Power plant idiocy

Take an efficient coal-burning power station. Spend billions subsidising it to burn wood. Then — oops! — realise that it’s devastating forests and, because trees take 100 years to grow, it’s WORSE for the planet than before

Almost exactly four years ago, I revealed details in the Daily mail of what I described as the perfect symbol of Britain’s ‘mad energy policy’.

It demonstrated more vividly than anything just how far the politicians in charge had become so lost in ‘green’ make-believe that their behaviour amounted to collective insanity.

What I was writing about in 2013 was development plans for Yorkshire’s giant Drax coal-fired power station, then the largest, cleanest and most efficient of its kind in Europe, supplying some 7 per cent of Britain’s energy needs.

Drax was about to spend £700 million, as a direct result of ‘green’ government policy, to convert half of its six giant furnaces from burning coal — the cheapest source of energy — to burning millions of tonnes a year of wood pellets, shipped over from America.

For Drax the commercial logic of this switch had become unavoidable. For a start, the Government was just about to introduce a steeply rising ‘carbon tax’ which would eventually make burning coal wholly uneconomical.

At the same time, burning wood, or ‘biomass’ as it is now termed, was deemed to be so ‘green’ and environmentally friendly that the Government was also offering a new subsidy so lavish that it would pay Drax two-and-a-half times more for the electricity it produced from wood than from coal.

the crucial point was that burning wood had been officially ruled by the EU to be ‘carbon neutral’ on the grounds that any Co2 it emitted would eventually be recovered from the atmosphere by new trees planted to replace those which had been chopped down.

By switching to wood, it was claimed, Drax — the single largest producer of Co2 emissions in Britain — would not only help ‘save the planet’ but also make a huge contribution to meeting the EU’s target that Britain must generate nearly a third of its electricity from so-called ‘zero-carbon’ sources of renewable energy.

Even before this huge project got under way, serious questions were being raised over these claims as well as the extraordinary cost. Now, a report published this week by the man who was formerly a special adviser to Chris Huhne — the minister in charge of Britain’s energy policy when the Drax project was first discussed in 2012 — has confirmed those concerns in spades.

the fact it is by someone so close to the subject matter — Duncan Brack worked for Huhne when he was minister of state at the Department for Energy and Climate Change — only adds to the sense of outrage.

the most telling point in his report for Chatham House, the respected think-tank, and one which is supported even by ardent green lobby groups such as Greenpeace, is that in reality Drax hasn’t been making any savings on Co2 emissions at all.

FIRSTLY, it is ludicrous to claim that wood is ‘carbon neutral’ on the grounds that replacement trees would eventually absorb the carbon emitted when a felled tree is burned. the report says it could take a replacement tree hundreds of years to grow to maturity — which would be far too long to have any supposed effect on any climate change.

second, burning wood, because of its lower heat efficiency, emits

12 per cent more CO2 than burning coal per unit of electricity.

Yet the report points out that the Government’s assessment of the impact on the climate from coal to wood pellets totally ignores emissions from burning the pellets in power stations. The Government only counts emissions caused by harvesting, processing and transporting the wood pellets to the power station.

This brings us on to the deeply alarming process involved in the production of this ‘green’ fuel from forests in north Carolina where the wood is turned into pellets and then transported no fewer than 3,800 miles across the Atlantic to Yorkshire.

It has been abundantly documented, not least in the U.S. itself, that a huge quantity of the millions of tonnes of wood turned into pellets is not just offcuts and waste material such as sawdust, as is claimed.

Duncan Brack’s report says that about three-quarters of the pellets from the southern U.S. came from whole trees, while such ‘residues’ accounted for just a quarter.

What’s more, these trees are growing in some of America’s most prized and wildliferich virgin hardwood forests.

little wonder that wood-pellet production has been described by conservation organi- sations as ‘an ecological catastrophe’. So the net result of giving Drax £450 million a year in subsidies to meet our EU ‘green’ target — and this sum is due to double when its conversion to biomass is complete — is that far from reducing the UK’s carbon emissions, we are actually increasing them while at the same time doing huge damage to the environment. And to make matters worse, we are all funding this lunatic exercise through hugely increased electricity bills.

Of COURSE, while we are having to dig into our pockets, those at the top of government who were behind this crazy policy have happily used their ‘expertise’ in greenery to enrich themselves.

Scarcely had Chris Huhne himself been released from prison in 2013, for perverting the course of justice after persuading his wife to take his speeding points, than he became the European chairman of a firm called Zilkha Biomass Energy . . . which makes its money supplying wood pellets from north America to Europe.

In fact, nearly all our other former energy ministers have no sooner left office than they are snapped up for lavish financial rewards to work for ‘ green’ companies which are making millions from policies which those same ministers put in place.

After leaving office Charles Hendry, another former minister of state at Environment, replaced yet another former environment minister, lord Deben (John Gummer), as chairman of the foreign- owned company which is building the largest (and most heavily subsidised) offshore windfarm in the world in the north Sea.

Ed Davey, former lib Dem energy secretary in the Coalition, now advises three companies in the low-carbon energy sector. And lord Barker of Battle, formerly energy minister Greg Barker, advises both a renewable heat firm and a solar panel outfit.

The fact is that these individuals — along with then party leaders such as David Cameron, nick Clegg and Ed miliband, all desperate to burnish their green credentials — have presided over an energy policy that is nothing short of a catastrophe.

Scarcely a week now goes by without some new horror story over yet another ‘ green’ fiasco wasting huge sums of our money while failing to reduce CO2 emissions or achieving any of the environmental benefits which were claimed for it.

Only last month there was the collapse of the northern Irish government over the scandal of the Renewable Heat Incentive scheme, designed to increase production of heat from renewable sources.

It emerged that businesses had been flocking to join it because for every £100 they spent on wood pellets to heat their buildings, they would automatically get £160 back from UK taxpayers.

Unsurprisingly they were working their boilers round the clock to get the money, even when their premises were found to be disused or empty, and costs are heading towards £1 billion. Then there are the giant new ‘anaerobic digesters’, subsidised to the tune of another £200 million a year, to make gas from waste and specially grown farm crops.

These have caused a succession of environmental disasters when toxic ammonia used in the process spills out into farmland and rivers.

At least the Government has not yet given the go-ahead to the ludicrous £40 billion project to build six vast coastal tidal lagoons, to generate ridiculously small amounts of electricity in return for absurdly large subsidies.

MINIMAL or negative returns for taxpayer largesse are, of course, the problem with virtually all these renewable energy schemes — above all the windfarms and solar farms for which we pay £5 billion a year in subsidies for electricity that is often not there when we need it because the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.

And yet, all the time, the Government uses the tax system to punish those coal and gas-fired power stations that still provide two- thirds of our electricity whenever we need it, and without a penny of subsidy.

The truth is that where energy is concerned, those who govern us, including mPs of all parties who just meekly go along with it, are in the grip of a total madness.

Who is going to stop it, before our lights really do go out?