Dirty cost of keeping the Government’s net zero strategy alive revealed
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
Doubling down on insanity:
The Government’s plan to reach net zero relies on burning the equivalent of the New Forest every five months, The Telegraph can reveal.
Ministers plan to use technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere in order to compensate for sectors such as aviation, agriculture and heavy industry, and meet their 2050 climate targets.
The proposals rely largely on capturing the smoke from power plants, which burn wood to create electricity, and piping it under the North Sea using a system known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (Beccs).
Because these biomass plants are considered to be carbon neutral, largely because the trees they burn will be replanted, any of the emissions that are captured and stored are counted as negative.
To create enough emissions so that the removal can balance the books and reach net zero, the power plants will need to burn the equivalent of 120 million trees a year, an analysis of government modelling by The Telegraph has found.
It came just days after the food strategy promised to use huge swathes of the countryside to grow crops, with scientists warning that there is not enough land to deliver on all the competing pledges.
‘A castle built on sand’
Concerns were raised over how the technology will work at scale and whether burning wood for electricity is a genuine renewable energy source.
The European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (Easac), the association of national academies across Europe including the Royal Society, has called on policymakers to “suspend expectations” that they can use Beccs to reach net zero.
Its analysis found “that there are substantial risks of it failing to achieve net removals at all” or that the removals will not happen quickly enough to meet climate targets.
Dr Michael Norton, the environment programme director at Easac, told The Telegraph that belief in Beccs is based on “flawed assumptions”, adding: “Our conclusion is that it is a bit of a castle built on sand.”
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Beis) said that the plans are not final, and it is looking at other waste products that can be used as biomass and other carbon capture technologies.
While governments are being urged to plant more trees, the idiots at BEIS want to burn yet more, and then capture the carbon dioxide with technology that does not even exist yet.
Meanwhile the environment will be destroyed in pursuit of a meaningless agenda.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Fortunately they won’t be able to afford to do too much more damage just yet, and common sense should prevail before they can.
Never underestimate the ability of politicians, being driven by their favourite activists, to totally ignore financial implications and common sense
“The proposals rely largely on capturing the smoke from power plants, which burn wood to create electricity, and piping it under the North Sea using a system known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (Beccs).”
Clearly these fools do not understand that bioenergy is NOT piping CO2 “smoke” anywhere. Bioenergy relies on plants (algae to trees) sequestering CO2. A temporary strategy because those materials will eventually be recycled by some of the oxygen they helped create. It’s part of Earth’s natural carbon cycle. Maybe the Ministers have been smoking something themselves?
So-called ‘carbon’ capture can never be more than a hugely expensive token gesture that may not even work in the end, at yet more public expense.
Why they pursue it is a mystery, other than to pretend to be doing something.
Perhaps it’s not a mystery? Given the way the vast majority of the population believed in all the Covid propaganda the government could reasonably assume that the same numbers believe in all this nonsense as well?
It makes more sense to re-open the Selby coalfield, and use coal and carbon capture (yet to be achieved) at Drax. Local source and carbon neutral, what’s not to like.
Burn a tree. Grow a tree. Carbon neutral. Well, no. Grow a tree, then burn it. Burning an existing tree puts you behind the 8-ball forever.
And, of course, “We are going to grow trees” is an empty promise.
“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”
Why do we still entertain the false idea that carbon dioxide is an important gas in the atmosphere, when it clearly is nothing of the sort ?
In my lifetime, CO2 in the air has increased approx 50% while temperatures are indistinguishable from my childhood. Reports are that the globe has not warmed this century and has even been cooling for the past seven years, or so ?
Is it not time to cancel CO2 ?
Indeed. A graph of GMT vs CO2 concentration over the last 43 years shows no correlation at all. MMGW/CC is fake. Obviously, demonstrably . . . fake.
The Earth’s average temperature is now colder than 80 years ago, while CO2 has increased by a third.. Fact. Does that mean CO2 causes cooling as well as warming? CEng, CPhys.
So it’s all about straightforward corruption then?
How can these ‘ideas’ (I use the term loosely) even get off the ground in a functioning government?
Does it actually need to be pointed out; that you can’t base a multi-billion government flagship policy on technology that doesn’t even exist yet?
It should be a one word, 3 second conversation. ‘No’.
It’s the ultimate vanity project based on wishful thinking and should have no place in a serious government.
Therein lies the problem. This is not a serious government, thus wishful thinking on vanity projects is all they have to offer
This is not a government, it’s a marionette. It’s strings are being pulled by the Davos elites. And they’re all Pinocchio’s.
There was a director at Drax by the name of Rebecca Heaton. She also sat on the board of the Climate Change Committee. She advised them that burning trees at Drax was climate neutral, and that her eponymous BECCS scheme would make Drax carbon negative. Gummer’s head was duly gummed up, and he agreed. Was he offered Deben-tures, or just some consultancy?
https://www.theccc.org.uk/2017/03/27/dr-rebecca-heaton-to-join-committee-on-climate-change/
Meanwhile Will Gardiner, CEO at Drax seems to have aroused a lot of real anger by posting an advertorial at ConHome.
https://www.conservativehome.com/sponsored/2022/06/will-gardiner-carbon-capture-can-help-the-uk-hit-net-zero-and-support-ten-thousand-jobs.html
“It came just days after the food strategy promised to use huge swathes of the countryside to grow crops”
And yet they want to drastically reduce the CO2 (plant food) content of the atmosphere…
That’s because our ‘experts’ know that CO2 is bad for the climate and has no impact on the growth of plants
Europe has the lowest forest to land mass averages on Earth. In the year 60 when the Romans conquered, 80% of Europe was forest . . . today only four are above 30% . . . YEAH . . .Let’s burn More Trees !! . . . Great for the environment !! . . . let’s make More Bio-Fuels and starve the people of the world . . . Then . . . we won’t have to burn fossil fuels . . . We have ‘Magic Tricks’ . . . we are elite Environmentalists . . . We have it all figured out . . . Kill those ‘EVIL’ Fossil Fuel Industries . . . Life, then, will be Sooo much Better !! ???
https://www.academia.edu/50913774/Global_Environmentalism_A_New_Standard
The Executive Secretary of the UN Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Christiana Figueres admitted that its agenda is not to save the planet, – but instead to destroy the economic model which to date has improved current living standards and life expectancy way beyond even the wildest imaginings of previous generations.
So…. THERE IS NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY !!
I read this first in the not so Torygraph yesterday. I was dumbfounded at the schoolboy tosh, asking me to believe that stripping the environment of more trees – to burn more – to capture more CO2 – to offset more – to achieve net zero. Who believes this garbage? It’s nothing more than authorised environmental destruction.
Can anyone tell me how long this storage will last in windless conditions
More than 1GW of battery storage to replace coal in world’s biggest isolated grid
The Western Australian government is about to embark on an ambitious investment to replace its last two publicly-owned coal generators with wind, solar and battery storage – enough to take the state’s main grid – the biggest isolated grid in the world – to 70 per cent renewables.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/synergy-to-seek-more-than-1gw-of-battery-storage-in-plan-to-replace-coal/
Ben the linked article is wonderfully misleading as is typical of most journalism these days.
Western Australia does not really have one single grid rather one major one and other (not linked) smaller ones plus multiple microgrids.
This is a map from one of the secondary suppliers showing the main areas
https://www.horizonpower.com.au/about-us/who-we-serve/
So exactly what the article is defining as the “world’s biggest isolated grid” is not clearly defined. It seems to suggest they are only referring to Synergy and the “South Western Interconnected Grid” (SWIG) and not all of Western Australia.
Obviously the 1GW only refers to power output not energy storage capacity and the latter, as ever, is rarely openly disclosed. In reality battery units do not store much more in terms of Watt hours than their advertised Watt power so I would doubt this unit is capable of storing much more than 1.25GWh.
The total annual generation of Western Australia from both power plants and own generation is quoted as 43,568GWh in 2020 so an average demand of 5GW likely to vary from about 3GW to 7GW by time of day etc.
https://www.energy.gov.au/publications/australian-energy-statistics-table-o-electricity-generation-fuel-type-2019-20-and-2020#:~:text=Total%20electricity%20generation%20in%20Australia,total%20electricity%20generation%20in%202020.
Hard to be precise but I seriously doubt that in the dark and with no wind this battery system could power even just the SWIG for 1 hour. Of course it would not be intended to do that anyway and its main function will be frequency and voltage control services.
As an aside here is a good infrastructure map that you can zoom into worldwide in remarkably precise locations for grid systems.
https://openinframap.org/#2/26/12
Talking about “biomass” – isn’t that what coal and oil are?
Here’s another shocker.
Biogas and biomethane supply chains leak twice as much methane as first thought
A new Imperial analysis has found that biogas and biomethane, while more climate friendly, leak more than twice as much methane as previously thought.
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-biogas-biomethane-chains-leak-methane.html
I’m not sure about the “more climate friendly” bit
I will be very surprised if the UK makes it out of this decade without a period of civil unrest with the triggers being the Net Zero lunacy and illegal immigration. It will finally get through to people that elections just change the morons in control and that democracy requires the people to have the power.
Sorry Gerry, but we don’t now live in a democracy. Since the 3 main parties came to a devils agreement to all go for one policy, Net Zero, there is no one to vote for. We now live in an ‘Elected Dictatorship’ and the dreadful waste of money and destruction of the economy will continue. Will the sheeple ever wake up?
If you burn clean gas to make the energy, you get no particulate emissions and half the CO2, so can plant half the trees. The CO2 and particulate emissions from wood burning at DRAX are worse than the coal it replaced, for which we pay c.£1B pa to DRAX in green subsidies added to our bills by government laws. Courtesy of CHris Huhne as Energy Minister , who now runs the wood chip company that supplies DRAX…. who have thunk it..
We should be buring garbage at high temperature instead of land filling.