seismic political event. It demands that politicians raise their game in response."
We have managers when we need visionaries. We desperately need to be able to recognise, and harness, obvious solutions, however innovative they initially appear to be. The obvious always becomes just that, obvious, once somebody has demonstrated that it works.
Our biggest river, the Shannon, offers a powerful example. Over its first 185km from Battlebridge, the river drops by a mere 12m as it drains a large part of the country. Nature transforms that ample but sluggish flow into a surge as the Shannon then drops 30m over the next 19km. In 1925 Irish engineers began to harness this raw power by building one of the biggest public infrastructure projects the country had known, the Ardnacrusha hydroelectric station.
When it opened in 1929 its 86 megawatt (MW) capacity was three times Ireland's existing electricity demand. The London Morning Postsarcastically worried that "the Irish people . . . with such an excess of power. . . may all be electrocuted in their beds."
Ardnacrusha provided thousands of jobs and laid the basis for the national electricity grid that transformed the Irish economy. Today its turbines still generate their 86MW, but that is now just under 2 per cent of national generating capacity. The Morning Postfolded in 1937.
Universal vehicle access to city centre streets is becoming a physical impossibility. When resources are scarce in relation to demand for them, a pricing system becomes unavoidable. Singapore was the first city to create a limited road pricing system in 1975. Technology made automated systems possible and London's Ken Livingstone introduced such a system in 2003.
Its success is demonstrated by smoother traffic in London, the generation of additional resources for the city's public transport, and that it has served as a model for similar systems in Rome, Valletta, Stockholm and a possible equivalent in New York.
The need to harness available power and price scarce resources is now obvious. When such investments can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and generate hundreds of thousands of jobs, the bottleneck should be one of potential deciders jostling for a place in the queue. Yet our "managers" fumble and hesitate, often sprinkling dribbles of support like an apprentice gardener hopefully scattering seeds into the wind. Achieving and delivering abundant clean electricity supplies is now technically feasible but a lack of political and financial leadership leaves us dithering while the planet warms.
The hydrography of the Congo is similar to that of the Shannon, albeit on a different scale. At 4,700km the Congo is the world's third longest river. It flows gently westwards for most of its length through a plateau, to fall 300m in its last 350km dash to the ocean. At the Inga Falls, it drops by 96m. The Inga I and II power stations have a capacity of 775MW, and an African consortium led by South Africa's state-owned power company, Eskom, plans to build the 39,000MW Grand Inga station. It could generate three times as much electricity as China's Three Gorges plant.
Planning is now well advanced and the chairman of Eskom Holdings, Reuel Khoza, said "we believe that in one fell swoop we could address the bulk of Africa's needs". Construction, estimated at $80 billion (€64 billion), is due to begin in 2010, and that's just part of Africa's potential.
Solar thermal power plants have proved themselves since 1969 when the first solar furnace opened at Font-Romeux in France. Commercial generating stations now operate in Spain, California, Nevada, and are under construction across the US and in Algeria, Morocco, Israel, Mexico, China, South Africa and Egypt. They use computer-controlled mirrors to focus solar heat on towers where steam is produced to spin the turbines. A molten salt mixture stores the day's heat, so the station can operate at night. Their output still costs about 50 per cent more than coal-generated power, but those costs fall with every new station.
Just across the Mediterranean lie the sun-soaked states of north Africa whose deserts receive 630,000TW hours of solar energy annually. The EU consumes just over 4,000TW hours of energy a year, or around 0.6 per cent of what the desert receives. The scientist-based Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Co-operation suggested that a cluster of solar plants, occupying an area about the size of Leinster, could supply all the EU's electricity needs. This cluster, together with a grid of high-voltage direct current transmission lines, would cost around €400 billion. That same grid could also transport wind-generated power from the Atlantic coasts.
The German government asked Hans Müller-Steinhagen of the German Aerospace Centre to vet the project, and he passed it with flying colours adding: "We don't have an energy problem, we have an energy conversion and distribution problem."
He is partly wrong. We have a political leadership problem. Societies in crisis are not overly forgiving of political leaders who fumble. If you don't believe me, ask George W Bush, John McCain - or Brian Cowen.