‘Nail in the coffin’ for ill-fated Fife plant

The collapse of the Government’s pioneering carbon capture competition was the “nail in the coffin” for Longannet, according to one worker.

Chris Murphy, the plant’s business services engineer, said: “Fair play to Scottish Power, they invested a lot of money in the scheme and in the development of the project.

“We thought there might be a future in that but when that did not happen, reading between the lines, that was the nail in the coffin,” said the Glenrothes 51-year-old.

Longannet was the last man standing in the competition when Westminster’s Department of Energy and Climate Change pulled the plug on its original contest to design and operate a commercial scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) unit in 2011.

Then Energy Secretary Chris Huhne announced plans had been scrapped after the Government failed to reach an agreement with Scottish Power’s parent company Iberdrola Group.

Westminster’s move, described as a “lost opportunity” by then First Minister Alex Salmond, was estimated to have cost the Fife economy £272 million a year.

At that stage Longannet had been running a CCS demonstration for a year.

In 2012 the National Audit Office claimed Whitehall failures led to the demise of the £1 billion competition.

It found the competition had been a high-risk and challenging undertaking launched with insufficient planning and recognition of the commercial risks.

The competition had been launched in 2007 by the then Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform but was cancelled on the grounds of protecting value for money and because it could not be funded within the £1bn budget.

Longannet’s closure will mark a key step in Scotland’s energy transition, according to WWF Scotland director Lang Banks, who said that, while it had served the nation, it was Scotland’s single biggest source of carbon emissions.

And the Scottish Greens’ economy and energy spokesman Patrick Harvie called for an energy agenda focused on demand reduction, storage and low carbon.

Picture: PA. The turbine hall at Longannet power station.