We’re sitting in the Llangammarch Institute, blinds pulled as tightly as possible over the windows due to fabulous Mothers’ Day sunshine outside. Inside, we can’t afford to let our minds wander to the temptation of beautiful sheep-scattered hills – we’re facing a serious challenge. We’re here to try to save future generations from the climate emergency, caused by our own inadvertence in creating a society with sky-rocketing energy consumption. We’re playing The Generation Game. No, not that one.
A board on the table shows us the daily power demand curves for Wales in summer and winter, as projected for 2030. Our task is to work out how we can supply that demand while meeting two criteria. First, because the Welsh government wills it, power must be delivered with the lowest possible carbon emissions; preferably none. Second, as otherwise that government would fall, power must be supplied at the lowest possible cost. These constraints confront us with difficult discussions.
The rules of the game
Each team is given a fixed budget of £305bn, so we have plenty of money to throw at the problem. We can build wind, solar, hydropower, gas, coal, or even nuclear facilities, if we conclude – despite the obvious political delicacy – that would be the best approach. None have zero carbon emissions due to their manufacturing and construction. But some promise much lower carbon emissions than others.
We also have the luxury of an existing solution: gas-fired power stations, which can easily deliver both the baseload and variable, brief peaks of power needed. So we know there’s no real risk of the lights going out. But we also know the first criterion, low carbon, negates a purely fossil fuel solution. And we know nuclear power is a nearly impossible sell, given people’s memories of both Chernobyl and Fukushima.
We’re going to have to try harder. Mugs of tea and coffee, biscuits and brownies in hand, we gird ourselves for the task.
Practicalities and penalties
Renewables, in the form of wind, solar, and hydro (whether tidal or reservoir-based) are obvious solutions. But the rules of the game are designed to make us think, not just idealistically, but practically.
In the real world, the government – and so, ultimately, the consumer – pays penalties to wind producers if, for any technical reason, they’re unable to sell the power produced to the grid. When the wind doesn’t blow, not only are we unable to use the windpower option, we have to pay a penalty for that. And building an excess of wind and solar supplies could actually lose us the game, due to escalated penalties.
When starting the game we throw a pair of dice to find out whether, on this first summer day that we’re trying to power, there’s any useful sun or wind available. Every time the dice are kind, we jump for the obvious solution and serve whatever renewable power there is to our consumers.
But it rapidly becomes clear that, even if we spend our billions building huge wind and solar capacities, the amount available varies so much that we simply can’t depend on them. On many days they’ll provide a part, but rarely the whole. And there are too many days when they supply nothing at all.
A third but unspoken rule of the game is: never let consumers go short. If demand peaks, supply must rise to meet it. It’s obvious – a cold winter night when towns around Wales have no lights, cookers, or heating is a social and political nightmare.
The holy grail
In the Institute’s artificial world, where build cost is no object and low carbon more important than political niceties, every team ends up opting to build enough nuclear power stations to provide the year-round baseload. Having been active in Scientists Against Nuclear Energy at university in the 1980s, I’m astounded to find myself agreeing: there really is no other low-carbon alternative.
I console myself that nuclear energy, and in particular nuclear safety, have come a long way since then. It’s fortunate that none of us players are politicians, who would have to justify this ‘dash for nuclear’ to voters. We did invite such politicians to the game, but none wanted to participate.
Unfortunately, I have to explain to my team that the holy grail of nuclear fusion – cheap, inexhaustible, non-fissile nuclear energy – is not yet an advanced-enough technology to become commercial in the 21st century. Likewise, ‘green hydrogen’ produced using excess renewable energy when available, won’t be developed and stored at a sufficient scale any time soon. A glimmer of hope in our team had flared up, flickered fitfully, then fizzled out.
But surely, with the baseload taken care of by our newly acceptable nuclear, a low carbon endpoint for our game is fairly straightforward. And indeed, for the summer stage we do just fine – a nuclear baseload, the renewables fortune grants us, and a hydro-powered top-up get us all the way through. Even in the winter my team comes fairly close, since by amazing chance we manage to throw double-sixes on our dice twice. Renewables to the rescue!
Biting the bullet
But pride going before a fall, for the next day the dice give us what Germans call a dunkelflaute, a day with neither wind nor sun to speak of. And – although we haven’t invested in an interconnector to the continent – we know any top-up power we might have bought from there would almost certainly be fossil-fuelled, since dunkelflautes tend to happen across swathes of Europe at the same time. No one will have spare renewable energy to sell us on a high-demand day in Wales when we have none of our own.
We’ve already turned up all the nuclear and hydro power we’ve built to reach the target, but it doesn’t add up to enough to power the peak. What should we do?
We’d like to take some of our remaining budget and build more hydro, but overheard the dungeonmaster explaining something to another team. Having, like us, built 20GW of hydro already, they were going to drown Wales if they built any more. So we’re cornered. After two hours of tweaks and discussion, we have to bite the bullet and build gas power.
By the end of the game every team has had to accept that someone, somewhere, is going to be burning gas to keep the lights on for Wales’ peak winter demand in 2030. And though gas is currently a cheap power source, on the board we’ve created it’s going to be tricky and expensive.
Standing idle for most of the year, the power plants will deteriorate, and the North Sea platforms that produce their fuel will be worse. Choosing gas purely as occasional back up means the cost of enormous maintenance efforts on an unwanted asset. The market isn’t going to like it.
The new normal
The sun is still shining when we step outside, though a brisk March wind keeps the shade temperature down. On reflection, we should have let it shine inside. Keeping the lights on with curtains drawn has contributed, if only a tiny fraction, to increasing Wales’ power consumption today.
But we can shrug it off. All of our generation would have made the same decision. The lighting is there, the switch is there. And even in remotest Breconshire, few of us live so off-grid that flicking the switch means going out to a shed to turn on a generator. It’s normal, easy, and natural to take whatever power we want, when we want it – and the hardest thing in the world to change our habits.
If anyone is interested in playing the Generation Game themselves, do get in touch at secretary@cambrian-mountains.co.uk
