Eco politicians

"approval of a biomass plant in Teeside"

Sensible way to get rid of all the bullshit this government is peddling.

Pinpricks

I hope a number of those 'millions' should be 'billions', otherwise they are pointless blips. Government needs to front load a good £20k per house for serious energy efficiency, and a sizeable percentage of that will have to be grant.

Basically, call it £200bn over a decade.

Maybe they should tax the bankers for all the money they stole.

Simples!

How's about this for a simple idea; I know govt's don't like those as there are no foundations for ivory towers. How's about a rising scale of price for power usage? At present the more you use the less you pay, your first kWh costs plenty, your 100th a bunch less. Big (domestic) users get power at a lower cost than a granny with a fridge & a TV.

Billing is not complex, no need to change a thing. "polluter pays"

As far as electric cars, windmills, biomass, barrages, tidal, solar, carbon taxes - all bollocks I'm afraid unless we live in caves and animal skins. Bad science driven by equally poor data collection and interpretation and not forgetting the lovely grants and irrational fear.

Re Mike: Taking us back to the Dark Ages.

The myth that any reduction to our carbon wastes will destroy the economy has long been exploded. Plenty of ways to reduce carbon will save money and help the economy. If the intention were to go completely solar/wind/tidal then the crack about going back to the dark ages might have some validity. (Read Bruce Sterlings essay in "Fusion" by Baen books for example.)

But the report says that 40% of the energy will be created by renewables, nuclear and "clean coal". Geothermal is great if you have a location that can use it.

Nuclear can certainly sustain a high technology society. But I have severe doubts about "clean coal".

A single clean coal plant does not exist on the planet. No one has shown that high pressure CO2 pumped underground won't leak out again which would invalidate the whole concept in a instant. More telling, a "clean coal" power plant would use up 60% of its energy output (167% more expensive) trapping the CO2, compressing the gas and pumping it underground. (And if we add 1.67% to the price of "clean coals" electric price it fails in the market place which is WHY there is not a single "clean coal" power plant on the planet.)

Anyway I've read about energy plans that would take us back to the dark ages but I do not see how what is discussed in this article can fit in that category.

Warm regards, Rick.

"£6m for a smart grid"

Would that be those dodgy insecure meters which send unencrypted data and can be hacked easily?

Those smart meters?

bright, green future

What bollocks, the future will be miserable.

1.2 million green jobs? 1.2 million people employed doing what we already do but in a much more expensive way - who is going to pay them especially with 1.2 million less people doing something useful.

Some stupid bint on TV today said yes electricity prices will rise but efficiency improvements in the home will mean savings and our bills could actually be reduced - yeah right,

And the Severn Barrage? FFS buy one nuke from the French (cos we don't know how to make them anymore) it will generate more electricity than the Severn Barrage at a small fraction of the financial and environmental costs.

owl magnets?

I notice this time around Milliband Minor has learned from Milliband Major's mistakes and gone for a PDF file, rather than a Wiki.

Damn shame, if you ask me.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/05/defra_wiki_abuse/

Can someone explain

How generating 30% of our electrickery from wind is going to be anything other than a colossal cockup when the damned things dont generate power for 30% of the time?

And we're going to have a nice Severn barrage..... bet that get all the eco-warriors in the south wales/somerset areas all fired up

I cant see that being built without the amount of protests usually reserved for nuclear power stations.

Which brings me neatly to my final point, If the french can generate 80% of their power from non CO2 producing nuclear power, why cant we do it?

Or is it a case of the french refusing to pay enough cash to the government for them to support it........

Fail... because it will... and none of the current shower in charge will have to clean up the mess

Waste of time & money

With China's & India's economies growing at 8-10%, it wouldn't make a crap of difference if the UK cut it's CO2 to zero or doubled it's output.

This £250 a year tax we're all going to paying should be to embrace & deal with climate change, not Canute-like try and stop it. I'm sure the JET laboratory could use the £100bn better than subsidising bloody windmills. We could be world leaders in fusion power - we can't even keep the one windmill factory open on the IoW - now have to import them from China!

The 1.2m jobs are to be civil servants - one department collecting carbon taxes, another handing out carbon credits - just like the existing big government bloat we have now.

The Severn barrarge revisited

Proposed in the 1960s and onward IIRC.

Yes it would bring potentially massive chages to the estuary. But being essentially a very large lump of concrete its life expectancy is in centuries, not decades.

Its ability to generate several % of the whole UK eletricity demand on a *predictable* basis (tides are powered by the moon) suggest it could be a good anchor generator at certain times of every day. This can be extended by gating the flow.

Water flowing down hill (or more subtly in the form of tidal or ocean currents) might not be very glamourous but can supply substantial dollops of power in a relatively small volume, which seems to be what big generators like.

Of course we still seem to have the worst housing insulation standards in Northern Europe.