Wednesday 10 February 2016

Generating Electricity by Fantasy-Power

Towards the end of last year, as part of the Green Crap Purge George Osborne Amber Rudd withdrew the £1 billion pot allocated for encouraging the development of Carbon Capture & Storage, one of the great moonbeams-from-cucumbers schemes of our time.

Now it so happens that all scenarios for achieving the UK's official daydream of Full Decarbonisation by 2050 depended upon a chain of reasoning as follows:  "most heating needs to be electric", followed by "most transportation needs to be electric", followed by "there must be lots of genuinely CO2-neutral** biomass power generation";  then - because as eny fule kno we will needs a heap of gas-fired power plants, and maybe even some coal plants to generate those quite staggering quantities of elelctricity "there needs to be lots of CCS": and all finally, triumphantly anchored by "the residual CO2 from non-electric transportation - you know, aircraft and such - needs to be offset by biomass-PLUS-CCS",  which is of course CO2-negative! ('net negative emissions' in the jargon).

Thus, our 'decarbonised' energy future was being built on some inescapable logic plus the manifestation, well before 2050, of the unicorn of CCS.  Economically viable CCS, to boot.

So, the government having cruelly withheld the billion, they can be blamed for the disintegration of the entire chain!  And they will be, from now until 2050, I should imagine.

When do we get to register that CCS is a non-existent deus ex machina for *solving* an insoluble problem?  That it is an ontologially-challenged concept?  That it is a pure fantasy? 

ND

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**as opposed to burning mature trees a la Drax, which is anything but CO2-neutral as the greenies are slowly coming to realise.  Sorry, Drax

7 comments:

DJK said...

CCS is slightly more than pure fantasy (See Boundary Dam CCS, Saskpower). If you burn coal in pure oxygen it's doable. And if the coal is cheap enough it might just be commercially viable in some parts of the world.

CityUnslicker said...

DJK - it is still a lot of if's. I find it sad that a supposedly right wing Government can't simply sign off a dash for Gas. LNG is the future energy of the world and is a significant improvement on coal and nuclear.

it is barmy that we are in this position.

Elby the Beserk said...

But Nick, in ClimateChangeWorld ANYTHING goes. You just make it up as you go along. As long as the message fits that, all is well.

Ravenscar. said...

Gas for heating in our homes, coal for electrical generation.

Gas should only be utilized in the home, pumped directly into for domestic heating and large industrial processes albeit admittedly, industry - which in Britain thanks to the green agenda is being forced offshore.

Burning gas to drive turbines to produce electrical power and consequent efficiency (transmission) loses (40%) incurred means burning gas is very inefficient use of a valuable resource: is crackpot policy.

Coal and nuclear for baseload - all of the rest of it the renewables BS is energy policy ex the loony bin and formed on the hoof by green zealots who will shut the damn country down. It is, really difficult not to view the big picture, surmise and thus conclude that, shortages Blackouts and industrial Shutdown is what they want to happen, a desired outcome.

Efficient new build modern coal burning power generation is not only cheap it does provide plentiful supply, any viable economy necessitates large quantities of energy!

Coal, is so wrongly made out to be the bane of the piece and that is through green inspired and totally shameful but idiot propaganda aimed at a very thick public.
Yes, the hairshirt brigade not only are they wrong on the basic premise of man made warming, the whole green blob circus is entirely dependent only on taxpayer subsidy why are we beholden to these fucking watermelons/SJWs/Socialist dogmatists/ Commies?. The idiocy of, basing energy policy by primarily shifting everything to suit, cater for unreliable 'juice' from boondoggles it just adds insult to the ever increasing insanity ......

And oh Dear God watching the nodding dogs, led by those two towering intellects in Amber and Andrea - Rudd and Leadssom one had to wonder how it could come down to this? Execrable was some of the energy debate in the HoC this morning - it makes my fucking head hurt, maybe Fifth formers (I won't use, I abhor the US styled age grading of students) would made a better fist of it.

We are, being and royally rear shafted by our own representatives, blame Brussels, Greenpeace, the Tories, Osborne and past mistakes going back to Thatcher's regime. 30 odd years of playing with, kicking the can, enabling the green agenda, allowing greens to write the Climate change ACT...........UK energy policy in Britain is coming to a head in the next few years, it will through gross negligence and massive incompetence - cause calamity, of such a steep decline, and ensuring untold misery and deaths numbered in hundreds of thousands.

Is that - what you want?

lilith said...

I'm loving my oil fired central heating. Just purchased enough to heat the house and hot water for a year for £270.

lilith said...

The electricity on the other hand is @£800 a year as we cook with it and we have incandescent bulbs. If we had to heat the place with it too it would be double that. Are people going to go back to paraffin stoves?

Wildgoose said...

Just want to add my support to Ravenscar's comments - our base load should be nuclear and coal, gas should be used at times of higher demand with peak demand catered for by energy storage such as at Dinorwig, et al.