Why Coal-Fired Power Is NOT Part Of Our Greener Future

The Sunday Herald is something of a "friend" when it comes to environmental issues, thanks in no small part to Rob Edwards who usually manages to get at least one story in each week's paper.

But it's not just his contributions - the business pages frequently manage to shoehorn a story about renewable energy or green jobs into its small section.

So imagine my surprise yesterday when I discovered in the business section a comment piece by Muir Miller, the Project Director for Ayrshire Power, the company who want to build the new Hunterston coal-fired power station, entitled 'Why coal-fired power is part of our greener future'. The whole thing - although admittedly "comment" - is little more than scaremongering.

To begin with, Mr Miller has a quick pop at the groups opposing the power station before asserting that coal is

the very technology that can do most to tackle global warming

Whit?? Ah, he means Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), otherwise known as "clean coal". Personally, I think the technologies that produce energy without emissions are those which can do most to tackle climate change, but then I'm not trying to sell a new coal plant to the Scottish people.

He goes on:

Since coal is here to stay, we must decide how to generate low carbon electricity from it – and Scotland can lead this process by developing clean coal technologies.

Coal doesn't have to be "here to stay". In fact, there's quite a few of us would rather it wasn't.

In a global context, of course, he's right, but that doesn't mean that Scotland should follow China's lead. Mr Miller seems to think that Scotland will be missing out hugely if we don't develop CCS and then sell it to other countries. I tend to think it's ludicrous to build something which pollutes in order to design something to remove the pollution. How about we just don't build the polluting thing in the first place, and let China steal the CCS technology from someone else?

He then talks about CCS being better if it was designed into a new power station rather than retrofitted to an old one

the only realistic way ahead is via a demonstration project as outlined in our application

But hang on, wasn't he wanting to sell the technology to other countries who already have coal power stations, and therefore would need to be retrofitted?

In reality, it's a thinly-veiled pop at Scottish Power who are currently testing CCS at Longannet power station in Fife, with a view to working out how to retrofit CCS.

But it's time for some scaremongering:

The urgent need for base load electricity means we don’t have the luxury of time to put projects such as Hunterston on hold until the technology catches up – the demand for energy must be addressed now

Mr Miller is suggesting that we should build Hunterston without CCS because we need the electricity. But just how urgent is he suggesting that need is? Later in the article he says:

The reason for the base load concerns is that within 10 years, older coal-fired power stations are unlikely to meet demanding environmental legislation and will be forced to close

So he's given us a rather generous ten years to get CCS to work. That's about the same timescale for getting wave and tidal power schemes going, and for all those new offshore wind turbines to come online, therefore negating the need for new coal power stations.

As for the base load requirements, Mr Miller uses the classic scaremongering tactic of omitting to mention efficiency measures. Power companies don't like energy-saving measures. They were rather you were led to believe that energy use has to rise and rise every single year, without fail. It's better for their business. With some decent efficiency measures in place, that base load requirement could be dramatically smaller than it is today, and Mr Miller's ten year timescale will also coincide with the emergence of the smart grid, with household appliances and electric cars "selling" their energy back to the national grid when it's needed most.

As a society, we have to get away from thinking that all of our energy is going to come from a big concrete box 30 miles away on the coast.

Back to the article:

We’ve worked closely with Scottish Natural Heritage

Hmm, didn't I mention them in connection to Hunterston last week?

As yet, we have made no decisions on the sourcing of coal or biomass fuels

I seem to recall that early on in the planning stages of this project, Ayrshire Power claimed that Scottish coal wasn't good enough for their power station and therefore they would import all their coal. Which is why they wanted to build new docks at Hunterston. As for biomass, we've seen that there's not enough of the stuff to go around and other proposed biomass plants will have to import from America.

Older nuclear stations will also start to be decommissioned over this period, and this capacity must be replaced if the lights are to stay on.

And there it is. Paragraph 16 before the first mention of lights going off. Normally, the unnerving ability of lights to switch themselves off is mentioned in the first couple of paragraphs, if not in the headline, so I'll give Mr Miller some kudos for holding back with that one for so long.

He then goes on to crunch the numbers, claiming that a "modern" coal plant (there's nothing modern about setting fire to rocks) would mean 25% less emissions than the existing plants. Actually, I don't dispute that - but 75% of an awful lot is still an awful lot!

He lops another 25% off with

demonstration-scale CCS fitted

Given that Hunterston are only planning to have CCS fitted to a fifth of the plant, that figure doesn't add up.

He then goes on to try and make the power station sound wonderful:

with CCS on the whole plant, expected by 2025, CO² emissions are estimated to be only 10% of those of a conventional coal-fired power station.

And with renewable generating, CO² emissions are actually 0% of those of a coal-fired power station, conventional or not.

And incidentally, are you not going to add in all the CO² emissions from transporting the coal and biomass from around the world to Scotland?

Mr Miller then makes a rather bizarre statement:

To repeat, CCS represents the only realistic way of achieving meaningful reductions in CO² emissions from fossil-fuelled power stations.

Well, no, you said yourself a couple of paragraphs beforehand that a "modern" coal power station would reduce emissions by 25%. Or is 25% not "meaningful"? And if you're going to broaden it out to all fossil-fuels, natural gas is a hell of a lot cleaner than coal.

Mr Miller rounds off his article by asserting that CCS offers

a truly sustainable approach to meeting our energy needs

Just what is sustainable about coal? I wasn't aware of an ever-replenishing supply of coal that we could use ad-infinitum.

Mr Miller is trying to greenwash the article by using an environmental buzzword, but spectacularly fails with that. In fact, he spectacularly fails with the whole article. I can't imagine there will be many people who don't see through his motivations and obfuscations.

In fact, I'll go for a wild stereotype here: the people who are going to fall for Ayrshire Power's scaremongering and greenwashing aren't going to be reading the Sunday Herald business pages. Hopefully those that did read it had the same reaction I did - that it's the funniest article in the whole paper this week!