From the London Daily Mail:
The UK's £1billion carbon-belcher raping US forests...that YOU pay for: How world's biggest green power plant is actually INCREASING greenhouse gas emissions and Britain's energy bill
It is touted as the flagship of Britain’s energy future: the world’s biggest green power plant burning wood pellets to generate renewable biomass electricity that will safeguard the planet for our children.
But today The Mail on Sunday can expose the hypocrisy that underpins the Drax power station in North Yorkshire – which far from curbing greenhouse emissions, is actually increasing them, while adding huge sums to the nation’s power bills.
Drax was once Britain’s biggest coal-fired power station. It now burns millions of tons of wood pellets each year, and is reputed to be the UK’s biggest single contributor towards meeting stringent EU green energy targets.
But astonishingly, a new study shows that the switch by Drax from coal to wood is actually increasing carbon emissions. It says they are four times as high as the maximum level the Government sets for plants that use biomass – which is defined as fuel made from plant material that will grow back again, therefore re-absorbing the CO2 emitted when it is burnt.
At £80 per MW/hr, Drax’s biomass energy is two-and-a-half times more expensive than coal – a cost passed on to customers. Last year Drax soaked up £340 million in ‘green’ subsidies that were added to British consumers’ power bills – a sum set to rocket still further. Without these subsidies, its biomass operation would collapse.
Perhaps most damningly of all, its hunger for wood fuel is devastating hardwood forests in America, to the fury of US environmentalists, who say that far from saving the planet, companies like Drax are destroying it. Drax denies this, saying it only uses dust and residues from sawmills, as well as wood left over when others log trees for purposes such as construction. Inquiries by The Mail on Sunday investigation suggests this claim is highly questionable.
Just wonderful and the cost is being carried by the British Taxpayer.
Of course, it is not about being green, it is about making money - the Daily Mail has this side-bar article:
The disgraced former Energy Secretary Chris Huhne was a key political architect of Britain’s drive for biomass – and is now the European chief of a US pellet company which is seeking UK markets.
Lib Dem Huhne – who was jailed in 2012 for persuading his ex-wife to take his speeding points – is a director of Zilkha Biomass, which is currently completing a huge ‘black wood pellet’ plant in Selma, Alabama.
Zilkha already has a contract to supply a power station near Paris, and a spokesman said it was ‘absolutely interested’ in doing business in the UK. The firm’s website boasts of Huhne’s former Cabinet role, saying he was responsible for ‘setting up a new energy-saving framework’ as well as ‘market reform to spur low carbon investment’.
Huhne declined to disclose his salary, saying: ‘Biomass is one of the cheapest ways of generating low-carbon electricity ... all I am doing is working in a business that I have followed and been interested in for years.’
Liberal Democrat of course - love the line about "declined to disclose his salary" all the while his money is coming from taxpayers everywhere as these projects need large subsidies to be at all feasible.
It's the Gang Green at work.
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