Professor Rebecca Willis, University of Lancaster: Where our electricity comes from

Rebecca Willis: Hello everyone – it’s great to be here with you online, and I’m really pleased that we’ve found a way to continue the Assembly’s discussions.

I’m moving to the next slide.

My job today is to give you an overview of what we are covering in this session, and what we’ll hear about from our speakers.

As you’ll know, we’re going to be looking at where our electricity comes from.

In previous sessions, we’ve talked a lot about how we use electricity, looking at electric vehicles, and using electricity in the home, for example. But we haven’t looked directly at where that electricity comes from and how it’s generated – so that’s what we’ll be doing today.

Moving on to the next slide.

The first speaker, Mike, will tell us about generating electricity through renewable technologies. He will describe the different technologies, including wind power, solar power, hydro, wave and tidal power. He will talk about the costs of each, and what the contribution of each technology could be to electricity generation overall.

He will also explain how we need to change the way our electricity system works, because some renewable technologies don’t produce power all of the time (for example, solar power needs daylight to work). So we need to make our system more flexible, as Mike will explain.

The second speaker, Patricia, will talk about generating electricity from biomass, like trees or plants. She will tell you about the role biomass could play, and the advantages and disadvantages of using biomass to generate electricity.

The third speaker, Jim, you’ll recognise because he’s one of our Expert Leads, will tell us about nuclear power, and about generating electricity from fossil fuels while capturing and storing the carbon (all of this will be explained as we go). Again, he will talk about the potential of both these approaches, and the costs.

Moving on to the next slide.

So by the end of the talks, you will have heard about six main technologies: onshore wind, offshore wind, solar, bioenergy, nuclear and fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage.

These technologies are the ones that could provide a significant amount of our electricity by 2050, and are most likely to be cost effective. These are the technologies you’ll be voting on, on Sunday.

You will also have heard a little bit about other technologies, like wave, tidal, hydro and geothermal. You are welcome to ask questions about any of these technologies in the question and answer sessions and there will be space on the ballot papers when it comes to voting for you to express your views on these other technologies if you want to and that will be recorded in the assembly report.

So thanks very much, I’m going to hand back to Sarah now.