Wollensky, June 2008 edition

Boomsayers could confound the doomsayers

1 December 2008



"And histories of our industry would offer riches to scholars"


Do you remember the skirmishings earlier this year over the proposed takeover of Iberdrola (the largest Spanish utility and said to be the world’s biggest windpower generator), by Electricité de France (Europe’s largest and the world’s most intensely nuclear-powered state utility) and the dominating Spanish constructors, ACS?

Iberdrola attracted notice for, among other features, its possession of some nuclear generating capacity. This adds muscle to Iberdrola’s UK arm, Scottish Power.† The Spanish utility’s position astride two apparently opposed enemy camps was striking. It drew a rather poignant observation from a banker involved. As reported in the business press he thought the prospective mixture of nuclear and renewable resources was what so attracted EdF and was ‘where the whole world is headed’.

Poignant? Nuclear and renewables have so often been seen as bitter enemies, have they not? Sworn enemies have of course been converted into allies – and prosperous partners – in the past. Worldwide accommodation between these particular erstwhile foes would give me – and I am sure that banker and other people – acute pleasure. And histories of our industry would offer riches to scholars to whom it had been little more than a footnote.

Three Gorges begets kudos, pathos and bathos

China’s Three Gorges Dam needs no introduction to modern power systematists (for some MPS coverage see October 2003 issue p27). As a feat of hydroelectric engineering the enterprise is magnificent. As a human intrusion upon certain sensitive natural states, however, the project attracted environmentalists’ doubts from its earliest beginnings. Last year some of the warnings were being recognised as having been justified, and there was talk of ecological ‘catastrophe’. These rumblings came not only from long-standing sceptics but – and now for the first time publicly – from Chinese officialdom too.

Among the international press reactions I have seen was a New York Times article discussing the results to date with this greatest of all hydroelectric schemes, the construction of which involved the inundation of land, cities, ancient temples and other notable places, and which displaced over a million people, to provide an unparalleled addition to China’s soaring electrical generating capacity.

The NYT writer observed that, sadly, ‘the rising controversy makes it easy to overlook the fact that the Three Gorges dam is the world’s biggest man-made producer of electricity from renewable energy’. His article was judicious and even-handed, reviewing China’s reasons for its long engagement with hydro-power: and, while discussing the pros and cons of continuation with hydro development, in competition with coal, nuclear and so forth, the writer remarked that the government-owned corporation that had built the Three Gorges Dam had already started work on three of a dozen large projects planned as a hydro system ‘anchored’ to The Dam. More than a hundred stations might be built in the upper Yangtse River basin within a couple of decades.

This is all serious stuff. I applaud the NYT contributor’s fair-minded approach. But you would be surprised, I think, if I failed to raise a question regarding the following passage from his article. ‘Environmentalists worry that these systems create a cascading effect in which one mega-dam begets another.’ Could such a fecund maternal metaphor possibly have been pun(ish)ingly unpremeditated?




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