The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) warning yesterday that the world would face higher energy costs, higher carbon emissions and less security of supply if it turned its back on nuclear were dismissed by EOS Energy – the UK’s fastest growing solar installer.
Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the IEA, gave his grim predictions yesterday whilst addressing St Petersburg International Economic Forum. Germany, Italy and Japan have all recently announced that they will abandon nuclear generation over the next two decades.
"It will cost much more, be less sustainable and there will be less security. These are the consequences of lower nuclear,” said Mr Tanaka.
Lee Summers, director of EOS Energy, dismissed the IEA warning saying: “Mr Tanaka’s hypothesis is based on the assumption that emerging countries will develop old technologies. Why should that be the case?”
Nobuo Tanaka said that the IEA believed that 80% of prospective new atomic power plants were planned for China, Russia and India.
“We should applaud China and India’s decisions to move away from their dependencies on burning coal but why is it necessary for them to continue to build new nuclear installations? China has been affected by the Fukushima meltdown as much as anywhere else,” said Mr Summers.
“Several wind power companies have successfully been floated in China and India is an excellent region for developing photovoltaic generation.”
“We should not lose sight of the fact that nuclear is a highly efficient base load generator. However, hydroelectricity can replace new nuclear stations in the correct environment. The point is that renewable technologies can be developed as readily in China and India as they can in Germany and Italy,” said Mr Summers.
The IEA also predicted that global oil demand to grow by 1.2m barrels a day annually until 2016 but it was confident that new supplies would keep up with demand.
The agency said that 1.1million barrels would be found in new fields in Iraq, Angola, Brazil and Canada.
Charlie Kronick, a Greenpeace energy advisor, said: "Energy is going to get more expensive irrespective of what happens in the world of nuclear power because companies like BP, Shell and Exxon are moving into more deepwater drilling, the Canadian tar sands, and now the Arctic. Oil in these places is inevitably more expensive as well as riskier to extract."