Thursday, March 10, 2016

Why the Labour Party needs a new policy on Hinkley C nuclear power station

Hinkley B nuclear power station. C doesn't necessarily follow B.

The resignation of Electricite de France's Chief Financial Officer Thomas Piquemal – after opposing the announcement next month of an investment decision on the building of a new nuclear reactor at Hinkley Point C in the UK – is the latest in a long line of expert denunciations of this project.

The Labour Party has always supported this project. It has been championed by the British government since the days of Tony Blair, despite expert criticism over the years.

The mystery is not just why the Conservative Party stubbornly remains so wedded to it, but why the Labour Party does too. It should distance itself and come up with a new strategy – and below I outline why.

Hinkley C would be the first new nuclear power station to be built in the UK in two decades. Originally planned for completion in 2017, it is now unlikely to be built until at least 2025 – if ever.

Bloomberg quoted sources close to EDF as observing that the finance officer was forced to quit because he believed that proceeding with construction would be disastrous for the company, while the French and British governments are putting pressure on EDF to proceed anyway. EDF is 85% owned by the French state.

The French company is at the heart of electricity generation in Britain and been the most committed supporter of new nuclear build here.

If EDF and the French and British governments do announce next month that construction will proceed, it will be at a massive cost to the British taxpayer [see below for how much].

The British government faces serious questions as to why it is persisting with Hinkley C. To understand the seriousness of these questions we need to look at the history of Britain's enthusiasm for this particular plant and technology.

The proposal


NNB GenCo, a subsidiary created by EDF Energy to build and operate two new nuclear power stations at Hinkley Point C and Sizewell, proposes to build a twin reactor power station at Hinkley Point C using an EDF / Areva UK European Pressurised Water Reactor (EPR) design.

Each of the EPR reactors would generate 1600MW of electricity, enough to power about five million homes together. Regulatory and planning hurdles were surmounted in 2013, and yet the project still has not been given the go-ahead. Hinckley Point B was supposed to come to the end of its life cycle this year, but is likely to be extended for another four years.

It began with Tony Blair


In 2010, Hinkley Point was one of eight sites identified by the Government for new nuclear power stations. This followed a new enthusiasm by Tony Blair's Labour government for new nuclear power following almost two decades of disinterest in the subject following the Chernobyl disaster. Commentators at the time credited Tony Blair's conversion to lobbying by the nuclear industry using the argument that nuclear power could help to fight global warming.

David Kennedy, the watchdog Climate Change Commission's chief executive, went on to talk of the country's carbon emission reduction target of a 90% cut in power sector emissions being delivered by 40GW of new nuclear, wind and clean coal and gas power – equivalent to 25 large power stations.

At the same time, the government put its faith in carbon capture and storage (CCS), technology. CCS from the start was condemned by environmentalists as being too expensive to work and was also dubbed a white elephant. It was finally abandoned late last year by the Chancellor George Osborne when he withdrew £1 billion of public support for this technology.

In July of the following year EDF received permission from West Somerset district council to carry out new preparatory groundwork for Hinckley C, and the company lent its support to the local Bridgwater College’s new Energy Skills Centre in order to develop the skills necessary to build the power station.

The government received surprising support from a group of environmentalists led by Mark Lynas and George Monbiot, who broke ranks to back nuclear power. This shocked many other environmentalists such as Jonathan Porritt  and Jeremy Leggett. But even these supporters later came out and said that the Hinkley C deal with EDF was a disaster for the taxpayer and should be scrapped.

Targeting women


In 2012 EDF began a publicity campaign in the UK to soften up the public, which was predominantly anti-nuclear, including paying for editorial in women's magazines because its market research found that women were more like to oppose nuclear power than men.

A complaint I made to the Advertising Standards Authority was upheld, about the use of advertising from EDF that was not labelled as advertising and looked like editorial, in Marie Claire, the "magazine for women who want to think smart and look amazing". The articles were provided by EDF, under the headline “Nuclear power: the facts" but contained inaccuracies.

Even after the ASA ruled in my favour, EDF still continued making dubious claims in the pages of the magazine, such as that in the 2030s “nuclear reactors in Somerset and Suffolk could supply around 40% of the country's energy needs".

In its dreams, maybe. because even while this was going on the French National Audit Office had recommended abandonment of the EPR as too complex and expensive. As Tom Burke, founder director of E3G, commented at the time: "The French National Audit Office recently recommended dropping the EPR as too expensive. This repeated a recommendation made to (French President) Sarkozy two years ago by the former head of EDF, François Roussely, who saw no future for it."

So: as long ago as 2010 the French government was told by EDF's own chief that they shouldn't go ahead with Hinkley C.

"The decision to extend the life of EDF’s existing fleet of reactors in France will put huge pressure on its capital budget over the next decade," the NAO went on to say, and it could support no further expenditure on its balance sheets. This budget, to repair existing nuclear power stations, is now estimated at 50 billion euros, and that work clearly takes precedence over new build.

Six years after Roussely, Piquemal came to the same conclusion, and realised that EDF could not afford to build Hinkley C and repair its old reactors. Now he's gone too.

Anyway, back then, heedless of this 2012 report, British Prime Minister David Cameron made an agreement with the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy to boost nuclear co-operation, which Charles Secrett, co-founder of The Robertsbridge Group and ex-leader of Friends of the Earth  labelled "a massive rip-off for the the British taxpayer". In that letter, he and many other environmentalists warned the government that "EDF will have us over a barrel".

Last month Cameron made the same commitment he made to President Sarkozy to his successor, François Hollande.

Centrica jumps ship


Originally, Centrica, owner of British Gas, was part of a consortium with EDF and Areva to build the plant, but in 2013 it pulled out, citing "uncertainty about overall costs and the construction schedule". Centrica wrote off £200 million and launched a share buy-back scheme to return another £500 million of unused capital to its investors.

Other energy companies such as RWE and E.ON had already decided not to get involved with new nuclear build.

At the time the MP Martin Horwood, said, "like any sane investor in my view, Centrica has decided that it is not going to touch these new nuclear plans with a bargepole".

The British Government would have been wise to heed this comment, but instead continued to persist, opening negotiations with China over financing of Hinkley C which handed the 20% stake formally taken by Centrica to the state-owned Chinese group China Guangdong Nuclear Power Corp., along with access to state secrets concerned with nuclear power, which raised a few eyebrows connected to national security.

The government also awarded Hinkley C a Government Infrastructure Loan Guarantee, a type of financial support that is available to a large infrastructure project.

The plant was then expected to cost around £14 billion. Latest estimates are £18 billion. The Treasury agreed to guarantee some of the cost, reducing the impacts on EDF's balance sheet and allowing a low strike price for the electricity generated – despite a Coalition Government commitment at the time not to subsidise nuclear power.

The wrong technology


Part of the problem is that the UK government backed the wrong technology: the European Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR). Not a single one of these has been completed.

The first, the 1,600 megawatt Olkiluoto 3 plant in Finland, was begun in 2005 and should have gone on line in 2009. It is still not generating power. The initial cost estimate was €3.7 billion; this has now risen to €8 billion.

A prominent factor in Centrica's decision to pull out was EDF's progress in construction a second plant at Flamanville, France. When construction began in 2007 it was to have cost €3.3 billion, according to Le Monde. The price tag is now €10.5 billion and it is seven years late.
Martin Horwood, a British MP, in a debate in the UK Parliament [Hansards 7 Feb 2013 : Column 471] about subsidies for nuclear power in 2013 said: "The Energy Fair group of energy consultants and academics has stripped out all subsidies and says that the real cost of nuclear power is at least £200 per MWh, which is much more than the cost of offshore wind power at £140 per MWh or that of onshore wind power at less than £90 MWh."

British taxpayers will pay the French £45 billion for Hinkley C


The strike price was eventually settled at £92.5/MWh over 35 years.

Professor Tom Burke, who was an adviser to a previous Government, commented that: "this would require a subsidy of £1 billion/year above today’s wholesale price for electricity. This would lead to a transfer of £30 billion to EDF”. He's recently upgraded this estimate to £45 billion.

In order to continue to back the project EDF's costs will be underwritten by the French government as well, which announced last month that it would take this dividend in shares to help conserve cash for the company. [See link at the top of the article.]

EDF's stake in Britain


EDF has a key role to play in keeping the lights on in Britain with low carbon electricity. It already manages eight existing nuclear power stations at sites across the country.

It is also coming to the end, on March 31, of what is believed to be the UK’s largest ever electricity supply contract by annual volume ever awarded by the Government Procurement Service, to supply an annual electricity consumption of about 7.6TWh over four-years to a "a vast range" of public buildings across England and Wales, from inner city academies to museums, from central Government departments to major hospitals, from defence sites, courts, to the British Museum, equivalent to powering 2.3 million typical households. 

Because it was supplied from nuclear power, this contract helped the Government meet its Greening Government Commitments of a 25 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2015 from a September 2010 baseline. Even so, the government failed to meet its own targets for cutting the environmental impact of the state’s operations, according to its last annual report.

What to do with the waste?


Meanwhile, there remains the problem of the storage of nuclear waste. The UK doesn't know what to do with its existing nuclear waste, let alone any future waste. The UK's Public Accounts Committee has published a damning report on the subject. Its Chair, Margaret Hodge, noted that: "a solution to the problem of long-term storage of the waste is as far away as ever. Taxpayers will have to foot the bill" and they "are not getting a good deal".

Questions to answer


Given all of this, the British and French governments have two questions to answer.

Firstly: why do they persist in pursuing EPR technology when, for as long as they have been doing so, they have been warned against it on cost and technical grounds?

This is hugely important, especially in the context of the UK government's widely criticised energy policy, which includes many government U-turns on support for renewable energy in the last six months, an increase in support for fossil fuels, persistent backing of shale gas, leading to criticism by many investors, such as asset manger Schroders, that confidence in the UK energy plans has “evaporated”. As a result of policy inconsistency and unpredictability Schroders said last week it would no longer recommend clients invest in the energy sector.

At least the British government realised the folly of continuing to pursue unproven and over-expensive carbon capture and storage. With this precedent it should now abandon EPR.

The second question is: why does the British government instead not aggressively pursue energy efficiency, when it is proven to be far more cost-effective than investing in new generating plant, especially nuclear power?

Only last week the government's own National Infrastructure Commission issued a report, Smart Power, arguing that a smarter use of power built around three innovations, interconnection, storage, and demand flexibility, could save consumers up to £8 billion a year by 2030, help the UK meet its 2050 carbon targets, and secure the UK’s energy supply for generations.

In the same week, a report from UNEP shows that the potential for energy policy to increase energy efficiency in industry alone is massive. [Disclosure: I am one of the authors.]

In a webinar to promote the report's release, co-author Kit Oung made the overwhelming case, based on research: "A report from the University of Cambridge has said that 73% of energy used in industry can be saved using currently available technical know-how and technology. This could result in 22 power stations not needing to be built in 2020 if just between 21 and 47% of those savings were to be achieved in the UK. And yet, according to the International Energy Agency less than 1% of global average energy savings are achieved by industrial energy efficiency around the world," he said.

The above statistics, taken together, point to a complete failure to use economic and scientific evidence in the design and implementation of a sensible UK energy policy that would put security, efficiency, emission reductions and value for money at its heart.

It's unlikely that we will get a proper answer to either of these questions from the British Government. So we must supply our own. As another of the report's authors, Stephen Fawkes, puts it: "The problem is, politicians like big projects. By contrast, energy efficiency, although much more beneficial, is almost invisible, and is certainly lots of small projects."

And energy projects don't come much bigger than nuclear power. As Jimmy Cliff might have put it: "the bigger they come, the harder they fall."

Labour must now choose


All of this shows why Labour finally see the folly of its continuing support for Hinkley C.

It must condemn the deal. It must use this stance to attack the folly of Tory policy.

And it must come up with a clean, green, nucelar-free low carbon energy policy based on demand reduction and demand management, renewable energy, community energy and energy storage – as Germany is doing – which would save everyone money: industry, consumers and the taxpayer.

Further Reading: Books by David Thorpe


Monday, March 07, 2016

Four emerging solutions to the need for cheap storage for renewable electricity

Westmill Solar Park with part of Westmill Wind Farm in the background, on the Wiltshire/Oxfordshire border in England. [photo: Neil Maw, Westmill Solar Co-operative]

We can’t control when the wind blows, and the sun doesn't shine at night, so with an increased proportion of these renewable energy resources supplying electricity to the grid, it means that countries will more and more have to balance overall electricity supply and use better in order to meet demand the most efficiently and economically.

Sometimes too much electricity is being generated, leading to the possibility of wastage, and sometimes there is not enough to satisfy demand, in which case either more polluting coal power stations must be brought online, prices put up, or, at worst, power cuts implemented.

The much sought-after solutions for this problem are the missing link in the widespread adoption of renewable electricity. They will either be cheap, easy-to-use energy storage or better, dynamic, management of electricity demand.

Many technologies are vying to be the go-to solution for filling this gap.

While different storage technologies such as lithium ion batteries or compressed air storage are becoming interesting for their practicality and price, more imaginative, novel solutions are also emerging. Here is a quick overview of four of them, including a new battery which could not only fit the bill best but also desalinate saltwater while it is being charged.

1. Get paid to use energy

For some time, several countries' grids have been running systems which reward industrial users who have their own spare generating capacity for selling it to the grid when there’s not enough coming from traditional power stations. In the UK, this has been achieved under a scheme called Short-Term Operating Reserve (STOR) that has been run by Flexitricity with the National Grid.

The same company is now operating 'Demand turn-up'. This is a demand management solution that will actually pay customers to use electricity when there’s too much wind, rather than it being wasted. Participating users are rewarded for increasing consumption or reducing generation at their industrial sites, so that the National Grid doesn’t have to pay wind farms to shut down, as it does now.
Small generators can be paid to reduce generation for the toughest half-hours in a high wind times. The more a generator is used in normal business activities, the more it can earn. These include operators of Combined Heat and Power (CHP), anaerobic digestion, including sewage and landfill gas, and small hydro generators with reservoirs.

Business energy users with flexible needs are the ones who can benefit from this scheme. They can earn by consuming more when wind output is high. Such needs include water pumping, heat and cold storage, space cooling and any non time-dependent manufacturing purposes.

Flexitricity’s chief strategy officer, Dr Alastair Martin, says this idea marks a significant milestone in the evolution of how businesses consume electricity. “It opens up a world of possibilities for business and for renewables developers. Currently, when the wind is at its strongest, the Grid turns large power stations down or off. But it can’t turn down all of them, so sometimes it has to turn off some of the wind farms. This wastes a free resource.

“Now, businesses can boost productivity for minimal extra cost and are incentivised to do so. In turn, the Grid can increase the amount of electricity distributed to homes from clean, renewable energy sources.”
This is in essence an evolution of Economy 7 – brought in to encourage use of nuclear power since those generators can't be turned off at night – made possible with smart tech. But there's another old idea out there that's being given a new, more reevant lease of life with smart tech.

2. Community storage

In America, electric cooperatives are set to roll out the use of electric water heaters as a demand response (DR) and energy storage tool in their service territories, following the launch this month of The National Community Storage Initiative. This is designed to promote growth in a novel, community-based approach to energy storage dubbed “community storage”, and is supported by legislation passed last year, the Energy Efficiency Improvement Act of 2015.

Energy co-ops have been in existence in the USA since the 1930s, to bring supply, price and environmental benefit especially rural members. They are a much more recent phenomenon in Europe.

The Energy Cooperative of America already offers its New York State customers a Demand Response Program in conjunction with the New York Independent Systems Operator (NYISO). In this scheme, businesses that participate are rewarded for temporarily reducing their electricity load when demand needs could outpace supply. Customers contribute to energy load reduction (decreasing usage or using onsite generators) during times of peak demand between the hours of 11AM to 6PM.

But, as with the Flextricity scheme in the UK, this new proposal would store surplus energy in residential electric water heaters to avoid it being wasted. There are 50 million such tanks the USA so this would create a significant storage resource with substantial environmental and cost benefits, according to a new report, The Hidden Battery: Opportunities in Electric Water Heating
commissioned from the Brattle Group by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), the environmental organization Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Peak Load Management Alliance (PLMA), and Great River Energy (GRE).

The storage is thermal (so can’t feed electricity back to the grid), and, unlike community renewable energy, where multiple customers buy in to a project at a single site, the storage tanks are distributed throughout the co-op's territory. Customers would use the hot water later, when they need it, and be rewarded with reduced electricity bills. This 'fast response' solution as it is called will save far more carbon and money than other related techniques, as shown in this graph:

This is already being done in Minnesota, where Great River Energy has been able to store a gigawatt-hour of thermal energy each night by charging the electric resistance water heaters of 65,000 end-use members.

Currently it only works with water heaters from three specific manufacturers that offer high efficiency. They are grid-connected from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., Connett said, and then when the DR program is in effect, they are disconnected until the next charging period. 

“When the wind is blowing or the sun is shining, large capacity water heaters can be enabled to make immediate use of that energy to heat water to high temperatures. The water heaters can be shut down when renewables are scarce and wholesale costs are high.” The water can then be used whenever it is needed.

Keith Dennis, NRECA’s senior principal for end-use solutions and standards, said: “Co-ops have been controlling large water heaters for decades in order to reduce demand at peak times, which also reduces members’ electric bills. A community storage program using advanced water heaters allows us to do even more: we can store energy, we can optimize the power grid by shaping demand and we can integrate more renewable resources”.

3. Lithium Ion: the current favourite

The current favourite for battery storage is lithium ion – the type found in many computing devices and electric cars.

One backer of this technology is John Hingley, who runs Renovagen, a company making off-grid roll-outable photovoltaic (solar) power generators for emergency relief and military users. His system is driven out to a location and simply rolled over the ground. Within minutes power is being generated and stored. "We can fit 18kWp in the small trailer/air-pallet container in the video and up to 300kWp or more could fit in a 40ft shipping container - all deployable by vehicle tow in a few minutes. Energy storage and inverter systems are built-in – it's a "micro-grid in a box" – also enabling multiple units to be run in parallel to build up larger micro-grids."

Rollable PV being used by the military.

Right now he uses lithium ion as it's cheapest. "We've already seen proposals for [lithium] storage systems come down from £1,500/kWh three years ago to £350/kWh today. Driven by the EV industry, like Tesla's Powerwall offer for solar-powered homes and its Powerpack offer for businesses and utilities, that trend will continue," he says.  "The solar + storage tipping point for 'off-grid parity' (same price as diesel) in most off-grid areas of the world I believe is broadly around £2/W and £250/kWh installed and we are getting very close to that point. Some options are already there, it's just a matter of how do you deploy?"

The container holds lithium ion batteries for storing the solar power.

Hingley is looking forward to the day perovskite PV is commercialised. "We're currently using CIGS PV, but the potential with perovskites (in particular, if printable under atmospheric conditions) is for significant cost reductions and efficiency improvements that could make this sort of technology the cheapest way of providing portable power almost anywhere in the world.

"In combination with leaps forward in the cost effectiveness of energy storage technology this can become hugely competitive and displace diesel burn across a wide range of industries – disaster relief, humanitarian, military, mining, agriculture and other remote commercial and industrial applications."

4. On the cusp: the battery that runs on saltwater

But lithium is not cheap, found in remote areas of the world, and comparatively rare. What if reliable and safe batteries could be made from something really common – and solve another problem brought about by climate change and rising populations: the increasing scarcity of drinkable water?

Step forward sodium batteries, that run on saltwater – sodium makes a salt, is similar chemically to lithium, and makes up more than 2.6 percent of the Earth's crust.

Laurence Croguennec, a material scientist at the CNRS Institut de Chimie de la Matière Condensée de Bordeaux, says that "As the chemistry is very close to that of the lithium battery, from that point of view there are no major difficulties; the mechanisms are the same ones and all the industrial processes for their production are the same. One remaining problem is that sodium is less efficient as a charge carrier, however. A sodium battery loses 0.3 volts as to compared to a lithium battery. You have to develop materials that can function at higher voltages and that provide ample capacity."

But the technology is advancing fast. Last December Wattstor, a British company, announced it had made the first British installation of sodium ion batteries made by US company Aquion on the premises of Henbo Energy Storage, a newly launched storage installation company in Portadown, Northern Ireland.

Aquion Energy's M-Line Battery Module, 22kWh on a PV off-grid system in Hawaii, installed a year ago.

This battery is first one to receive certification for the maximum use of available recycled materials and an optimisation of the amount of the product that can be recycled. Wattstor Director Michael Danes insists the technology has a long (expected) lifespan. “These new batteries use a completely organic electrolyte in the form of saltwater and a potential lifespan of 15-20 years. In a market dominated by lead acid and lithium, it is encouraging to know that sustainable battery chemistries are being developed.”

The unspectacular looking Wattstor installation – the black box is the sodium batteries.

But your devices may soon be running off something like this – a small, rechargeable sodium battery.
James Dean, manager of rival company Circuitree, says the batteries will eventually be cheaper than lithium ion. “Due to the abundant nature of materials in their construction, this allows us to deliver much greater capacity at lower cost, giving our customers increased energy independence, affordably, from a unique and sustainable product”.

That's good news. But it gets better. Researchers at the University of Illinois have last month reported that they have come up with a refined design of the sodium battery that does all of this but also removes the salt ions from the water in the process to create drinkable water. In other words, it has the potential in the future to be used in a solar powered desalination plant that also stores the electricity generated in the daytime so that it can power itself when the sun goes down.

Here's how it works. In a regular sodium battery, one electrode receives desalinated water, but only for a while, as the sodium ions then flow with the current back the other way. The Illinois researchers have developed a filter to stop this occurring while letting the battery continue to work.

On of the researchers, Kyle Smith, explains that "In a conventional battery, the separator allows salt to diffuse from the positive electrode into the negative electrode. That limits how much salt depletion can occur. We put a membrane that blocks sodium between the two electrodes, so we could keep it out of the side that's desalinated."
Schematic of the battery design. Courtesy: Journal of The Electrochemical Society, 163 (3) A530-A539 (2016)

The researchers, (the other one is Rylan Dmello), have modelled how their device might perform with salt concentrations similar to seawater, estimating that it could recover around 80 percent of desalinated water. But seawater contains other contaminants so work is ongoing to test it using real seawater.

Most water desalination uses reverse osmosis, which pumps water under high pressure through a membrane to separate the salt. This is expensive and energy-intensive forcing reverse osmosis plants to be large in order to be cost-effective. The Illinois researchers believe that their design will use very little energy to extract the salt, meaning small-scale, desktop desalination could be possible.

Andy Glass, Executive VP, Chief Technology and Marketing Officer at JET Recycling America, Inc., comments that: "Massive scale energy storage and balancing is the biggest obstacle to proliferation of sustainable energy technologies like wind and especially solar. Shortage of potable water and arable soil are huge environmental threats. It's exciting to think that a combined solution like this could be scalable to global needs. This could also be a tremendous boon to remote areas where increased access to electrical power and potable water can change and even save lives.

"Water production from this method does not have to be compared to mass-scale desalinization needed for crop irrigation, for example. Production of safe drinking water is a different problem and more urgent in many areas of the world. This technology sounds like it may be implementable first and most practically as a local solution."

Peter Murphy, the Founding Director at UK Water Ltd., agrees, calling it "an excellent solution for water stressed areas," adding that: "If we can address the energy and waste salt issues then this has real potential."


Wednesday, March 02, 2016

Best Practices and Case Studies for Industrial Energy Efficiency Improvement

cover of Best Practices and Case Studies for Industrial Energy Efficiency Improvement
My latest publication is a collaboration with two other experts, Steve Fawkes and Kit Oung, on good energy efficiency policy for the industrial sector.

It is published by the Copenhagen Centre on Energy Efficiency on behalf of the United Nations Environment Program and called Best Practices and Case Studies for Industrial Energy Efficiency Improvement.

Click on the above link for a free download of this 170pp A4 PDF.

Improving energy efficiency in the industrial sector is being prioritised in many countries. Investment to improve industrial energy efficiency can deliver large energy savings, improved productivity, and reduced environmental pollution.

However, in many cases information, financial, and regulatory barriers are continuing to prevent enterprises from fully realising the potential opportunities offered by improving energy efficiency.

A wide range of policies and programmes can be adopted to help overcome these barriers.

Countries are keen to learn from international experiences on how to accelerate energy efficiency improvements, particularly the various approaches towards policy making, their effectiveness, and disseminating success stories and best practices.

So this book is aimed at supporting countries in industrial energy efficiency policy making through sharing international experiences.

It explains preconditions for successful implementation of policies and programmes while providing concrete examples.

The overall objective is to stimulate joint actions from business, governments, and civil societies to help realise the goal of the United Nations Secretary General’s Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) initiative, of doubling the global energy efficiency improvement rate by 2030.

This goal is in fact extremely modest. The potential has been demonstrated to be many times more.

David Thorpe is the author of: