UK needs total energy revamp for 2050 carbon goal

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain will need completely new transport and energy infrastructure to meet its ambitious carbon emissions target for 2050, the head of the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) said.

Building wind farms and nuclear power stations alone is not going to meet Britain's target of cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050 from 1990 levels, David Clarke, chief executive of the private-public partnership, said.

"The change we've got to make over the next 40 years ... is not just technological ... It's societal," he told Reuters in an interview.

"We've got to look ahead and recognise energy could be more expensive. We may have to think much harder about reducing energy usage ... Carbon dioxide comes with a price."

The ETI is a company, set up by the UK government and global industry groups including Rolls-Royce Group, E.ON, EDF, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Caterpillar Inc, to develop technologies for addressing climate change.

Clarke, former Head of Technology Strategy at Rolls-Royce, said it was crucial to develop an integrated energy strategy for transport, heat and power.

"It's only now that we are starting to treat them as three integrated parts of the problem," he said, adding that lower emissions from the UK energy sector was largely offset by higher output from the transport sector in the recent years.

The ETI is to announce the next project it is to fund from its current annual budget of 60 million pounds this week.

More project funding will be announced over the next two months, including carbon capture and storage (CCS) and low-carbon transport, he said. CCS traps carbon dioxide emissions and buries them underground.

FLOATING WIND FARMS

Clarke warned that some strategies for meeting the country's 2020 target of cutting carbon emissions by 34 percent could make it more difficult to achieve the 2050 target.

"You have to look at 2020 purely as a step towards 2050," he said.

Combined heat and power (CHP) systems, for example, might pose a long-term problem.

CHP's greater energy efficiency compared to standard power plants could help cut carbon emissions to meet 2020 targets if widely rolled out at the domestic and community level.

But they could make further reductions in climate warming gases more difficult because it would be far more difficult and costly to capture and bury emissions from thousands of small CHPs than it would from a much smaller number of big plants, he said.

The government is to publish its Renewable Energy Strategy on Wednesday, setting out how the country should reach its European Union binding target of sourcing 15 percent of energy from renewables by 2020.

On Monday, business lobby group the CBI said Britain needed to build more nuclear reactors and cleaner coal plants while putting less emphasis on wind power.

"There's no doubt nuclear is going to play an important part of the energy mix, but so is wind, and clean coal, or coal with CCS," Clarke said.

"If you look ahead to the future of 2020 and onto 2050, one thing we can say for sure is it's going to be a broader mix of sources than it is today."

He said a broader mix, including marine energy like tidal power, could also provide flexibility to back up wind energy if needed in calm weather.

"Wind may not be blowing, but actually it may not matter as people may not want electricity at that point," he said.

"You've got to look at that as a complete energy system across power, heat and transport and how they operate together."

The ETI is looking into floating wind farms or and other machines to reduce costs for such low-carbon energy.

(Reporting by Nao Nakanishi, editing by Daniel Fineren and Jon Boyle)