A personal assessment by Kenneth Fergusson, Honorary Vice President of the Combustion Engineering Association.
In London, 23rd January 2017 dawned windless, foggy and frosty. 100 flights were cancelled at Heathrow. The BBC reported that the conditions were widespread across the country. Looking at the weather map, I remembered an article written back in November 2003, when major UK wind generation capacity was only an aspiration, but RWE in Germany already had 13GW in service.
In 2001, I retired after four years as Chief Executive of the Coal Authority. I was invited to become President of the Combustion Engineering Association, a role which I relished for four years. During that time, UK energy policy was being reformulated and for the first year, I acted as a consultant to DTI on the subject of “clean coal” for which carbon capture and storage (CCS) was prerequisite and the appropriate and the appropriate generation technologies were “ultra-supercritical”(USC) or “Integrated gasification combined cycle”(IGCC).
In 2009 I was invited to write an article on UCG for “Modern Power Systems” for which I prepared a comparison of generation cost or offshore wind, nuclear, USC and IGCC, gas CCGT and UCG all the fossil fuel cases included 90+% CCS.
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