While reading the obituary of Sir Denis Rooke,1 in the warmth of my office with a thick blanket of freezing snow outside, I could not help but wonder at the changes that have taken place over the last 50 or so years.
As a teenager living in Fife, a coal mining area, the possibility of a UK shortage of fossil fuel never entered my head. There was plenty of the black stuff everywhere. In 1958, some 215 Mt of coal was mined in the UK. Electricity was generated from it. Towns' gas was derived from it. It was the motive power for trains and industry. The smoke belching from chimneys was so thick with soot that housewives could not hang out their washing. The main source of heat was the coal fire in the front room which also, by means of a back boiler, provided hot water. Insulation of buildings was poor. Unlike today, central heating was the preserve of a few and not considered essential. The winters were so cold that on more than one occasion the hot water storage cylinder in the cupboard to the side of the fireplace in the main room froze solid. Concepts such as global warming due to carbon emissions were not heard of.
Today the majority of the coal fields are closed. The Bings have been landscaped and the pithead structures have been removed. In 2007, only18 Mt of coal was mined in the UK and a further 45 Mt was imported. Coal now accounts for 35% of electricity generation. Towns' gas is replaced by natural gas sourced from the North Sea and increasingly from Russia and possibly, in the future, places even further afield, like Kazakhstan. Sir Denis Rooke was deeply involved in this change.
You would think that, in this wondrous electronic age and after the great strides that have been made in living standards, the sourcing of energy would have been cracked. But has it? Are we at a crossroads? Can we continually, ad infinitum, rely on imported fuels? Do we have to cut back on our consumption? Is renewable energy to be our saviour?
The papers in this issue do not specifically answer these questions. They look at current concerns for the near future energy supply; the prospects for bioenergy; and the means by which we can, by better insulating our buildings, reduce our reliance on energy to provide heat.
The media are continually telling us that there is a looming energy gap. In their paper, ‘Is there an ‘energy gap’?’ Collins et al. identify two categories of ‘gap’.2 One is insufficient fuel and the other is insufficient electricity generation capacity. Insufficient fuel is a product of the reducing output of North Sea gas and the accelerating need to import primary fuels to meet demand. Insufficient capacity is the product of ageing plant, the EU large combustion plant directive, which dictates that combustion plants that do not meet strict standards for emissions other than carbon dioxide, are required to close by the end of 2015, and the planned closures, without replacement, of the majority of the existing nuclear power stations by 2023.
Hammond et al.'s paper on ‘A bioenergy resource assessment for the south west of England’ indicates that by 2020 the potential bioenergy resource in the region could meet 4–9% of the region's primary energy consumption.3 This is between 30–60% of 15% of the region's total energy consumption which is similar to that envisaged by the government in their UK renewable energy strategy consultation (see previous papers by Roddy4 and Everett and Billington5 for more information). The consultation's vision was for bioenergy in the form of transport fuels, heat and electricity to provide 44% of the EU's 15% target for all UK energy to come from renewables by 2020.
The third paper in this issue, by Bonnett et al. ‘Ultra low U-value walls for low-carbon-dioxide homes’6 is very pertinent to today's need to reduce the UK's carbon emissions and reliance on fossil fuels (see Ko and Fenner for further information7). It should be of interest to those engaged in the design of low energy, near zero carbon emission buildings and the proposed ‘eco towns’. The paper provides details of six, ultra low energy ‘U’ value wall systems plus outline details of a solar facade system from which the heating effect varies daily and seasonally with the solar angle.
