Green energy dooms coal
From: Coun Andrew Cooper, Green Party Energy Spokesperson, Kirklees Council.
IN “Britain ‘on track’ for coalfree summers” (The Yorkshire
Post, August 16), you quote a Drax spokesperson in the headline statement.
That’s surely a cautious interpretation of the plummeting of coal-fired electricity generation, below one per cent over the summer.
The spokesperson is also far too negative about developments in the Southern hemisphere. Analyst Coalswarm note that in the first half of 2018, retired capacity has nearly matched newly-operating plants. Less than 2GW of new coal capacity has been proposed in China and India in total in 2018, Japan has called off 3.6GW of proposed coal capacity since 2017 and South Korea will not permit new coal.
The claim that enhanced nuclear capacity is “likely to be required” is risible – we know how ludicrously expensive and troubled Hinkley C has been, let alone the other new nuclear proposals for the UK, as Germany plan to phase out all nuclear power by 2022.
Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have demonstrated that there is no practical obstacle to a 100 per cent renewable future.
Existing renewable, lowcarbon technologies (which definitely do not include burning quantites of wood greater than Britain’s entire annual production, as is being done at Drax), combined with energy efficiency measures such as insulation of our poor-quality housing stock, can provide us with a secure future at the lowest practical cost.