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UK's Coal Plants To Be Phased Out Within 10 Years (bbc.co.uk)
AmiMoJo writes: The UK's remaining coal-fired power stations will be shut by 2025, Energy Secretary Amber Rudd has announced. They will mostly be replaced with gas. Currently, coal provides 28% of the UK's electricity. Japanese/European nuclear plants built in the UK are also expected to contribute. The big question is how to ensure gas plants are built to replace it. Only one large plant is under construction today. Another, which secured a subsidy last year, is struggling to find investors. The government cut renewable energy subsidies earlier this year, which led to questions about the government's commitment to tackle climate change.
We could just harness all the politicians hot air thats been produced about this over the last 15 years.
I'm really beginning to believe that technically pig ignorant people should not be in politics. It seems to me that they Just Dont Get that we're have hardly any spare capacity and closing another load of stations without any new ones to immediately replace them is only going to make things worse especially if we have another cold winter.
FFS , if they can't even formulate and carry out a sensibly policy for building basic infrastructure what fecking chance do we have if there's a real emergency?
Why phase it out? Is it more expensive than the alternatives? Is the coal going to be used for something else? Are modern coal plants really all that harmful to the environment? I thought they were able to capture the emissions at these big plants.
None of these questions enter into the "mind" of the liberal demoncrap. They are only concerned with making things more expensive and shouting you down for employing basic logic and asking simple questions which expose their positions for the lunacy that they are.
The muslims will destroy all of that before 10 years is up.
The strongest commitment of any Conservative party government when it comes to energy policy has always been, is, and always will be, to ensure the best possible bottom for of the oil companies, nothing else matters to them including what is best for the nation.
Our government has no clue about energy policy. They are a bunch of utter morons tied to lobbyists' interests. They have already agreed a new nuclear with the Chinese that guarantees a 100% rise in energy costs over current prices and have sold (with the help of the BBC) this to the general public as an energy security initiative. My countrymen are fools and the government is made up very much of their ilk.
Dear Comrades...er...Customers,
Thanks for ditching your remaining coal plants.
Now that you threw those pesky Ukrainians under the bus, we can now offer our natural gas without problems. I will love to sell more to you by 2025 and later.
From Russia, with love.
Putin
XOXO
One minute he's griping that they aren't building enough gas stations. Then he says they aren't pushing enough renewables.
Last time I looked, gas is a fossil fuel. Stupid summary.
According to people like AmiMoJo, the planet is going to collapse within 15 years due to climate change. Why would you need subsidies or incentives??? Isn't it incentive enough to pay for it yourself in order not to die? If people truly believe in climate change, why is the EU increasing their Co2 output year after year EVERY year? Why does the average European consume more and more energy every year? Are they crazy? Don't they know they are going to die from Climate Change?
Or can it be that no one really believes in that Climate Change is real, and when it comes down to it personally affecting them they ignore the issue? Why it is always "someone else" (the Gubmint, the Chinese, India, etc) that isn't doing enough?
From the summary:
Japanese/European nuclear plants built in the UK are also expected to contribute
No, we're getting Chinese ones. I think our politicians must be among the most easily bought.
UK will sit in the dark and freeze.
Leftist tools are the funniest peoples.
But ultimately you want to replace all fossil fuel power plant with zero-carbon power plants which means nuclear, solar, wind, wave, and bio-based fuel power plants.
Are modern coal plants really all that harmful to the environment?
Yes. Perhaps you've heard of climate change?
I thought they were able to capture the emissions at these big plants.
The cost of carbon capture for coal plants makes the operation far more expensive (per MWh and per MW) than nuclear or renewables. As a result, a tiny fraction of one percent of coal-fired generators in first world nations are capturing the carbon emissions and sequestering them.
As for your second paragraph -- it's one thing to be ignorant of a specific industry and its technologies and economics. That's your first paragraph, and that's fine. That's how we learn. But the ignorance exhibited in your second paragraph indicates a different kind of ignorance altogether. Please go back to the kiddie table.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Given the decline of coal usage in the U.K. (on a downwards slope since a now somewhat rusted lady held power, though plateaued of late) and that the U.K. has been a net importer of coal over a similar period of time, phasing out old coal plants may be something of a no-brainer. Granted, the U.K. is now also a net importer of gas, and a net importer of oil, but those declines are much more recent than that of coal. It will be interesting to see, moving forward, how the British economy pays to import those resources, having burned through its own easily obtained stocks with quite some abandon...
Does it mean Great Britain's climate will improve? How? What will the home of the coal powered industrial revolution get for its horrendous sacrifice? Handshakes at the UN?
All three due to problems with unreliable coal powered stations.
I'm left wondering why the fuck they want gas.
I can only think because we don't otherwise really need fracking in this country, so the politicians hope to make us hostages to gas to force us to allow them to blow the shit out of our water sources so they can sell the gas on the open market to the rest of the world.
PS, all those rolling blackouts to make people listen? That's what the private industry did in California so as to gouge higher profits from the state and their customers. Deliberately manufactured and unnecessary blackouts to "make people listen". If some arab had done the same shit, they'd be in Gitmo so fast the earth would have been slowed down by their acceleration to Cuba.
mutated testicle of BIG PICTURE. WHAT Beyond the scope of
Russia is not a reliable supplier. Shipping gas across the Atlantic is costly or at least undeveloped. Fracking has not taken root in Europe So, where is all that natural gas priced to be cost effect for power generation going to come from?
But, hey, that's just economics.
Cameron is a pig.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm left wondering why the fuck they want gas.
Presumably because gas power stations are far cleaner than coal, provide output that can be relied on (unlike wind or solar) and can be built quickly (unlike nuclear).
"Harry Bradbury .. has been given licences by the government to drill for and extract gas from massive coal reserves under the sea and off the North East coast."
"Under the North Sea there are vast deposits. We're talking about two billion tonnes of coal off the coast here. Now, to give you some measure of that, two billion tonnes has more energy in it than we've ever extracted from the totality of North Sea gas since we began." link
More likely because their anti-nuke hysterics are as bad as our anti-nuke hysterics.
Just remember, the one thing that can turn an AGW fanatic into a proponent of coal is the thought that the easiest zero-CO2 replacement for a coal plant is a nuclear power plant....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Anybody think that coal is clean AND cheap is kidding themselves. The only way to have cheap coal is turn off all scrubbers the way that china does. Then you simply shifted costs from the electrical plant to health services, as well as real estate, business costs, etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The UK is giving aways its nations power payments to China.
The design, build costs, running costs, decontamination, decommissioning cost all get covered by the UK with profit making for all the owners and services provided over the life of a nuclear project.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Except it isn't. While well managed nuclear at scale with current technology holds a lot of promise it requires a large amount of capital and quite a bit of infrastructure. The will to do that does not currently exist so whether we like it or not we'll have to wait for 1950s style prosperity before it is going to be given serious consideration - as China did recently.
To boil things right down, a windmill or two requires little effort or action on the part of people in politics while nukes would require actual work.
Are you getting the picture now? The question - "where is my network of power stations with GenIV reactors" can be filed with "where is my flying car" for now.
Pretence that it is easy is going to be met with various levels of disbelief by anyone with a clue.
Bit of a downside to changing from a manufacturing economy to a service economy and telling the Scots to go fuck themselves isn't it? The legacy of Thatcher still has not been repaired.
Wait, what? I thought there was no fracking in the UK? And Gitmo is a US thing. I don't think the UK sends people there, as a general rule?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Scrubbers remove NOx and SOx but not CO2 and they are relatively cheap although you need a lot of space for water storage to go with them. The currently experimental measures to remove CO2 are a different story and look like they will be very expensive.
I should add that not all ash ends up in the ash dam just the fly ash so that's why the numbers may look weird at first glance. Bottom ash, which is taken out of the bottom of the boiler, typically ends up in concrete and cinder blocks among other things.