UK gives green light to coal-fired power stations

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Britain gave a green light to the construction of up to four coal-fired power stations, but insisted that developers offer a guarantee to bury some of their carbon emissions underground.

The scheme, which will be paid for through a levy of up to 2 per cent on the household bills paid by all 26 million households in the UK, represents a significant shot in the arm for British hopes of mastering carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, which advocates say will play a critical role in efforts to tackle climate change.

“I believe that we need to signal a move away from the building of unabated coal-fired power stations, because it is right for our country to drive us towards low carbon as part of a progressive decarbonisation,” Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, said.

He said that the project, which will see coal-fired stations built at Kingsnorth, in Kent, Hatfield, near Doncaster, and two other sites, was “the most environmentally ambitious of any country in the world”.

CCS, by which the carbon emitted from burning fossil fuels is stripped out using chemical scrubbers and piped for storage in old gasfields beneath the seabed, remains an unproven technology at commercial scale and has only ever been demonstrated at pilot plants generating 30 megawatts of electricity.

But under the terms of the scheme, power companies would have to apply CCS to 400 MW of power production, or a quarter to half of a typical coal plant, and would have to fit it to their entire output by 2025.

The inclusion of the CCS technology is expected to add about $1 billion (£685 million) to the cost of building each coal power station.

Mr Miliband said that the first plant could be operational by 2015.

Green goups welcomed the announcement.

“At last Ed Miliband is demonstrating welcome signs of climate leadership in the face of resistance from Whitehall officials and Cabinet colleagues,” John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace, said.

“He is the first minister in 12 years to throw down the gauntlet to the energy companies and demand they start taking climate change seriously.”

Matthew Lockwood, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, said: "The Government has now stepped up to the mark on coal. The ban on new , unabated coal-fired power stations is the most important UK climate policy we have seen so far.”

But critics said the announcement was long overdue and others questioned how the scheme would be funded.

This story was featured on The Times Website

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