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Generating Electricity by Fantasy-Power
Towards the end of last year, as part of the Green Crap Purge George Osborne Amber Rudd withdrew the £1 billion pot allocated for encouraging the development of Carbon Capture & Storage, one of the great moonbeams-from-cucumbers schemes of our time.
Now it so happens that all scenarios for achieving the UK’s official daydream of Full Decarbonisation by 2050 depended upon a chain of reasoning as follows: “most heating needs to be electric”, followed by “most transportation needs to be electric”, followed by “there must be lots of genuinely CO2-neutral** biomass power generation”; then – because as eny fule kno we will needs a heap of gas-fired power plants, and maybe even some coal plants to generate those quite staggering quantities of elelctricity “there needs to be lots of CCS”: and all finally, triumphantly anchored by “the residual CO2 from non-electric transportation – you know, aircraft and such – needs to be offset by biomass-PLUS-CCS”, which is of course CO2-negative! (‘net negative emissions’ in the jargon).
Thus, our ‘decarbonised’ energy future was being built on some inescapable logic plus the manifestation, well before 2050, of the unicorn of CCS. Economically viable CCS, to boot.
So, the government having cruelly withheld the billion, they can be blamed for the disintegration of the entire chain! And they will be, from now until 2050, I should imagine.
When do we get to register that CCS is a non-existent deus ex machina for *solving* an insoluble problem? That it is an ontologially-challenged concept? That it is a pure fantasy?
ND
__________
**as opposed to burning mature trees a la Drax, which is anything but CO2-neutral as the greenies are slowly coming to realise. Sorry, Drax
Source: http://www.cityunslicker.co.uk/2016/02/generating-electricity-by-fantasy-power.html
