Our ‘green energy’ bonanza is costing the earth
The oddest thing about the political crisis gripping Northern Ireland was what triggered it. In 2012, under an EU ruling that burning wood was “carbon-neutral”, the Northern Irish government, led by Arlene Foster and Martin McGuinness, adopted the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), a “green” scheme that had been introduced by the UK the previous year, offering lavish subsidies to businesses to use wood chips to heat their premises.
RHI was launched in Belfast without any control over how the money was spent. When businesses discovered that they could be paid £160 for every £100 they spent on wood, so many signed up, even using it to heat empty buildings, that, by 2020, it was estimated, the bill to UK taxpayers could have risen to £1 billion
But this is only one of the countless unforeseen consequences of that obsession which has long held our politicians in its grip: the belief that, to “save the planet”, we must replace the fossil fuels on which our entire way of life rests with new sources of supposedly “carbon-free” renewable energy.
We are committed to spending almost unlimited sums on subsidising ways we can tap into “clean, green” energy. Yet scarcely a week goes by without one of these schemes being revealed to be making a mockery of the purpose for which it was set up.
Each new example is shocking enough. But when we put them all together, we see just how far this relentless drive to “decarbonise” is based on a colossal act of collective make-believe. Here are some examples. ancient woodlands, even including a Cheshire estate owned by the National Trust. boilers to “biomass”, burning wood. For the three already converted, instead of being “carbon-taxed”, Drax now receives a whopping subsidy under the “renewable obligation” worth nearly £500 million a year.
But what has made this really shocking is that most of the 7.5 million tons of wood Drax uses each year is being shipped from the south-eastern states of America, where 4,600 square miles of forest are being felled annually, to be turned into wood pellets for burning 4,000 miles away in Yorkshire. Scientific studies have shown not just that much of this is virgin forest, uniquely rich in wildlife, but that, far from saving CO2, the whole process, including production and transporting of the pellets, has been estimated to result in emissions actually much higher than if Drax was still only burning coal. methane to the national gas grid, made from food waste and crops such as maize.
A particular concern for those living near these unsightly operations is not just their smell and the thousands of vehicle movements needed to bring in their fuel, but the growing list of pollution incidents from leaks of toxic ammonia, killing farm animals and wildlife. Investigations are currently under way into whether a spillage that killed more than 1,000 fish in one of Britain’s best-loved salmon and trout rivers, the Teifi, came from one such site. per cent of the cars on Britain’s roads.
Carefully hidden, of course, is that most of the power used to charge their batteries comes from fossil fuels. So, when the manufacturing process and transmission losses to charging points are added in, these vehicles emit significantly more CO2 than they supposedly save. Yet MPs last July nodded through the “Fifth Carbon Budget”, imagining that within 13 years 60 per cent of all our cars will be electric. But the penny has now widely dropped that when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, these are not only useless, but require immediate and very expensive backup from gas-fired power stations (and even thousands of diesel generators), to keep our lights on.
Even more absurd is how, when there is “too much wind”, to prevent this destabilising the grid we must pay £90 million more a year in “constraint payments”, to compensate their owners for not sending electricity into the grid, paying them very handsomely to do nothing.