8
The energy programme
Gerald Leach
When IIED was born in 1973, the world energy scene was rather different from today's. A quarter century of ever-increasing global energy consumption had led to many deep problems and concerns. In the industrialized world, at least, there was much talk of an ‘energy crisis’: nuclear power, acid rain, oil spills and the threat of dwindling fossil fuel resources were never far from the headlines. Political recognition of the climate change problem was still two decades away in the future. Oil cost only half as much as it had 20 years previously and there was still a year of calm to go before the sudden and massive price hikes of the winter of 1973/74. The fuelwood crisis of the South had yet to be discovered by the North.
No less important was the very different perspective on energy which almost everyone adopted: politicians, researchers and the energy business itself. Decades of cheap energy and economic growth had created an almost universal belief that energy demand could rise forever in step with continued economic growth. If massive energy growth should one day run up against finite fuel resources, the resulting energy ‘gaps’ could be filled by nuclear power: fission reactors, fast-breeder reactors and, one day, fusion reactors. The policy and academic agendas were almost wholly concerned with the coalmines, oil and gas fields, and nuclear power stations of energy supply. There was little curiosity about the other side of the energy coin: the nature of energy demand, with its huge diversity of users, uses and consumption technologies – let alone the enormous latent potential for more efficient energy use.
The OPEC oil price rises during the winter of 1973/74 changed all this. Energy became a top political priority and a hot academic research topic. It also began to experience a profound paradigm shift as policy and intellectual interest switched increasingly from supply-side to demand-side issues. IIED was to play a leading role in this revolution.
But this would come later. When Barbara Ward and her tiny team opened the first IIED office, up near the rooftops above Mortimer Street, energy was only one among many topics on the programmatic wish list. David Runnalls kept in his head an immense database about who's who in energy – as in most other subjects. Barbara had written and spoken powerfully about energy and its importance to environment and development concerns, not least in Only One Earth, her book for the 1972 Stockholm Environment Conference. IIED had no staff working on energy, however, until the summer of 1974 when I started my 15 years hard, mostly enjoyable but sometimes fraught and frequently broke, labour with the Institute, running its energy programme.
Energy and Food Production, published in 19761, showed how the food chains of the industrialized world, from farm to factory, truck and supermarket, had become major users of energy, both directly and indirectly, through labour-saving mechanization and land-saving fertilizers. With a few other studies along similar lines, it provided another club, labelled ‘energy profligacy’, which environmentalists could (and still do) use to assault modern farming practices. However, later events should have (but mostly didn't) put an end to such attacks. Higher energy prices after 1974 stopped the most energy-extravagant practices of food production – such as growing lettuces in the British winter courtesy of oil-heated glasshouses – and led to many all-round improvements in energy efficiency. Within a few years, farming in Britain (and doubtless in other industrialized countries also) had become one of the most energy-effective sectors of production.
The years 1975 and 1976 were taken up by work on two major projects: the European Commission's ‘Europe Plus 30’ project, which examined the need for a European forecasting agency; and the first multi-national examination of energy demand and supply prospects –the Workshop on Alternative Energy Strategies – which was led by Professor Caroll Wilson, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Political historians might like to know that this work – or, more exactly, one of the more purple passages in a draft introduction written by the IIED energy programme himself – was responsible for the gales of derision which greeted the remark by US President Jimmy Carter that ‘the energy crisis is the moral equivalent of war’. Even today I wonder what on earth this phrase was supposed to mean.
THE LOW-ENERGY STRATEGY: ANALYSING ENERGY USE
In early 1977 the energy programme began perhaps its most influential project: the two-year study which culminated in the publication, in January 1979, of A Low Energy Strategy for the United Kingdom.2 Christopher Lewis and Frederic Romig joined IIED at the start of 1977 for this project, which also enjoyed Ford Foundation support. In early 1978 I was struck down with cancer (but continued working most of the time) and Gerald Foley nobly accepted an appeal to move down from the floor above IIED, where he directed the Architectural Association's postgraduate energy programme, to help out as unofficial co-director. He brought with him the fifth team member, Ariane van Buren.
A Low Energy Strategy for the United Kingdom (LES) was remarkable in being one of the first ever-detailed studies of how a nation uses energy. It broke down energy use in the UK into over 400 separate categories determined by economic sector, fuel, appliance and end use. With such a ‘bottom-up’ perspective it is not hard –merely time-consuming – to figure out where and how future energy growth might be constrained both by energy-efficiency measures and by natural saturation effects, such as a slowdown of the rapid growth of central heating (and, consequently, warmer offices and homes) during the 1960s and 1970s. This the LES did for 1990 and 2000 (and somewhat reluctantly, under pressure from allies in the government's Energy Technology Support Unit, who helped us with invaluable energy-use data for industry) also for 2010 and 2025.
The biggest problem with this approach was the huge amount of calculation needed. For the first year we relied on pocket calculators, but it was taking literally weeks to make substantial changes in the scenarios. We had to computerize. But in 1978 that meant big money. The only desktop computer then available was a behemoth called the Altair: a stack of three huge boxes including two 8-inch floppy disk drives, but with only 32k of available memory and BASIC as the only software. And the bill? Around £8000. Barbara Ward and Dave Runnalls, with gritted teeth, somehow raised the cash – and we launched off into a Neanderthal version of the Computer Age. Aunty Altair saved the LES but ended its days in a corner printing envelope labels for Earthscan.
This data-intensive, bottom-up approach was in stark contrast to the ‘top-down’ methods used by virtually all governments and economists. The UK government energy forecast at the time was based on only five sectors: iron and steel, transport, all industry (except iron and steel) lumped together as one unit, the commercial sector (consisting of offices, hospitals, schools and shops, etc also lumped together as one unit), and the average household. With the last three of these sectors, future energy use was estimated by the simplest possible linear extrapolation of past trends, with economic output or family expenditure as the only variables which determined the projections of energy consumption. Using these equations, Amory Lovins and I once calculated that in the winter of the year 2000, upper-income UK families would be sweltering indoors at an average temperature of 40°C.
Not surprisingly, the LES came out with future energy use way below the government projections. Its projection for 1990 was 224 million tons of oil equivalent (mtoe) for UK primary energy use, compared with 207 mtoe for the baseline year of 1976. The government forecast was 295 mtoe. Actual consumption was 215 mtoe, a shade below the LES projection. For the year 2000 the LES projection was almost 11 per cent below the actual figure (233 mtoe) but the government forecast was too high by 54 per cent.
The response to the LES was as varied as these projections, ranging from cheers to outrage. ‘The case of the vanishing crisis’ headlined the Guardian story. ‘I've seen the future – and it's less’ echoed Energy Manager. ‘Bleak forecast for UK energy’ countered the Financial Times. Sir Francis Tombs, chairman of the Electricity Council, accused us of showing ‘lack of respect for civil liberties’ by invoking government intervention to promote energy saving. Six months later the Department of Energy launched an energy conservation division to do just that. Revisiting today the many yards of reviews and commentary about the LES, the basic schism which it uncovered remains as clear as ever: the true pessimists about the energy future were not the conservationists (often written off as doom-mongers) but those with interests vested in the nuclear and other energy-supply industries. They had to believe in high-energy growth and widening supply-demand gaps to keep their costly enterprises at the forefront of policy and supportive government expenditures.
BIOMASS, POVERTY AND DEVELOPMENT
In 1979, Richard Sandbrook wryly observed that IIED was supposed to be about development as well as environment and could we please think about projects in or for the Third World. Well, yes, we said. But how, where, what? Fortunately, President Nyerere of Tanzania had the answer. He had approached the Commonwealth Secretariat with a request for help on a long-term sustainable energy policy for his country – and IIED got the job.
Tanzania in 1980 was an inspirational shock. For me, Gerald Foley and Ariane van Buren, it was the first experience of acute underdevelopment. We worked out of the cabinet secretariat office in State House, with a flag-flying chauffeur-driven car at our disposal. But the office was allocated only three sheets of photocopy paper per month. National statistics often existed in only one copy, handwritten in pencil. The country's one coal mine was producing just 3000 tons a year, with bare-footed workers scrabbling in the dark as there was no cash for boots or lightbulbs. A US$2 million Japanese consultant's report had recently advised the government to ‘do a Brazil’ and launch a massive programme to convert sugar cane to fuel-alcohol. Meanwhile the country's largest sugar mill was tipping around US$700,000 worth of molasses each year out of its back door into a river for want of two rail wagons to carry the stuff to the molasses tanks on the docks of Dar es Salaam. Nearly two-thirds of the country's import bill went on oil and most energy aid went on power generation and distribution lines. Yet oil and electricity accounted for only 1 and 3 per cent respectively of national energy use. The remainder was traditional biomass fuel: firewood, charcoal and crop residues.
What could we do but recommend a cautious approach? Learn to manage better the resources one has and forget the grandiose, costly and high-risk schemes for renewable energy which Nyerere had perhaps been hoping for. But in one crucial respect, IIED did change things for the better, while learning some cardinal lessons that would infuse much of its policy research work for the next decade.
Received wisdom said that biomass fuels were in a serious supply–demand crisis. Women everywhere were allegedly walking miles to gather fuel. Forests were supposedly being devastated to provide charcoal for urban consumers. The Forest Department was trying to spread its scant resources around every village, hoping to persuade people to ‘behave rationally’ by planting energy woodlots and buying improved cookstoves. But the people were taking little notice. Then to his great credit, during the IIED study, Gerry Foley faced a roomful of village foresters and told them there was no fuelwood crisis in Tanzania. The immediate response was a hostile uproar. Then, gradually, over the next hour of discussion, the foresters came round to agreeing that most villages were so poor that they needed and were calling for many things: tin roofs, fresh water supplies, better access to markets, schools and health clinics, and, oh yes, as an afterthought, easier fuelwood supplies. (The same low priority given by Tanzanian villagers to fuelwood needs, despite entrenched official beliefs that the country faced acute fuelwood supply crises, was to emerge again in a 1988 survey for the Tropical Forestry Action Plan in which IIED was involved, and yet again in a 1995 survey conducted by the Stockholm Environment Institute).
The IIED solution was to propose a new structure for Forest Department assistance, whereby villages were helped with their energy problems only when they called for help because energy had become a top priority. The most lasting lesson we learned from this experience is that one must never approach rural energy issues wearing the blinkers of the energy specialist. Instead, one must place them in the much broader context of effective land management by societies who are almost wholly dependent on – and know about – a huge variety of biomass resources and management practices. Another lesson we learned was that received wisdom about a problem will continue so long as the flow of aid funds depends on the continuation of that problem, whatever facts are revealed that show it to be a myth. In a few year's time Gerry Foley would create a global uproar from NGOs working on improved biomass cookstoves by subtitling an Earthscan report which was critical of improved stove programmes: ‘How Much Wood would a Woodstove Save if a Woodstove could Save Wood?’
Biomass energy and the many fascinating hard facts, soft facts, rumours, myths and lies which surround it, were to dominate the IIED energy programme for most of the 1980s. In 1981 I had started a decade of repeated trips to Pakistan to work there on traditional biomass energy for three successive five-year plans. Despite all best efforts, it proved next to impossible to wean government officials away from a top-down, command and control view of biomass energy ‘solutions’. These consisted mostly of setting targets for expanding government plantations and exhorting farmers to grow more trees. It wasn't until 1991/92, when a World Bank study revealed that Pakistani farmers were planting over 100 million trees each year, with little if any help from government programmes, that policies began to change. Meanwhile, once again, poor farmers had been demonized for not behaving ‘rationally’ about their energy needs.
In 1985 the World Bank, European Commission and UN Food and Agriculture Organization combined to fund a one-year study of traditional biomass energy in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, published in 1987 as Household Energy in South Asia.3 Publication led to a flurry of questions in the Indian parliament asking what an Englishman was doing dictating Indian energy policy, when in fact the policy chapter of the book had been based entirely on a workshop, organized and paid for by IIED, of household energy experts from the four countries, including some very senior Indian representatives who helped to smooth their countrymen's ruffled feathers.
Meanwhile, Gerry Foley and Geoffrey Barnard began work on their widely acclaimed and influential series of Earthscan technical reports4 on key aspects of biomass energy supply and use in developing countries: biomass gasification (1983), improved cooking stoves (1983 and 1985), farm and community forestry (1984), agricultural residues as fuel (1985) and charcoal-making (1986).
The last major phase of IIED's energy programme began in early 1987. The Norwegian energy aid programme was spending vast sums on electric power developments but the Norwegian people were calling for a much greater focus on poverty, women and the so-called woodfuel crisis. Could IIED help? Could it accept substantial funding for the next three years to research and report on what could be done to improve the biomass energy situation in Africa. Well, yes ....
This was a wonderful chance to look, in depth and breadth, at all those facts, myths and lies that had been accreting around and concealing the realities of the woodfuel issue. Most ably assisted by a young geographer, Robin Mearns, we were able over the next two years to uncover at least some of these realities, first in an early 1988 IIED report – Bioenergy Issues and Options for Africa5 – and then in late 1988 with an Earthscan book: Beyond the Woodfuel Crisis: People, Land and Trees in Africa.6
A key theme of the book was that the environmental devastation supposedly caused by woodfuel use – from deforestation to the loss of soil nutrients by burning animal wastes – was nearly everywhere being hugely exaggerated. So was the hardship imposed on women and children by the need to collect woodfuel. In some places, and some seasons, woodfuel collecting was certainly a serious burden on hard-pressed women. But over vast areas it was not, as there was plenty of biomass around, or it was only one of many physical hardships of rural poverty – and not necessarily a leading one for people to address by spending scarce resources on the woodlots and improved cookstoves which visiting energy experts proposed. In short, the biomass energy problem was not at heart a problem of energy but a manifestation of much deeper social ills and environmental constraints.
Years later, a survey7 of the most influential forestry books of the 20th century picked out Beyond the Woodfuel Crisis as one of the main influences which sank that crisis: ‘Eric Eckholm put the “fire wood crisis” on the policy makers’ agenda in the late 1970s, while the subsequent questioning by Gerald Leach, Robin Mearns and Peter Dewees of whether such a crisis really existed helped take it off’.
But this questioning was also about to sink the IIED energy programme. Late in 1988, Richard Sandbrook, Lloyd Timberlake and I visited the Ministry of Development Cooperation in Oslo to review the Ministry–IIED relationship. Towards the end of the day, as night fell and the room darkened, energy came up on the agenda. ‘We like very much your work on biomass and Africa’, the energy representative said, ‘and we will order several hundred copies of the book to distribute. Thank you. But what the book has taught us is that this is not an energy problem. It is more to do with agriculture and forestry. And so we will not be funding you for next year, as originally planned.’
Lloyd leaned over, through the darkening gloom, and whispered for all to hear: ‘Gerry, I've never actually seen anyone shoot themselves in the foot until now!’ Yes indeed: next year's funding vanished through a bureaucratic masterstroke. Deep depression and fury, until a few days later another good fairy from Scandinavia made an offer no one could refuse: join the new Stockholm Environment Institute, with ample funding to work on whatever seemed most interesting and important, from my London home. So, with many regrets after nearly 15 years with IIED, but also with excitement, the sole remaining representative of IIED's energy programme jumped ship.
EPILOGUE: SUSTAINABLE ENERGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY?
What can one say about the future of energy in helping to make a sustainable world? The frank answer is: right now, not much. Technical progress in the areas most critically pertinent to this question is extremely rapid but the outcomes – in terms of just what, when, and at what cost – are, for the moment, extremely uncertain.
We need to backtrack a little. Few would deny that the dominant issue of global energy development is how to mitigate climate change. Energy production and consumption are by far the most important sources of rising greenhouse gas emissions which are the root cause of global warming. As many people know, global emissions must be cut by some 60-70 per cent over the next few decades if global warming is eventually to be stabilized. Even deeper cuts will be needed in the high-emission industrialized world if the developing world is to be allowed some space to increase its per capita emissions – even by only modest amounts – to fuel essential economic growth.
How to make these cuts is one of the supreme political and technical challenges of this century. Underlying this challenge is the familiar but fundamental question of how much can be done by technical fixes? Depending on this, how much belt-tightening (or life-enhancing?) changes to rich-world ‘lifestyles’ will be needed? The zero-emission fuel-cell car – or the bus and bicycle?
The prospects for sufficient lifestyle changes look increasingly hopeless. Many speak and write of them; some march and demonstrate for them; few make them. The slogans of politics – with the connivance of the vast majority of the media and public – cluster around more economic growth, better public services, or tax cuts. When the occasional tough environmental policy does emerge – such as the UK's high vehicle fuel taxes and prices during late 2000 – the ensuing rage and revolt are met with official evasions and denial. Few politicians dare stand up and emphasize long-term benefits.
So that leaves ‘tech fix’ to cover the failure of sufficient lifestyle change. What are the prospects here? Huge declines over the past 20 years in the energy intensity of industrialized nations (that is, in the energy use per unit of GDP) are now being followed by some developing countries, notably China in the past 4 years or so. A combination of real energy-efficiency improvements and of structural change towards less energy-intensive forms of production – notably from industry to services and from heavy to light industries – is in many places allowing economic growth alongside much slower growth – or even declines – in associated emissions of greenhouse gases.
There are huge remaining gains to be had from these emission-reducing trends – a point that environmental groups persistently underline when they object to projects designed to increase energy supplies, whether based on fossil fuels, nuclear or even many forms of renewable energy (including onshore wind, hydropower, biomass energy crops, or energy from urban waste via incineration and landfill gas). Quite right too – up to a point. More, much more, could be done by the spread of effective policies to promote energy efficiency that are now applied in a handful of countries.
But, crucially, efficiency and structural change will not be nearly sufficient on their own to effect the required cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, even if we pursue them with increased and enduring vigour. A low-emission energy future must be based not only on lots of energy efficiency but also on the maximum feasible reliance on renewable energy sources. Insulating a home might cut its energy use in half; providing that energy from the sun and wind cuts it to nearly zero.
There is also crucial problem with most renewables: the sun goes out at night, the wind dies to a calm, and even wave energy and hydropower vary with the seasons. Energy storage to smooth out the highs and lows of these renewable energy sources, on a scale sufficient to run an industrial society, appears to be prohibitively expensive. Only two classes of renewable energy avoid this flaw – by providing stored energy, as fossil fuels do. One is ‘modern’ biomass: growing trees and grasses or using crop, animal and urban residues as fuel to convert into high-grade energy (as opposed to using biomass in traditional ways, such as for cooking). The other is the so-called solar-hydrogen economy: use solar cells to convert sunlight to electricity and use some of that to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. Both approaches can provide all the forms of ‘modern’ energy we need: electricity, liquids, gases and heat. But neither is ready yet for takeoff; and no one yet knows what their potential for providing energy will be, or their costs.
Biomass is the best-established of renewable energy sources. There are working biomass energy projects and programmes right across the world, from Brazil's sugarcane-alcohol programme to innumerable village-scale biomass-electricity schemes. However, in capital-scarce developing countries, production of biomass energy is mostly un-mechanized and has to rely on large pools of very cheap labour. Typical labour productivities are about 20-40 workdays to produce an amount of energy equivalent to one tonne of crude oil. In contrast, the equivalent figure for UK opencast coal mining is less than one working hour. To keep the bioenergy competitive, developing country wage rates cannot rise above roughly US$1-2 per day. So one mechanizes to allow better wages and hold down costs? Yes, but at the end of that road lies the typical European or North American biomas-energy crop producer, mechanized up to the hilt and hostage to bank interest rates and bank managers, growing ‘green energy’ that costs roughly twice as much as energy from fossil fuels.
Research is underway to reduce bioenergy costs, while subsidies are fully justified in order to pay off biomass for its low to zero greenhouse-gas emissions. Much the same applies to the solar-hydrogen idea: intensive research, development and desk studies are underway to ‘prove’ the concept and find the best approaches to its widespread application.
It will be some time yet before we get credible answers on either of these research fronts. Meanwhile, we know remarkably little about where these two paths to a climate- and development-friendly energy future might lead us. Abundant low-cost clean energy for 10 billion people? A trickle of high-cost energy for a few? Or something in between? Much is at stake – but for a few years most of us can only wait and see what they come up with, while pressing governments and industry to do much more on research and development and to spend real money on deploying the best technologies as they become available.
NOTES
1Leach, Gerald (1976) Energy and Food Production, IPC Science & Technology Press, Guildford.
2Leach, Gerald, Lewis, C. Romig, F. Buren, A van. Foley, G. (1979) A Low Energy Strategy for the United Kingdom, IIED and Science Reviews, London.
3Leach, Gerald (1987) Household Energy in South Asia, Elsevier Applied Science Publishers, London. 4Foley, Gerald and Geoffrey Bernard (1983) Biomass Gasification in Developing Countries, Earthscan, London.
4Foley, Gerald and P Moss (1983, revised 1985) Improved Cooking Stoves in Developing Countries, Earthscan, London. Foley, Gerald and Geoffrey Bernard (1984) Farm and Community Forestry, Earthscan, London. Barnard, Geoffrey and L Kristoferson (1985) Agricultural Residues in the Third World, Earthscan, London. Foley, Gerald (1986) Charcoal Making in Developing Countries, Earthscan, London.
5Leach, Gerald and Robin Mearns (1988) Bioenergy Issues and Options for Africa, IIED, London.
6Leach, Gerald and Robin Mearns (1989) Beyond the Woodfuel Crisis: People, Land and Trees in Africa, Earthscan, London.
7Spilsbury, M and D Kaimowitz (1998) The Influence of Research and Publications on Conventional Wisdom and Policies Affecting Forests, Centre for International Forestry Research, Jakarta, Indonesia.