“unprepossessing” would be a kind word for this freebie. Perhaps “freebie” is a kind word for this freebie: it is probably more of a sample, and to the lucky recipient is probably only useful as a paperweight. It appears to be a rectangular brick of a rocky substance in which pieces of glass and ceramic are embedded. The surface is something like polished concrete or coarse marble, and one face is covered by a label with the logo of Energy Answers International. The label suggests that the object is a “boiler aggregate block”. The listed website is defunct. Even the website of Energy Answers International is defunct nowadays. So what on earth was this?

Well in truth we know what it was. But we still did some digging to refresh our memory and uncover the context.

This object was given out in 2008 by the developers behind the “N7 Resource Recovery Project”. “N7” because the project would have stood alongside the N7 road near Rathcoole, County Dublin, and “Resource Recovery Project” because this was definitely not to be confused with an incinerator – no sir, this was something completely different and not to be associated with so emotive a word. The plant was to take 365,000 tonnes of waste annually whilst simultaneously generating “enough energy to power over 43,000 homes”.

It never happened. The plant was refused planning permission by An Bord Pleanála in February 2009, and project sponsor Energy Answers International, a US company, packed up shop and retreated home. This small brick is probably the only physical evidence that remains of a great deal of its work in Ireland.

Who were they? Well Energy Answers ran waste-to-energy facilities in Massachusetts and New York, but sold its US operations to Covanta in 2007. Projects under development at the time were retained, and this rump business assumed the name Energy Answers International. The smaller entity concentrated on realising plans such as the N7RRP and a site in Baltimore, Maryland, under the leadership of the original co-founder of the group, Patrick Mahoney.

That original business, started in 1981, claimed to have technology for shredding waste to allow it to burn more efficiently, and also recover valuable metals and potentially usable aggregates. At the time this was innovative, and the boiler aggregate blocks produced during the process, of which our object is an example, were supposed to be amenable to construction applications.

Waste-to-energy is seemingly not a buoyant technology in its home US market, however, where the number of WtE facilities has decreased over the last decade. The US industry started to look elsewhere, including to Ireland, for growth. The site chosen by Energy Answers International was a quarry west of Dublin, which would have hidden much of the visual impact. The problem in this instance, however, was primarily the Dublin waste management plan of 2005, which envisaged a different facility (which was subsequently built) in Poolbeg.

This sort of development is almost guaranteed to provoke local campaigns, in this case Rathcoole Against Incineration Dioxins (RAID). Subsequently another Energy Answers International project was rebuffed in Baltimore in 2014, after activist opposition. Then in 2018 political support for a Puerto Rico-based site fell away.

The company founder died in 2016, and it appears that without his presence the business has withdrawn from the fray.

Why have we included this object in this series? Well it is because we believe that it is important to consider what didn’t happen alongside what happened, and to consider what alternative histories might have been.

Wouldn’t it have been a different world if ESB’s 1974 plans for a nuclear reactor at Carnsore Point had come to fruition? Or if Hess’s plans for an LNG terminal at Tarbert hadn’t been squashed? Or if the 2009 planning application for the North-South Interconnector had specified the correct pylon heights? Or if there had been an administration in office at Stormont capable of legally approving the resubmitted North-South Interconnector plans in 2018 for that matter?

It is also (whatever you think of waste-to-energy, or this project, or this developer) a salute to the project developer in general: that group of people with a vision who through ambition, persistence and taking risks often effect the real progress in our industry. Particularly those project developers who don’t have the safety net of developing under the aegis of a semi-state entity or large multinational.

There are always casualties: a more recent comparable example we might have chosen is Mayo Renewable Power, which failed in 2016, but it is the tombstone-like quality of this N7RRP freebie that attracted us. This is not an acrylic deal-commemorating tombstone like those that adorn a merchant banker’s cabinet; this marble-coloured slab is something much more sombre, and worthy of an epitaph.

Back to Part 1 or Part 4

The post A History of the Liberalised Electricity Industry in 25 Freebies Part 5: A Small Brick of a Concrete-Like Substance Given out by Energy Answers International (circa 2008) appeared first on ElectroRoute.

In his first Prime Minister’s Questions to Tony Blair back in 2005, David Cameron as Leader of the Opposition told the House of Commons, “I want to talk about the future”, and added (referring to the Prime Minister), “He was the future once.”

A nice jibe. David Cameron was also the future once – at that very moment in retrospect – but we all know the more recent history.

In this fourth part of our series A History of the Liberalised Electricity Industry in 25 Freebies our object is a pin badge featuring the logo of Nuclear Electric on the obverse and bearing the motto “Energy for the 21^st Century”.

So nuclear was the future once – and perhaps still is… who knows from this vantage point?

We mentioned science fiction author Isaac Asimov last time. In 1983 he was asked by the Toronto Star to make predictions for the year 2019 (see here)– subscription required), and amongst some eerily accurate ones he also foresaw solar farms on the Moon as the big thing in generation technology. This year. The future ain’t what it used to be, obviously.

What was Nuclear Electric then? Well until 1989 almost all generation in England and Wales was owned by the Central Electricity Generating Board, or CEGB. The privatisation strategy at the time was to split its fleet between Powergen plc and the larger National Power plc. National Power would be bigger than Powergen because it would inherit the fleet of nuclear stations as well as generating using coal and oil. That was the plan. In Scotland the nuclear assets of the South of Scotland Electricity Board were moved to Scottish Nuclear Limited.

Nuclear Electric sprang into being in late 1989, when it was belatedly realised that it would be impossible to privatise the CEGB’s nuclear generating stations at the same time as the other stations. Just before the Electricity Act 1989 was passed, the Government announced that it had found that the fleet of nuclear reactors, particularly those employing the ageing Magnox technology, were simply too expensive to compete in the new market, and were “ignominiously pulled”, to quote the opposition spokesperson at the time.

As it happened the 1970s and 1980s era Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor (AGR) stations were also pretty difficult to sell in the City too, and Nuclear Electric became home for them too. The ambition to privatise at least part of the nuclear industry remained, however, and in 1996 Magnox Electric was spun up to take away the Magnox stations of both Nuclear Electric and Scottish Nuclear, whilst the AGR and PWR sites were transferred to Nuclear Electric. Nuclear Electric was to be renamed the patriotic-sounding British Energy, and shares sold to the public.

It was not a good time for a company endowed only with inflexible baseload generation to be hitting the market, however. The reforms to the market known as the New Electricity Trading Arrangements (NETA) in March 2001, over-capacity as a result of the gas stations built in the 1990s, and global fuel price weakness combined to cause a wholesale price slump in England and Wales. This was more than British Energy could stand, and in 2002 the share price dived to below 10 pence. A rescue became necessary, and nationalisation effectively ensued.

So this particular badge could only really have appeared between roughly 1990 and 1997, and in all likelihood 1996, prior to rebranding and after becoming the designated vehicle for privatisation.

Subsequently British Energy was sold to EDF, and the more recent history of nuclear in Great Britain remains in the news, particularly with the saga of Hinkley C, due to come online around 2025, and the current debate about Sizewell ‘C’.

The debate about what the energy for the 21^st century should be is almost eternal, something like the old joke about how fusion generation is always been thirty years away. But, as with hemlines, there is something of a cycle in political support.

After the British Energy collapse, support for nuclear was somewhat in the doldrums. It had come unstuck because of its high costs, but behind the scenes there were still plenty of proponents. And in fact there was an emerging environmental selling point in an era of growing concern about carbon emissions. By 2006 Tony Blair had decided that nuclear generation was “back with a vengeance”:

“we have to debate very seriously whether we need to replace nuclear power stations to guarantee the future energy needs of this country; otherwise, we would be engaging in a collective dereliction of our duty”

It isn’t widely remembered that the future Prime Minister was in fact the young and ambitious Shadow Secretary of State for Energy mentioned earlier during the debates on the 1989 Electricity Bill. Contrast his 2006 enthusiasm with this one of his contributions to the 1989 debate on the same subject: “if the privatisation process has taught us anything, if it has brought us any benefit, it is that it has exploded once and for all the notion that we should go nuclear because it is cheaper”.

Plus ça change…

Back to Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3

The post A History of the Liberalised Electricity Industry in 25 Freebies Part 4: A Nuclear Electric Badge (circa 1996) appeared first on ElectroRoute.