The great recoupling

Locals in the vicinity of the Hinkley Point C nuclear power development are up in arms about a plan by EDF, the project’s owner, to flood several hundred acres of farmland for salt marshes. The idea began life as an alternative to the range of barriers and deterrents that would supposedly stop a few dozen tonnes of fish getting swallowed up by the power station’s immense seawater-cooled condensers every year. It may have been cheaper, so EDF reckoned, to “offset” the damage rather than try to prevent it, by creating alternative habitat for marine life in this small corner of Gloucestershire. 

Given the numbers of fish concerned, the sums of money involved with the mitigation are astonishing

Given the uproar, it seems unlikely that EDF will be allowed to go ahead with the saltmarsh idea in lieu of the acoustic deterrent plan — although there were rumours over the weekend that they might have ended up being required to implement both solutions as “mitigation” against the killing of what is, in fact, a fairly trivial number of fish. Modelling estimates that one single salmon is expected to be hoovered up by the seawater intake every 12 years or so, along with 47-100 twaite shad. 

Given the numbers of fish concerned, the sums of money involved with the mitigation are astonishing. Others have already written about the absence of perspective, and the way in which the modern British state considers its priorities in silos, insisting on achieving optimal results in each metric, even when doing so negatively impacts on another of its priorities. On any given area — and especially on anything to do with wildlife and the environment — taking a pragmatic approach that accounted for trade-offs would almost certainly fall foul of judicial review. Rafts of quasi-constitutional legislation, passed by previous governments to signal some vague political aspiration, are enforced by the courts to keep the regulatory architecture of the nation locked in a perpetual battle of the perfect against the good. 

Instead, I would like to consider what this episode tells us about our long-term relationship with obtaining energy, and the resources we deploy to put it to our own uses. Human progress is inextricably linked to our ability to harness energy from the resources with which nature has endowed us. Indeed — our ability to do so is a handy proxy for human development. The most basic way our ancestors did this was by eating things they hunted or found; our bodies serving as primitive power stations turning these sources into the energy to do things with. Once they learned the trick, they could also burn wood for heat. 

For hundreds of thousands of years, that was pretty much as far as it went in terms of mankind’s ability to turn the things around us into the power to do things; only marginally more than that of any other member of the animal kingdom. Only around 12,000 years did humans begin experimenting with the husbandry of animals and the cultivation of crops. Not only did this increase the amount of food that became available — and thus the amount of work a human being could do themselves — it put the stomachs of cattle and donkeys at humanity’s disposal for additional labour. 

This change gave an inherent value to particular pieces of land, which became tied up in permanent patterns of usage. Where previously humans may have had a range which they considered their territory, with the dawn of pastoralism and agriculture, systems were required to ensure the security and ownership of land to ensure that it could be devoted to the conversion of energy from the sunlight into the food that would sustain people or animals. Over the course of the millennia, more and more of the world’s land would be given over to this purpose until, in some parts of the world, every acre of productive land was employed in one manner or another the sustenance of human life. 

Yet still, for the vast majority of the time since the dawn of agriculture, the only power available to human beings was that of our own muscles or those of draught animals, and wood for combustion. The adaptation of wind and water power was patchy and slow, and subject to regular reversals as civilisations rose and fell. Water mills were common across the Roman world, only to all but vanish for several centuries after its collapse. It has become unfashionable to talk of that era as “the Dark Ages” — however, archeological and ice records are clear in terms of the collapse of the exploitation of energy generation sources that took place; in transport, smelting and the production of food. 

Relatively advanced pre-modern societies consumed huge quantities of wood for use as fuel. The great fuel demands of metallurgy meant that wood was also in massive demand as a building and construction material — especially for ships. As with the cultivation of land for food or for the grazing of livestock, the growth of wood was another burden of human energy generation that required a great deal of land. Natural and ancient forest was encroached upon, to be replaced by plantations of fast growing trees to be burned or built with. 

England was one of the first places to adopt horizontal axis windmills in the late 12th and early 13th century. Along with the widespread adoption of three field crop rotation, this was the beginning of a major transformation over the course of the last millennium that would see Western Europeans harnessing greater quantities of energy without a commensurate increase in the amount of land taken up by the activity. Developments such as these slowly allowed early modern Europeans to rise back to the standards of living attained in classical antiquity. But it seemed impossible to surpass that level substantially; we were constrained by natural limitations regarding the energy we could extract from the world around us. 

England in particular was limited by shortages of wood, with forests around population centres heavily depleted by the 16th and 17th centuries. Wages were high, reflecting a shortage of people to do all of the work that needed to be done, but the country was already reaching the limits of the numbers who could be sustained given the available farmland. There was little scope for further economic specialisation given the population ceiling that this imposed. The invention of steam power transformed this calculation. Not only did it allow the pumping of water out of mines to facilitate the industrial extraction of coal, but it vastly increased the productivity of individual workers. This in turn enabled the export of manufactured goods, which financed the import of food. This meant that the population was free to grow beyond the limit imposed by the availability of land. 

We are encouraged nowadays to think of the industrial revolution in Britain as the victory of the blackened chimney stack and furnace over the green, prelapsarian idyll that came before. Many people remember the cringeworthy dancing NHS nurses as the silliest element of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics, but his two-dimensional depiction of 19th century industrialisation far surpassed that in its parochial moral superiority. As already mentioned, the primary effect of the industrial revolution was an increase in the population — and those of us who are alive today as a result of that live vastly more urbanised lives than our forebears. But its most striking feature now that we can look back on at a couple of centuries’ remove is how little pressure this population explosion exerted on the land itself. 

The demise of wood as the primary fuel source took a long time to work through. My maternal grandfather’s own maternal grandfather continued to work as a woodcollier into the early 20th century. But it has now enabled huge swathes of English forests to recover. We now have more woodland than at any time since the 15th century, and we are projected to regain the 15 per cent of canopy cover that the country last had at the time of the Domesday book in advance of 2050. 

Nevertheless, coal mining and burning came with its own environmental impacts. At its peak, there were up to 2,600 mines operating across the country, with the fumes from coal fires in homes, as well as the output of factories, making the air noxious in populated areas. For domestic lighting, the primary source in the 19th century was candles made from spermaceti — a substance found in the head cavities of sperm whales, the hunt for which drove that species to the brink of extinction. But yet again, the steady transition to more efficient means of harnessing energy would ride to the rescue, with the roll out and adaptation of electricity over the early 20th century. This meant that the immediate pollution could be concentrated to fewer locations, and eventually moved further away from population centres, improving air quality. It also meant that homes could be lit by electric light rather than bits of whale. 

Over the course of the middle and later 20th Century, gas was steadily adopted as a replacement for coal in domestic heating and then in power generation. The burden of energy production in Britain was shifted from thousands of coal mines across the country to a handful of drilling rigs in the north sea. By 2000, Britain had the capacity to generate 23 gigawatts of electricity from no more than 34 gas plants — which combined probably took up somewhere in the region of four to five thousand acres of land. To generate that quantity of power from wood, you would need to harvest a similar area of woodland, every single hour. 

It is almost impossible to generate electricity, unit for unit, with anywhere near as little impact on the natural world as will be achieved by Hinkley Point

The great hope was that this great decoupling of our energy needs from the land (and from the heads of whales) would be accelerated even further by the advent of nuclear power. However, it wasn’t to be — at least not in Britain. Instead, we have shifted to wind and solar. Whereas 5000 acres of gas power can produce 23 GW of electricity, since the late 1990s we have built 16 GW of wind farms which collectively occupy nearly half a million acres of land. We have an additional 12.5 GW of ground-mounted solar occupying around 70,000 acres. Bear in mind, even these eye-stretchingly low efficiencies of generation capacity per acre are in fact enormously flattering to the renewables, given that the reliability factor for solar and onshore wind are both considerably less than 10 per cent, compared with 95 per cent for gas. And in terms of the amount of wind and solar we are planning to build to hit Net Zero targets, we’ve barely got started. 

Suddenly, a few hundred acres of farmland being flooded and transformed into salt marsh doesn’t seem anywhere near as profligate as a waste of land, especially given that Hinkley Point C will generate nearly 3.5 GW of power with a 90 per cent reliability factor.  And yet, it is still a reversal of the principle of decoupling energy from land use. It is almost impossible to generate electricity, unit for unit, with anywhere near as little impact on the natural world as will be achieved by Hinkley Point, or indeed any modern nuclear reactor. But our shortsighted regulations insist we measure it against not producing any power at all.