It'd be hard not to like Guy Martin. He's affable, he's enthusiastic, he's knowledgeable, and he's curious. He's eager to learn and he's eager to try things out. It seems to me like a recipe for a life well lived. You certainly won't begrudge him his nice house.
On Guy Martin's Great British Power Trip (Channel 4, narration by the ever reliable Shaun Dooley and his no nonsense Barnsley accent), Guy's out to travel all over Britain to find out both why his, and our, energy bills are so expensive and what can be done about it. Of course he delves wider into the world of energy creation. Both its history and its possible future.
Having just had a bill from British Gas that saw a 422% mark up from the last quarter it was a subject I had some personal interest in. But, that aside, the programme was fascinating and had me wondering why nobody had addressed this subject in this way before. Perhaps they had and I'd missed it.
There's lots of old black and white footage of men clambering up pylons with no harnesses or any safety gear whatsoever (before the days of health and safety), there's plenty of statistics to blow your mind (the National Grid has over 600,000 miles of wires, electricity travels at 600,000,000 mph), lots of amazing bits of kit (a battery so strong it could lift a battle cruiser out of the sea), and there's lots of stuff I don't fully understand.
Science, sadly, not being my strong suit. Guy starts in his not inconsiderable shed where he checks which of his devices use the most power/cost the most. Using a gadget he's got he works out it costs him 4p every time he boils his kettle. Estimating he does that ten times a day (he likes his tea, clearly) that comes to £146 a year. Another £312 is spent powering his parts washer and, in total, he estimates he spends £732 per year powering everything in his shed.
But then power isn't cheap. Guy visits the UK's biggest power station, Drax in North Yorkshire. The boilers, rubber on the outside - concrete inside, are twenty storeys high and the turbine hall is so large you could fit St Paul's Cathedral in it twice over. Drax powers 4,000,000 homes and though it does use some coal, it mostly relies on wood pellets to make power.
Though the white smoke that we see coming from the cooling towers is completely harmless water vapour, that doesn't tell the whole story. Wood is nowhere near as energy dense as coal and, therefore, creates more CO2 and other greenhouse gases. It gets even more complicated when discussions about the sustainability of biomass is hotly debated and I'm left not sure exactly what to think.
They're currently trialling a system called 'carbon capture' which will help reduce CO2 emissions. A pipeline is planned but that's not due to be up and running until 2027. My initial suspicion that the makers of this programme were coming from a reactionary, climate change denying, angle don't amount to much but it does seem reasonable enough to ask how can we rely, completely, on wind power when sometimes there's no wind?
Wind, at the moment, only provides a very small percentage of our energy requirements. It's gas that's the thing costing us so much and not just because the people who own the companies, and have shares in them, are a bunch of greedy bastards. For the records that's my own personal opinion and not one offered up by Guy Martin or anyone else on this television programme.
85% of our homes are heated with gas and 45% of our electricity is produced by burning gas. Right now we're in the middle of a perfect storm as far as gas prices are concerned. A harsh winter, huge demand on India and China for gas as they start to move away from coal, supply issues resulting from the sanctions placed on Russia following Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and a government reluctant to do anything to help ordinary people and yet eager to boost the coffers of Tory donors. Many of whom are high up in oil and gas firms.
Guy Martin never takes the political route and, instead, just gets on with learning. Learning and doing. He joins a pylon service crew in Nottinghamshire and climbs 25 metres up a pylon. It's a bit vertigo inducing but it's something not many people ever get to do. Only about one hundred men and women in the whole of the UK are qualified as 'linemen'.
I hear you singing in the wire. The makers of the programme missed a trick here by not playing Glen Campbell's Wichita Lineman, Snap's The Power got an airing but that seemed a bit obvious. Never mind. Once Guy's learned, and taught us, about the National Grid's ESO (a body that makes sure power stations can meet consumer demand) he's moved on to a part that particularly interests me.
Climate change issues. Solar power, at the moment, only provides 4% of our energy needs. On a sunny day that may rise to 25% but as anyone who lives in the UK knows only too well you can't guarantee a sunny day very often. I was surprised to learn that one of the places where solar power was being put to the most effective use was within the country's military.
The British Army Defence School of Transport in Yorkshire (a county that crops up a lot here) is where the army, air force, and marines learn to drive various military vehicles. Obviously this would generate a lot of pollution but they now mostly rely on solar power. There are a LOT of solar panels there.
As for wind farms, Britain's first was built as recently as 1991 but now the country is on course to be the world's biggest off shore wind farmer. Some see these wind farms as eyesores but I think that's frankly ridiculous and on a walking holiday in Wales last year I learned they were also brilliant for the local wildlife.
The Siemens Gamesa factory in Hull makes turbine blades for the wind farms. Guy Martin, as is his style, helps in the process and that involves undergoing Helicopter Underwater Escape Training. What some call getting in a "flying coffin". The programme makers go a bit over the top here with ominous music and an unnecessarily dramatic voice over but it's still instructive to see what's required of people who visit, and service, these wind farms.
Hornsea Two offshore wind farm is the world's biggest and each rotation of each blade is said to power a house (though, disappointingly, it's not specified how long for - an hour? a day? a year?). Wind farms are expensive to build but they're cheap to run. But, as already mentioned, the wind doesn't blow all day every day.
Sometimes it blows too much and that can be a problem too. Could the answer be huge banks of batteries on the outskirts of every town and city in Britain? Guy Martin visits a huge bank of batteries stored in a mountain, by the side of a loch, in Argyll and Bute and then he travels even furrther north to the Orkneys where the National Grid ends to look at another possible solution.
It's home to the world's biggest tidal turbine, Orbital O2, and that's partly because the tides around the Orkneys, where the North Sea meets the Atlantic, are very powerful. Tides are reliable, they happen twice a day regardless of weather, and the eventual goal is that tidal power will be used to create 10% of all the energy required for keeping the lights, and heating, on in Britain.
Although corrosion, especially when underwater, means lots of money spent on servicing and replacing rust damaged parts. In Orkney, where the relatively low population means they need less electricty than in big cities, they're looking at converting excess electricity into hydrogen fuel. That would help on the Orkneys but it wouldn't be a solution to net-zero on the mainland where demand is much much higher.
Is the answer nuclear? Possibly but there are only five nuclear power stations in the whole of the UK and they're all coming to the end of their lives. Hinckley Point B stopped making power last year and Hinckley Point A shut down in 2000. But, also in Somerset - near the Bristol Channel, they're building a new one. You guessed if, Hinckley Point C.
It's not cheap, the estimated cost will be twenty five billion pounds, and it's not a small project. The site will have one hundred and fifty buses to ferry staff around, two huge hotels for the workers to live in, and it's own fire service, police force, and doctors. In Big Carl, it's got the world's biggest land crane.
Nuclear waste has long been seen as one of the main problems of nuclear power. It stays dangerously radioactive for thousands of years so what to do with it? Cumbria is home to Britain's "nuclear dustbin' Sellafield. Formerly known was Windscale.
Opened in 1956, it was the first commercial nuclear power station in the world and the designs were sold to the Italians and the Japanese so they could open their own versions. But Britain was soon overtaken in the 'nuclear arms race'. Many people, myself included, conflated nuclear power with nuclear weapons and, on top of that, had more genuine concerns about how safe nuclear power was.
Now, unlike in the past, there are ways of storing nuclear waste safely and these ways are both understood, regularly reviewed, and reinforced rigorously. All well and good but the long term answer to our energy problems may come in nuclear fusion. In Oxford, Guy Martin learns a little about what they claim will be 'unlimited clean energy'.
But the progress is slow on this. Fusing atoms, it seems, is much more difficult than splitting atoms which even MC Tunes boasted of being able to do back in 1990. In fact we're so far from getting there that even the most optimistic forecasts say we're twenty years away. More realistic predictions say we're looking at close to eighty years so at least your energy bills may come down somewhere around the year 2100.
Guy Martin seems to enjoy himself throughout the series (he goes from making an incandescent light to blowing up a former coal power station in Eggborough) but, more importantly, he's brought us with him. Like him, we've both enjoyed ourselves and we've learned a lot. Also, like him, there's no sign of our gas bills going down any time soon.
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