'Energy from the Surrey Hills: wind and wood'

Another busy day!

The morning was filled with ‘New ways to produce and store energy: chemistry to the rescue’ which explained how chemical sciences have a key role to play in the development of new technologies for producing and storing renewable energy. I learnt that in London some experimental buses running on clean hydrogen with fuel cell engines gave proof of reliability. Fuel cells produce electricity and heat at high efficiency and with very low emissions. The car maker Honda already manufactures a fuel cell car and the engineers confirmed that the technology can be successfully implemented. Unfortunately, and as it seems to happen with most of the things running on clean energy, it’s very expensive to produce.

In the early afternoon following a big lunch I attended ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants: Celebrating Muslim heritage in our world’, during which some Muslim researchers presenting the ingenious inventions of some Muslim pioneers which helped create the world we are living today.

Later in the afternoon I went to ‘The North Sea: a store for Europe’s future CO2 emissions’ to hear that carbon capture and storage (CCS) could be part of the solution to tackle climate change. This technique consists of storing the CO2 produced by coal or gas fired power stations in the depleted gas and oil reservoirs of the North Sea. The UK Government seems to be very supportive of this idea and has proposals to fund up to three large-scale demonstration projects via a new financial incentive. Some questions remain unanswered though: Is there enough storage space? Is the storage safe?

In the evening I went to the discussion ‘Energy from the Surrey Hills: wind and wood’ where a panel debated the opportunities for renewable energy production from wind and wood in the Surrey Hills. I was a bit disappointed to see that some people still have a mentality of ‘not in my backyard’ or the ‘landscape issue’ and also to find out that wind turbines cannot be built in conservation areas and I found myself asking, “if the purpose of a conservation area is to preserve the environment, what can’t people living there have the opportunity to consume green energy produced by a wind turbine rather than be forced to consume non-clean energy…?”

Anyway, the number of people supporting wood fuel and wind turbines seems to be higher than the number in the opposition. It was agreed that action has to be urgently taken, not only because of climate change but also because it seems that British power stations are reaching the ‘end of their life’.

Diana

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