How much does our energy cost?

A big part of my motivation for working on the ‘Where Does My Money Go?‘ (WDMMG) project was to learn more about the cost of the UKs energy system and the cost of mitigating climate change.

What interests me about the climate change issue are the two competing requirements: on the one hand we have to provide affordable energy to meet an increasing energy demand as the population grows, on the other hand we have to dramatically reduce our carbon emissions (by 80% on 1990 levels by 2050) as set in the 2008 Climate Change Act.

The competition arises from the fact that the technologies that tend to emit carbon in the greatest levels are currently the most affordable and cost effective.

Unless there is a dramatic improvement in the cost effectiveness of low carbon energy sources or a dramatic reduction in the energy used then requirement 1 and 2 will conflict to a greater and greater degree in the next 40 years.

I’m not the only one who sees trouble ahead.

Last week the Department for Energy and Climate Change presented the public with an open source tool, which aims to show the effect of tweaking the supply and demand aspects of our energy system, and the effects this will have on our carbon emissions.

The tool is a carbon calculator that looks like this:

Once you have tweaked to get Britain the right carbon reduction and energy supply for 2050, and your happy with the results, there is a public consultation you can complete to let the government know.

The tool shows what is physically possible.

It does not show, within what is physically possible, what is economically possible. That is the next step.

I’ve been doing some research into the cost of energy systems.

I’d been looking for good, detailed data on how much the government spends on our current energy infrastructure, and since working on WDMMG I’ve found, pretty much, what I was looking for. I learnt about the Country Regional Analysis that HM Treasury publishes yearly to show the parts of the country that have benefit from UK public spending.

I took the Country Regional Analysis report and I’ve separated out all the codes that impact on our energy infrastructure and carbon emissions and their associated costs for 2008/09.

You can see the results of my investigation at my Many Eyes account.

I’m being quite careful about the summing these costs, as some of the figures are negative, which I believe means that they are income generating. But more research is required on this.

I have also been requesting the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s spending on different energy sources. So far you can see that for 2008/09 I’m getting a cost of £26 million, in total.

I’ll be writing a follow up post to this one, when I have a display of these Department of Energy and Climate Change costs.

I hope that calculating the costs of our current energy system will form a good baseline for discussions about the cost of our energy system leading up to 2050.

If you would like to work on this project with me then please add your details to our get involved page.