Green campaigners claim a major Government energy strategy collapsed in just six minutes following an exchange of emails between ministers and a big energy company.
Greenpeace claims the emails show Eon, the German utility giant, was dictating terms of approval of a new controversial coal-fired power it wants to build and rubbished a new technology which the Government was previously keen to push.
The plan was to build the UK’s first coal-fired power plant for around 20 years - at Kingsnorth in Medway - as a test bed for the new but untried carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.
The technology had been criticised by Greenpeace which said it will emit as much carbon dioxide as the 30 least polluting nations in the world combined and Dr James Hansen, the director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said it was “a matter with ramifications for life on our planet, including all species".
But Greenpeace says an email from Eon – written two weeks ago and obtained under the Freedom of Information Act - demanded the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform radically alter conditions attached to building the power station – and, admitting the CCS technology would not work, demanded to be allowed to build a conventional plant.
Said a Greenpeace spokesman: “In the Eon email, sent at 8.16am on January 16, the company says CCS technology at Kingsnorth ‘obviously… has no current reference for viability at any scale.’
“Astonishingly, the email then goes on to insist that cabinet minister John Hutton has ‘no right’ to withhold approval for a conventional, highly polluting plant and that ‘we [Eon] want to build from summer 2008.
“Six minutes after the Eon email was sent, the Department for Business replies: ‘Thanks. I won’t include [the previous conditions].’
“As a result the government’s climate and energy policy – based on a faith in the potential of carbon capture technology to deliver ‘clean coal’ – has been exposed as hollow, with huge implications for the UK’s carbon emissions targets.”
Greenpeace executive director John Sauven said: “We now face the prospect of Britain building conventional coal-fired power stations without even the pretence that carbon capture technology can play a role in the short term. The implications for our emissions targets are enormous.
“A week after this email was written ministers were telling the public we’d be generating between 30 and 40 per cent of our electricity from renewables by 2020. We now stand at an energy crossroads. What will it be - a renewables revolution or a renaissance for the single most climate-wrecking form of energy generation in use anywhere in the world?
Greenpeace said a sign of how keen the Government is to approve a conventional coal plant at Kingsnorth is that civil servants have already drawn up a 13-page list of highly detailed conditions which don’t even mention climate change but do discuss protection for the area’s water voles and great crested newts.
POSTED: 01/02/2008 09:01:34
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