By charles the moderator
We missed this story in May, but in order to replace the use of coal in the UK, power stations are being refitted to burn wood chips. But the UK doesn’t have enough forests to supply the wood chips, (biofuel) so…
Wait for it…
Wait…
Yup, power companies in the UK are planning on purchasing timber in the United States to be converted to wood chips to be shipped across the Atlantic to burn in the previously coal-fired power plants.
From the BBC
Swamp forests in the US are being felled to help keep the lights on in the UK. Is this really the best way to combat climate change?
Environmentalists are trying to block the expansion of a transatlantic trade bringing American wood to burn in European power stations.
The trade is driven by EU rules promoting renewable energy to combat climate change.
Many millions of tonnes of wood pellets will soon be shipped annually to help keep the lights on in the UK. Other EU nations may follow.
Critics say subsidising wood burning wastes money, does nothing to tackle climate change in the short term, and is wrecking some of the finest forests in the US.
The insanity of this is difficult for me to put in perspective, but it seems comparable to shining spotlights on solar collectors.
Read the full BBC story here.
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Remember the Clinton Administration scheme of an inflated “everybody gets a house” market? Because houses for sale were hard to find, since everybody was getting one, the prices went way up. And the people who bought them, though they couldn’t really afford the huge prices, were allowed to get guvmnt-backed loans anyway. Then somebody took a needle and blasted the balloon all to hell.
Owning your own home is a great way to improve communities, families and the economy. WW2 pre and post economics show that. So it is a good thing. However, instead of the Clinton plan, we should have opened up our forests and enlarged the supply of home improvement wood products thus reducing the price, then put people to work improving foreclosed/decaying houses the guvmnt bought at garage sale prices. Those houses could have then been improved then sold at a reduced price instead of an inflated one to folks whose income was less than ideal for home ownership. Over-inflated housing prices would have been avoided due to the normal supply of houses for sale. The bursting bubble would have been avoided. And we would not be in the mess we are in now.
Drax requires 7.5 million tonnes per year. Seems the BBC could no tcalculatre how much of North Carolina that equates too.
Nor how many ships, big heavy oil burners are needed to transport this very low density fuel.
Nor could they calculate how much energy to crop, trim, transport , process and dry in USA
Or how much the port infrastructure will cost to build and operate, seeing that six states combined only export 1.2 million tonnes.
Nor could they bring themselves to state that such logging is illegal in Europe, hence the need to clear cut North Carolina.
They also see to think that this is the next best thing to sliced bread, whereas a palm oil plantation is the very spawn of the devil
I have repeatedly asked Watermelons what is the difference and they decline to answer.
One would expect that the pollution (excluding CO2) from burning wood pellets would be higher than from burning natural gas for example. There are a whole lot of tars and resins in wood that should burn to form all sort of interesting compounds, most of which are not likely to be lung friendly.
My question is for the WUWT pro-nuclear readers: how many of you will heap scorn on the attorneys that are representing the environmental groups that are trying to stop this wood-burning nonsense?
Is using the law to halt, or even delay the wood-pellet shipping operation a good thing?
Guessing the response will be “of course it’s a good thing. But, lawyers who strive to make new nuclear power plants comply with the law are evil.”
Just want to make sure I understand the nuclear advocates’ position.
Here is an informative link re the diesel generator madness: http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=84224
It appears that the World’s Grand Experiment in Industrialization is experiencing a hiccup. Can’t anyone see that the culmination of the Industrialization process eliminates all jobs. This is what automation does, eliminates jobs!!! Detroit was a growing city [1915]. Automation flourished [1920]. Detroit led us into the Great Depression, then WW2.
They will have WW3 to remove the unemployed; standard practice through out the ages. First no electrical power, then economic collapse, next WW3.
Roger,
I don’t know the full story behind the wood-pellet burning, but I very strongly suspect it was due to either a government policy or legislation of some sort. So, to cut to the heart of what you seem to be asking, making entities comply with the law does not appear to be inherently productive or counter productive; it depends on how stupid the law in question is.
If you’d argue that the original problem is the law / regulation rather than enforcing compliance, I might agree with you.
Yes it’s all true. It seems stupid to us too here in the UK, but we have no say in it.
However, you need to be aware that, due to the deregulated nature of the UK energy industry, Drax is now a listed company. And it owns a US subsidiary… Drax Biomass International Inc. And of course Drax power station will be obtaining its pellets from… Drax Biomass International Inc.
You might want to find out what subsidies Drax Biomass International Inc is getting for its operations. At least they will be subsidising the UK’s electricity industry — something we’re grateful for to since most is now owned in Europe and milked to keep Continental energy costs low.
And salt is rubbed into the wound by this from the Times
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/utilities/article3829929.ece
which says about Drax and it ilk
“The (UK) Government will soon offer subsidies, funded by levies on consumer bills, to power stations to switch on quickly when wind farms are not generating sufficient electricity, under so-called capacity auctions. ”
How many words for mad are there?
If I remember, Einstein said he knew of only two infinite things, the universe, and stupidity. He added he wasn’t sure about the universe.
If the oarsmen on the combustion free ships carrying the wood chips go on strike, the UK clean, green government can boot-up the thousands of Diesel generators setup to provide clean energy to backup the grid when their windmills stop turning.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2362762/The-dirty-secret-Britains-power-madness-Polluting-diesel-generators-built-secret-foreign-companies-kick-theres-wind-turbines–insane-true-eco-scandals.html
Green Logic Fail.
Re: M Courtney
The UK has a “Committee on Climate Change” which is supposed to be independent and advises he Government on tackling climate change. The chairman of this committee is Lord Deben who also happens to be Chairman and shareholder of a company called Veolia. Guess what this company does … connects wind farms in remote locations to the grid. The more wind farms connected, the more profit.
The House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee, who appointed Lord Deben, decided that this (and other interests) were not a conflict of interest. That is hardly surprising since the Chair of the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee that decided this was Tim Yeo, who is also chairman of the Renewable Energy Association, chairman of TMO Renewables, director of Eco City Vehicles PLC, Waste2tricity Limited, Albion Community Power PLC and so on.
The UK Government, via the Department of Energy and Climate Change (yes, that’s what the part of government responsible for our electricity and gas supply is called) now realises that wind won’t do it, even if they do spend £100 Billion on it. So in addition to buiklduing all those offshore windmills, they also plan to enter into unbelievably lucrative contracts with owners of standby diesel generators (factories, hospitals, filling stations, churches, you name it) so that we won’t have blackouts when the wind doesn’t blow. It is difficult to understand how a government department in a mature democracy can have reached such a level of mass instanity. Unless, of course, the democracy is getting senile…
The stupid no longer just burns; it has gone thermonuclear.
http://www.forgreenheat.org/blog/An%20environmental%20impact%20assessment%20of%20exported%20wood%20pellets%20from%20Canada%20to%20Europe.pdf
An environmental impact assessment of exported wood pellets, by the Department of Chemical and Mineral Engineering, University of Bologna, Italy and the Clean Energy Research Centre, at the University of British Columbia, published in 2009, concluded that the energy consumed to ship Canadian wood pellets from Vancouver to Stockholm (15,500 km via the Panama Canal), is about 14% of the total energy content of the wood pellets.
An ice free Arctic could reduce this considerably, by opening the long sought North West Passage to shipping and thereby reducing the CO2 created.
At the same time, Europe and the US are giving hell to poor countries to export legitimate lumber from tropical forest where 99 % of trees die of old age and release all the co2 they have stored. Talk about double standards.
They aren’t interested in reducing CO2, they’re moving CO2 production ‘off shore’ ( outsourcing if you will ) so they don’t have to account for it in Britain’s CO2 production.
To my mind the solution is simple.
Plant large pineapple plantations in Greenland. Service these using electrically powered vehicles that can be recharged using solar energy and transport the biomass, after it has dried out in the sun, to the UK by sail.
Why has nobody thought of this simple, practical solution before?
How many readers here saw the Financial Times article of a few months back which showed that from 2006, relative to the US, EU electricity rates have risen 40%. And that continental and UK industries were moving production to the US because our energy costs were so much cheaper (mainly nat gas feedstocks for chemicals, I think, but there were others).
Yes, the EU, with its massive unemployment, is committing economic hari kari, to appease the Gods of Greenpeace.
Well, as long as they persist, we might as well become an energy exporter for a while. And a good thing is that the environmental folks here, losing forests and species in them, can get a good gander at what the world will look like if and when their ilk continue to get governments to do their bidding.
Unintended, shmunintended. The System Is Broken: Incompetent Science and Insane Politics
Bottom line: “You cannot stop the insanity if you will not recognize it as insanity, if people will not recognize the system is broken.”
I live in southern Alabama, also known as the black belt for its fertile soil. It’s quite amusing to read the tree devotion from other places. About 10 years, a bunch of northern artistes protested a plan to cut down a live oak tree for condos, The live oak was about 50 meters in limb spread and 6 meters in diameter at the base. They brought tree experts who testified that a tree that big had to be at least 300 years old. The owner of the tree ringed it to kill it. After the usual delusional attempts, court-ordered to save it, it was eventually cut down. It was 50 years old.
A long leaf pine can be harvested for pulp in 7-10 years. They grow like weeds. You don’t have to fertilize or irrigate them. If we ever manage to get a low-lignin wood like eucalyptus to grow in Alabama, the turnaround will be 3-5 years. The energy density isn’t anything like coal, but there’s absolutely no reason to obsess about killing them because they’re trees.
Unintended consequences! DOH!
When will they realise that they caused this nonsense in the first place by demonising nuclear, oil and coal?
Everytime we get these unintended consequences I always congratulate the ‘eco-worriers’ – well done chaps, what would the world do without you?
Now, something similar is about to happen in a developing country near you, today. Large financial institutions in the West are restricting / refusing loans to third world countries for coal and oil powered generating stations. Mmmmmmm. I wonder what the next step is???? What else could a poor third world country burn I wonder???? 🙁
Reminds me of Dr. Seuss’s “Lorax”….good grief. I’m going to start bottling air, call it “clean breath” and sell it to the Brits.
By the way back in winter this year there was a report in Spiegel about Germans stealing wood from forests to keep warm because the cost of energy was so high. Another lovely consequence and spreading worldwide. This mus be what greens meant when they talked of worldwide action.
Something else not yet widely appreciated about this is that stores of wood chips are incredibly susceptible to spontaneous combustion.
Of course, if Drax burns, the Greenies will be overjoyed – one less power station to fuel civilisation!