Historical Overview

GORDON MacKERRON

1 Introduction

Around the turn of the last century, a great wave of technological innovations transformed industrial and domestic life in the industrialized countries. These innovations included the motor car and the modern chemical industry, but an essential ingredient in the transformation was the provision of electricity supply, with the steam turbine playing a vital role. The advantages of electricity at the point of use have always been that it is clean, precise, and efficient. However, as the 20th century progressed, it became clear that to generate electricity cheaply it was necessary to move to larger and larger scales, and often to sites that were remote from the main centres of electricity demand. This, in turn, brought a need for long-distance transmission links which changed the physical appearance of parts of the countryside. As concern with various aspects of air quality grew strongly in the second half of the century, so power generation became increasingly implicated in the major issues: particulates, sulfur, nitrogen, and most recently carbon, besides the emotive issues surrounding nuclear power.

By the late 20th century, the electricity industry had thereby become deeply enmeshed in most of the leading environmental problems of concern to both Governments and citizens. Almost all major forms of electricity generation — fossil fuel-based, nuclear, large hydro, newer renewables, as well as transmission — have raised serious environmental concerns. This chapter, in keeping with the rest of the book, concentrates on the issues that are specific to the UK, and therefore gives little consideration to environmental concerns surrounding large hydro schemes. However, for virtually all countries, the impacts of electricity generation are high on the list of active environmental issues, and many of these issues are now subject to international and even global negotiation and control.

2 History

Electricity supply in the form of public lighting stretches back to the early 1880s, with Godalming in Surrey and Brighton having the earliest public supply systems. However, gas remained a powerful lighting competitor for many decades and the electric lighting schemes remained mostly very small. The development of trams and railway electrification represented a major growth in the use of electricity, and by the first decade of the 20th century, electricity had begun to be an important source of motive power for industry. By the time of the First World War, factory power had overtaken traction and lighting in terms of kilowatt hours used. Most of the 19th century uses of electricity depended on small, on-site forms of generation, often using reciprocating engines. As the steam turbine — with its potential for efficiency on a larger scale — became more widely used, so 'central' power stations with local distribution networks became more common. Newcastle was a leader in this, and the Newcastle Electricity Supply Company operated the largest integrated power system in Europe before 1914. However, the industry remained small and localized before 1914, and its environmental impact was small.

The First World War accelerated the development of interconnected and larger systems, and the potential for household electricity use began to be exploited in the post-war period. The potential benefits of large scale interconnection were beginning to be clear, but a major problem was the huge variety of systems, both municipal and private, that were developed on a local scale. Standardization and rationalization were both necessary and difficult, but the watershed was the setting up of a Central Electricity Board under the Electricity Supply Act of 1926. Its main task was the establishment of a national grid system. This was the first time that electricity impinged on rural environments, and great dispute surrounded the intrusion of overhead pylons and wires into areas of natural beauty. The first 'amenity' based pressure groups began to be set up in the 1920s — for example, the still-active Council for the Protection of Rural England — and electricity transmission was one of the issues that engaged this amenity movement. By the mid-1930s, the grid was virtually complete and the efficiency and cost-reducing benefits were large, not least because the need to keep large reserve margins of generating capacity fell sharply.

In the early days of grid operation, the main purpose was to connect the main industrial areas and provide back-up, and siting of power stations remained essentially urban and close to main load centres. This meant that, in emission terms, it was urban areas which suffered most, and the principal problem was smoke or particulates emerging from the chimneys of the almost exclusively coal-fired urban stations. However, there were so many other sources of local air pollution — urban factories and, in the winter, private homes — that the contribution of power generation was not especially large or noticeable in the period up to the Second World War.

It was not until the Second World War and afterwards that the grid began to operate as a truly national, rather than a regionally based, system. In 1947, the UK industry was nationalized, and much rationalization remained to be done. Nationalization brought together 200 companies, 369 local authority undertakings, nearly 300 power stations, and the Central Electricity Board under the new British Electricity Authority (BEA). Within this new structure, 14 Area Boards were to be responsible for regional distribution, and a new Central Authority (later to split into the CEGB for England and Wales, and two integrated Boards for Scotland) took over power stations and high voltage transmission.

Under the new order, standardization was completed, and from the 1950s onwards the size of generating sets increased rapidly from 30 and 60 megawatts (MW) to 660 MW in the 1970s, by which time 2000 MW stations were normal. This vast increase in scale was accompanied by a radical shift in siting policy. Urban sites, except for a few gas turbines in the 1960s and 1970s, were no longer used for new investment. Coal was the dominant fuel, especially in the 1950s, and here the practice was to locate power stations on the coal-fields. As oil became important in the 1960s, oil-fired stations were built at coastal sites, usually near oil refineries, and at the same time nuclear stations began to be sited in remote areas, nearly always at a coastal location. This all involved larger flows of power over longer distances, but the development of the super-grid at 275 kilovolts (kV) and later 400 kV meant that transport costs fell sharply. Because of the accidents of coal-field locations, the...