Opportunities for CO2 reduction in electricity generation? by Peter S. Hofman The generation of electricity in the Netherlands and the rest of the world makes a major contribution to CO2 emissions and thus to the climate problem. In the Netherlands it contributes 26% of CO2 emissions, while the global figure for carbon emissions is 37.5%. 1 It is very important to reduce that contribution but it turns out to be very difficult to achieve in practice. The Matric project 2 is looking at how the interaction between technological and societal developments have shaped the system of generation, transport and use of electricity. The analysis concerns how the predominance of central, large-scale, fossil-fuelled electricity generating stations, in association with the closed network of electricity actors, has long impeded the introduction of alternatives. The process of liberalisation and the increasing pressure of the climate problem have led to an opening up of the closed electricity network and to new strategies and coalitions of actors that have changed the prospects for alternative energy technologies and can thus also increase their chances. It is difficult to change the direction of technological developments in the electricity system since, over decades, elements such as technology, infrastructure, knowledge, regulation, industrial organisation and user preference have become mutually attuned, leading to a tightly-knit system based on large-scale, centralised, fossil-fuelled electricity generation. In studies of technology the term ‘technological regime’ has been introduced to describe this relation between the development of both technological and social components in a system. Between 1970 and 1990 the technological innovations that occurred were largely incremental, contributing to the technical and operational improvement of the system, but leaving the dominant technological regime unchanged. External pressure for greater efficiency and energy savings was thus translated by the closed network of electricity actors in terms of further optimisation of the existing technological configuration. Gas turbine technology Since the 1970s gas turbine technology has played a crucial role in the technological development. Gas turbines were first introduced to relieve peaks in electricity demand and led to improvements in the efficiency and reliability of the system. Hybridisation between gas turbine and steam turbine allowed a further improvement in the efficiency of electricity production and to an extension of the life cycle of the steam turbine, which had reached an optimum scale with a stagnation in the progress towards efficiency improvement. Other alternatives, such as wind technology, could not adapt to the system and fulfilled no specific need. They could not, for example, contribute adequately to the base load of the central electricity system. Gas turbine technology, moreover, also played a crucial role in undermining the centrally co- ordinated electricity system. It could achieve high electrical yields at smaller scales. For that reason, from the 1970s on, the electricity producers started to make increasing use of gas turbines to satisfy peak demand and for the combined production of heat and power (CHP). The Electricity Act of 1989, which split the production of electricity from its distribution, broke open the closed network of actors in the electricity industry; the strategies adopted by the distributors began to converge with those of industrial actors. This led to a storm in the development of decentralised CHP stations. Post-1989 the distributors adopted the profile of