This chapter discusses the energy infrastructure in the UK. In other countries in the late 1990s, an alternative model for electricity generation was being explored that went right back to the UK's early electricity industry. Countries where there was no electricity infrastructure already existing were developing one that looked rather like the UK's early industry, with local electricity generation for local use, and gradual linkages forming betw een local areas to exchange supply and supply backup where necessary. Neither the UK's privatized system nor its power market supported this type of local generation. By 2000, it was clear that government intervention would be needed to change the market structure to force it to invest not only in new types of generation such as renewables, but also to shift the balance in the UK away from a centralized system so that electricity could be generated at whatever scale and site it was most efficient. That would mean that, as well as central power stations, there would be electricity fed into the system from a huge variety of local projects 'embedded' into the lower-voltage parts of the network. It could make the network more efficient, more reliable and cheaper to operate, but it would clearly require government intervention and financial incentives to make the shift.

This chapter discusses the electricity supply industry of UK.

Water power has been a familiar sight for thousands of years. Most people in the UK probably know an old water mill, whether or not it still has its water-wheel that has been converted to another use, but the water that powered a threshing machine or grindstones can be used equally well to generate electricity.

This chapter discusses photovoltaics for generating electricity from solar energy.

This chapter discusses biomass fuel which comes from wood, which is the oldest and still has an important role to play. Wood has provided heat for millennia, but only recently has modern technology increased efficiency and automation. In northern Europe and North America, wood burning technology is widely used and markets are large and well developed. In northern Europe, medium-sized, automated central-heating systems underpinned by capital-grant schemes were used to develop the markets, after which large-district heating, combined heat and power (CHP) and power schemes were built. Wood now accounts for up to 40 percent of space heating in rural areas in some countries. Britain's Forestry Commission exports timber for this purpose. The Commission recently supplied 2 000 tonnes of timber via a merchant from its North York Moors forests to Denmark for use in wood-burning power plants. Virtually any form of biomass can be considered for fast pyrolysis. While most work has been carried out on wood due to its consistency, and comparability between tests, nearly 100 different biomass types have been tested by many laboratories ranging from agricultural wastes such as straw, olive pits and nut shells to energy crops such as miscanthus and sorghum, forestry wastes such as bark and solid wastes such as sewage sludge and leather wastes.

Fuel cells can provide heat and power, and a huge variety of fuel-cell devices currently being tested and demonstrated are likely to hit the market in the next decade.

The need to rethink the UK's electricity network to accommodate local energy projects was already exercising the minds of the industry at the start of the new century. In 2001 Galium McCarthy, then chief executive of the regulator, the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem), said that government targets on renewables and CHP would require the biggest revolution in the distribution network for 50 years. He told distribution network operators (DNOs) they must 'bring these issues to the top of the senior management agenda' and said that for Ofgem, too, it was 'emphatically not business as usual. Today, a DNO might have 300 embedded generators within its entire network. If the government's targets are to be met, by 2010 a DNO could have 300 generators connected to every substation.'. Even then, he said, meeting the 2010 targets 10 per cent renewable generation and 10 GW of CHP would require 3 000 new renewable installations, 1,000 CHP plants and up to 3 million domestic CHP installations. Technically, passive local networks would have to become active managers and, financially, DNO investment planning would be more demanding and take on more commercial dimensions.

How do you export power from your local energy installation to the electricity grid? Until recently, connection was a notoriously complex business, depending not only on your installation and whether you hope to get some income from the export, but also on regulations that were intended for very different electricity generators and distribution network operators (DNOs) whose procedures and attitudes vary widely. However, a new connection standard designed for the job has simplified matters considerably, as have new regulations that determine the price paid for the connection and that will force DNOs to offer export tariffs to new generators. At bottom is a new attitude that acknowledges that, rather than being a nuisance or a sideshow, local energy projects can strengthen existing energy-supply arrangements, reduce the need to make expensive reinforcements to the grid when new demand in the form of new housing or business arrives in the area, introduce efficiency and persuade people to use energy with more care.

At the moment, energy customers buy gas and electricity from their energy suppliers. But electricity and gas are not what they really want: in reality they want services such as heat, lighting, refrigeration or entertainment. Energy-services companies (ESCos) can operate to take advantage of the mismatch between what customers are buying now and what they really want. In the process, it is hoped that providing services rather than energy could make it possible to make big energy savings - not least because for most customers energy is an alien concept. That means it is perceived as complicated and of dubious benefit to make energy savings - customers want to be sure they will have the services they want, and are not necessarily convinced that that can be achieved if less energy is used.

The European Commission's emissions-trading scheme should impose a cost on energy generators that produce carbon dioxide, favouring renewable generation. In July 2005, Greenpeace set out a list of changes that would have to be made to support and encourage DG in the UK. Among its proposals were changes to building regulations that would ensure that distributed energy was used in new homes and business premises, changes in the rules on network access and export tariffs that would support the export of excess power from small generators, and tax changes that would give a financial incentive for installing distributed energy. Progress in some of these areas has been significant, as is described elsewhere in this book. Many believe, however, that all progress on distributed energy must be underpinned, and will be given much more impetus, if the effect of carbon dioxide emissions is fully assessed and costed. Greenpeace raises this possibility in its wish list as a tool to make visible the effects of carbon dioxide emissions from large fossil-fuel-generating stations and impose a financial penalty accordingly, but many believe that 'discovering' a price for carbon dioxide emissions will be fundamental to shifting the balance of our energy industry. When the price of carbon dioxide emissions is factored into the energy price, it should reward companies and individuals who switch to the most efficient forms of energy generation, as well as those who use sources that, like renewables, do not produce carbon dioxide emissions.