It's A Start But Shut It Down Completely...

[ToraToraTora]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyplj7dkw2o

I'm no eco warrior but this is an ecological disaster.

[ToraToraTora]

By shut it down I mean convert it back to coal, a much more environmantally friendly source than what it's burning now.

[barry1010]

Coal has to be imported 

[davebro3]

It's madness. If we're gonna burn stuff it should be our own coal.

[barry1010]

Thatcher put an end to that, davebro

[ToraToraTora]

09:33 no it doesn't we live on an island made of coal. Open new mines, lots of them.

[davebro3]

//The UK has identified hard coal resources of 3 560 million tonnes, although total resources could be as large as 187 billion tonnes. About 80 million tonnes of the economically recoverable reserves are available in shallow deposits capable of being extracted by surface mining.//

[ToraToraTora]

09:35 Most mines were close by Labour, oh dear barry not got our thinking head on this morning? Anyway irrelevant, open new ones or reopen old ones, we are not short of coal.

[Stableford]

I'm sure Ed Miliband has it all in hand.

[ToraToraTora]

He's definitely got something in hand.

[webbo3]

Not according to my post here.

https://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/News/Question1889230.html#gsc.tab=0

[youngmafbog]

No chance of that happening with Mad Milliband in charge of Energy.

Common sense has gone right out the window.

[New Judge]

It should be remembered (especially so as we are not accused of partisan views) that the national scandal that is Drax began on the Conservatives’ watch.

Drax opened in 1974 and was the largest power station in the UK. Courtesy of considerable investment in technology since its opening it also became the most advanced, efficient and clean power plant in the country. When Drax was constructed it, along with its sister plants at Eggborough and Ferrybridge, were sited so as to be close to the Yorkshire coalfields where their fuel was sourced. Drax got much of its coal from Kellingley colliery, just eight miles away.

It was in 2012, when it was clear that the country was to embark on a badly planned and futile folly which would see the end of coal,  that Drax announced its plans to switch over to burning wood. That is when the project should have been strangled at birth. 

Alas, rather like now, gullible and ignorant politicians were in abundance. They and their advisers were enthralled with the idea, especially when they learned that the emissions produced from burning the wood  would not be recorded against the UK’s totals, but instead against those of the country where the trees were chopped down. Those countries also had added to their totals, the emissions from the huge processing plants (Drax currently runs 18) which turn the wood into “biomass” (which doesn’t sound half so sacrilegious as burning wood from freshly felled trees does). Also on their books are the emissions from the ships which transport 7m tons of the stuff annually from Canada and the southern USA to Liverpool, Immingham and Tyneside. 

The only emissions the UK records are those from the diesel trains which cart the stuff from the ports to Drax. Every week about130 of these – each weighing over 1,000 tons -  arrive (one about every 75 minutes, 24/7).  Together with their empty return journeys (the wagons cannot be used for anything else) they account for over one million rail miles.

All this means that, despite being the site of the UK's biggest single source of CO2 emissions, the process of acually burning 7m tons of wood each year produces none.

UK taxpayers and energy consumers are paying about £2m a day to subsidise this gigantic confidence trick. It is clear the plant will have to continue to generate power for the foreseeable future . This is thanks to a series of irresponsible decisions which have seen the UK’s energy resilience severely compromised by making much of its supply dependent on the weather. Its supply is so finely balanced that in mid-December, during a cloudy and calm spell the grid came so close  to exhaustion that either voltage reductions or power cuts were a distinct possibility. Although Drax accounts for only about 7% of demand, that small percentage was critical to maintain supply.   

But make no mistake -  the real blame for this fiasco stretches back more than a decade to whichever idiot was fooled into agreeing that felling hundreds of square miles of forestry annually, processing the wood and shipping it 5,000 miles to be burnt in Yorkshire, was “sustainable” and so must be subsidised.