ZeroCarbonBritain 2030 - A new energy strategy to be launched in May 2010
A great many things have changed since the Centre for Alternative Technology launched the first Zero Carbon Britain report in June 2007...
Many people are only now grasping the serious nature of our present human predicament. Senior experts, scientists, NGO’s and political leaders are beginning to appreciate that the most recent evidence on both climate security and energy security reveals a situation more urgent than had been expected, even by those who have been following it closely for decades. In addition, the crisis in the global economy has painfully illustrated the cost and consequences of realising there are problems in the pipeline and not taking the required action in time.
In May 2010 the Centre for Alternative Technology launches its new report ZeroCarbonBritain 2030 - a policy and technology scenario designed to expand on the detail and answer questions raised by our initial report. Through integrating cutting-edge findings from leading experts and researchers from a variety of organisations and disciplines, ZeroCarbonBritain 2030 explores just what it is Britain must do to meet the scale and speed of the challenges defined by the most recent climate science.
A great many solutions to climate security are the same as solutions to energy security and to long-term economic recovery. A flagship of a new economic approach, ZeroCarbonBritain 2030 will show how we can re-focus the ingenuity of the finance sector on the actual challenges at hand. Rather than residing precariously at the end of the peaking pipeline of polluting fossil fuel imports, Britain can head an indigenous renewable energy supply chain powering a lean, re-localised economy. Every field, forest, island, river, coastline, barn or building holds the potential to become an energy and revenue generator, with different technologies appropriate to every scale or location.
ZeroCarbonBritain 2030 clearly illustrates how the parallel de-carbonisation and re-vitalisation of the UK economy would work, creating a single document of immediate relevance to policy-makers everywhere.
We’re almost there! Our final chapters are out for external review and all the writing and editing of the report will be completed by the end of this month.
Looking back, December was an important month for ZeroCarbonBritain. As well as work on the report, our attention was diverted to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNCCC) in Copenhagen.
It’s been another busy month for the Zero Carbon Britain team as we’ve been gearing up for the climate change talks taking place at Copenhagen.
We’ve put together a Copenhagen Briefing Paper which acts as a bit of a sneak preview to the final report due to be published in spring. Representatives from The Centre for Alternative Technology are currently there promoting the report, and more generally, a Zero Carbon World!
We’ve also made huge progress on the writing and editing of the final report.
We are delighted to announce our provisional findings for Copenhagen.
Zero Carbon Britain will be presented on both the 10th and 15th of December in Copenhagen. Full details on our events page
Like our full report, this provisional release highlights solutions that are available now to build a sustainable future.
Whether you’re interested in the latest climate science or in new opportunities for job creation; want to know more about renewable sources of energy or about which policies can best support emissions reductions - you'll find information on all of this and more in our provisional findings.
To keep up to date with everything CAT is doing at Copenhagen be sure to check out the CAT blog
The full report will be released in Spring 2010. To be among the first to know when its available join our newsletter.
The science says we must, the technology says we can: it’s time to say we will.
Paul Allen, Kim Bryan, Tanya Hawkes and Alex Randall from The Centre
for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth set off today to Denmark - via
Saturday’s massive WAVE demonstration in London. They are going to
Copenhagen to promote the second edition of Zero Carbon Britain
(ZCB) and participate in the myriad
of workshops and events that are taking place as part of COP15- The
United Nations Climate Change Conference.
With so much interest in what’s happening behind the scenes below is a sneak preview of how things are getting on. Work is progressing well on the writing and editing of the Zero Carbon Britain 2 report.Over the last few months all sections have been updated and several are so close you can touch them.
Section 1 on The Global Context is currently being reviewed by the leading experts in the field.It presents the scientific evidence on which the report is based, and includes discussion on natural feedback mechanisms, the capacity of natural carbon sinks, and peak oil.The impacts of climate change are serious and the UK must implement an emissions budget which aims for a 100% cut in carbon emissions as soon as possible, to be completed by 2050.The UK is currently facing a gap opening up between energy supply and demand due to the retiring of plant and generation capacity.There is therefore an excellent opportunity to invest in low-carbon energy generation.
Last week, Gordon Brown urged more research into electric cars and called for a commitment from European leaders to explore the potential of new "commercially viable" electric vehicle technologies.
As part of a serious measure to tackle climate change however, electric vehicles need to be tapping into a grid of clean, renewable energy.
Electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) power are a vital element of the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT)’s Zero Carbon Britain report.
Electric vehicles would look much like normal cars. But instead of filling them up with petrol they would be plugged in and charged up, or drivers could swap spent batteries of charged ones while out and about. Electric cars mean less carbon emissions – but only if the electricity they run on has been generated from renewable sources like wind, solar and hydro-power. At present most of Britain’s electricity comes from burning non-renewable fossil fuels so electric vehicles would help make carbon emissions.
If Britain did make the switch to clean renewable energy, electric vehicles could also be used to store energy. When the cars aren’t running and are plugged in, their batteries can be used to store electricity and smooth out peaks in electricity demand. This technology is called 'vehicle-to-grid' or V2G.
When consumers demand lots of electricity, the spare electricity in the plugged in cars could be supplied back to the national grid. When plenty of electricity is being generated, but there is little demand for it, then the power can be used to charge car batteries. Consumers would benefit, as they would be paid for the spare electricity they supplied.
The average British car spends 23 hours a day sitting in the drive way. If this trend continues there is potential to use electric cars as energy stores and iron out fluctuations in electricity supply and demand.[1]
Almost 2 days worth of Britain’s electricity supply could be stored in our stationary vehicles. Similarly a single electric car would store about 2 days worth of power for the average family home. Having this big storage would make the national grid more secure and balancing the power from different renewable sources easier. [2]
"Britain already has some of what we need to make vehicle to grid work. The national grid already supplies electricity to and from people’s homes. However, Britain would need to make massive investments in renewable energy if electric cars and vehicle to grid technology are going to help us tackle climate change," said co-author of Zero Carbon Britain, Tim Helweg-Larsen.
Contact: (Email:
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NASA calls for radical reductions and urgent switch to renewables
CAT project will present solutions for Europe
A new report from NASA, released today, highlights the need for radical CO2 reduction targets and stresses the urgency of replacing fossil fuel energy such as coal with renewables.
James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said that the European Union and its international partners must urgently rethink targets for cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of fears they have grossly underestimated the scale of the problem.
Along with other leading climate scientists, Hansen insists that the major obstacle to saving the planet is not technology. The good news, he said, is that reserves of fossil fuels have been exaggerated, so an alternative source of energy will have to be rapidly put in place in any case.
“The work of Hansen and others makes it blindingly clear. We have burnt quantities of carbon into the atmosphere that are already resulting in major climate damages. We can no longer contemplate stabilising the concentrations even higher than we currently have. Hansen’s call to the EU should be read with the utmost urgency and our response should be nothing less than a zero carbon Europe.
“The Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) last year produced the Zero Carbon Britain report and is now coordinating a project entitled Zero Carbon Europe.
“We will be inviting contributions from research centres and think tanks regarding all aspects of Europe’s transition to a zero carbon community. We welcome Hansen’s calls to the EU and will be backing this up with a robust action plan to achieve a Zero Carbon Europe,” said co-author Tim Helweg-Larsen.
CAT to headline at Ireland’s leading annual event for sustainability
A symposium investigating post carbon cities, transition towns and sustainable communities will feature talks and workshops about CAT's ZeroCarbonBritain report at Dublin’s Cultivate Living and Learning Centre, 3–7 April 2008.
Paul Allen, CAT's Development Director, will present a set of strategies using an integrative approach to the problem of climate change.
This year, the 13th annual Convergence Festival focuses on talks from Paul and other leading international thinkers actively providing practical responses to the twin issues of resource depletion and climate change.
Published in 2007, ZeroCarbonBritain demonstrates how a nation can realistically eliminate fossil fuels within the next 20 years.
Paul said : “We have stumbled blindly into an emergency situation, and must immediately face up to our addiction to fossil fuels, embarking on a ‘detox’ to a zero carbon economy as quickly as possible.”
Paul will present sound proposals to build consensus amongst the international community in order to cultivate local action. John Gormley, the Irish Minister for the Environment, will launch the festival with an opening speech.
Contact: Jessa Latona 01654 705957 (Email:
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CAT Development Director Paul Allen looks back at 2007
In 2007, scientists released a record number of climate change reports. For many the UN talks in Bali were meant to be the year’s highlight, yet despite this negotiating frenzy, and some bleak scientific warnings, the world still lacks firm greenhouse emissions reduction targets.
This year also marked the virtual extinction of the ‘contrarian’ climate change deniers – they were a notable absence in the Bali negotiations. However, instead of agreeing firm targets, the ‘Bali Roadmap’ initiated a two-year process, committing states to the principle of further emissions cuts to replace those in the Kyoto Protocol, and to concluding negotiations on those cuts by 2009. The EU pressed for a commitment of 25-40% emissions cuts by 2020 for industrialised nations, a bid that was implacably opposed by a bloc containing the US, Canada and Japan.
The ‘Bali Roadmap’ aims to build on the Kyoto process by using funds from international carbon trading to pay for mitigation measures such as sea walls, fresh water infrastructure, new crop varieties, mosquito nets and whatever else may be needed as the world warms and rainfall patterns change. But, in terms of agreeing targets, the route now leads to Poznan in Poland in a year's time, and to Copenhagen late in 2009 – there is certainly plenty to read during this, hopefully final leg of the journey.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 4th assessment report provides evidence that reducing global greenhouse gas emissions can be done at quite moderate costs, far less than the costs of failing to do so, affirming that “Delaying emission reductions significantly constrains the opportunities to achieve lower stabilisation levels and increase the risk of the more severe climate change impacts.” In short, really radical action must be taken now - if we are to avoid crossing a tipping point of 2°C in global mean temperature, beyond which we run the risk of irreversible, catastrophic feedback effects. 2°C inevitably becomes 3°C, releasing more carbon and pushing the temperature irreversibly up to 4°C and so on to climate chaos.
However, many climate scientists were concerned that the 4th IPCC report actually underestimates the seriousness of our situation because it only incorporates research published up to mid 2006. Carbon Equity’s The Big Melt report (see www.carbonequity.info) presented an overview of new trends in the behaviour of Arctic ice revealed this summer, showing the Antarctic ice shelf to be more sensitive to warming temperatures than previously thought. Its floating sea ice is headed towards rapid summer disintegration as early as 2013, a century ahead of the IPCC projections. Hence no further greenhouse gases should be released. We may even have to consider drastic action, at considerable cost to recapture existing atmospheric CO2.
We have now collated enough information to prove beyond reasonable doubt that is time for radical action – the emphasis for 2008 must shift from detailing the problem, to detailing the solution.
The Centre for Alternative Technology’s Zerocarbonbritain report was launched in July. The report aimed to integrate our detailed knowledge and experience into a national framework to address climate change and energy security while providing access to energy to a growing global population. Zerocarbonbritain demonstrated that we could reduce eliminate fossil fuels completely by 2027, reducing our greenhouse emissions from energy to zero if the correct drivers were put in place.
It is meaningless to compare our lifestyles today with those of a zero carbon future – as the most recent science has demonstrated, life as it is now will change - like it or not. More useful is the comparison between a future where we have been proactive and acted ahead of events, with a future where we have let events overtake us.
Rising to the challenge will entail a new approach to many of our current lifestyle choices. Pioneering new lifestyles in reducing emissions means ingenuity replaces apathy, and self-reliance replaces self-gratification, but perhaps most significantly, it might just deliver a rich sense of collective purpose and personal meaning, which we may find we have been craving for a very long time.
CAT supports Minister's plan for offshore turbines
Wind power key to a sustainable future
Energy Secretary John Huttton MP has announced a massive drive for offshore wind power, providing all the electricity for Britain’s homes by 2020.
The Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) applauds the government for recognising the urgency of climate change and the potential of offshore wind farms in Britain’s future energy mix.
In its zerocarbonbritain report released earlier this year, CAT detailed how the UK could generate all its energy from renewable sources by 2027, meeting around 50% of this demand with offshore wind farms.
This would require approximately 140 offshore wind farms the size of the 1GW London Array spread out around our 8,000 mile coastline. This is more than four times the Government’s proposed 33GW from offshore wind.
Zerocarbonbritain details the policies and technologies that could reduce our emissions from fossil fuels to zero within 20 years. The report demonstrated how we could reduce our energy use by 50% through energy efficiency measures, then deploying a wide range of renewable energy technologies to meet the reduced demand.
“Crucially, we need to reduce our energy demand significantly in the first place,” CAT Engineering Consultant David Hood said. “The government plans to produce 20% of our energy from renewable sources by 2020 – but if we used energy more efficiently, we could produce around 40% of our total energy needs from renewables by this date, en route to becoming 100% renewable by 2027.
“Reaching zero carbon emissions is now clearly a scientific necessity; this report shows that doing so is technically possible – it now needs to become socially and politically thinkable,” he said.
On top of the offshore energy provision, approximately 30% of electricity would come from marine technologies such as tidal and wave power, and the rest from a mix of biomass-fuelled combined heat and power (CHP), building-integrated photovoltaic panels, onshore wind turbines and hydroelectric schemes. Heat could come from CHP, solar thermal, ground-source heat pumps, biomass and efficient electric systems.
Balancing a completely renewably-powered is the biggest engineering challenge for a fossil fuel-free Britain – but there are many emerging technologies detailed in the report which can solve this problem.
Following the success of zerocarbonbritain, CAT (in collaboration with the Public Interest Research Centre) is planning a Europe-wide zero-carbon energy strategy, mapping out a pathway to show how the entire EU could rapidly decarbonise – watch this space for zerocarboneurope!
To avoid catastrophic climate change, we need to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions to zero, according to research from the University of Victoria in Canada.
This data supports CAT’s groundbreaking energy strategy, zerocarbonbritain, which also advocates a 100% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible – an energy scenario explored within the report demonstrates it is possible to make these changes within 20 years.
CAT Development Director Paul Allen said: “The results from the University of Victoria back up our reading of the climate science, and highlight the immense challenge we now face.”
The team from the University of Victoria used a computer model to determine how much emissions must be limited to avoid exceeding a 2°C increase. They looked at reducing emissions by between 20% and 100% of 2006 levels by 2050. Only when emissions were entirely eliminated did the temperature increase remain below 2°C.
Mr Allen said: “If global temperatures rise more than 2°C, climate change will rapidly spiral out of control. The EU has pledged to reduce emissions to keep warming below this level, but their target of a 50% reduction in emissions by 2050 is too little, too late.
“Solving climate change is urgent, we need the right policies to eliminate all emissions from fossil fuels right now.”
zerocarbonbritain recommends technologies and policies to meet this challenge. It advocates a series of electronic carbon allowances known as Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) which would create a market driver for renewable energy, as products and services which use less fossil fuels would be cheaper.
This all happens within a global framework, allowing every nation’s per capita emissions to equalise, then reduce to zero. The scenario outlined in the report shows how the UK could reduce its overall energy use by 50%, then meet the remaining demand with 100% non-nuclear renewable energy.
Contact: Arthur Girling 01654 705953 (
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