More "green" madness

Britain cuts down forests to keep ‘green’ power stations burning

The Times Online

Whether you believe in Allah, the Great Spaghetti Monster, powdered rhino horn being an aphrodisiac, Anthropomorphic Global Warming and other such nonsense, this has to be the biggest dose of green irony I've ever seen - worse than the windmill debacle.

Let me point out a few obvious things:-

1. Cutting down, processing and transporting the wood from Canada and South America by ship is burning how much fossil fuel?  Cutting requires fossil fuel and emits carbon dioxide.  Processing the wood requires fossil fuel and emits carbon.  Transporting requires fossil fuel and emits carbon.

2. Biomass fuelled power stations are typically less efficient than coal burning or fuel gas power stations.  Often, like the "green" windmills, they work in conjunction with fossil fuel burning power stations, so you won't completely eliminate the fossil fuel burning side of it.

3. The wood often has to be processed before burning (drying or converting into biomass pellets), costing more energy.

4. The irony of cutting down the very thing that naturally can convert carbon dioxide into oxygen.

5. This strikes me more of desperately addressing the imposed EU Landfill Directive by incinerating waste rather than dumping it in landfills.

6. What's wrong with coal? Plenty of it here.

7. The eco-nazis are wailing that it's a good thing because the trees will come from sustainable forests.  Fast growing trees can grow between 6-10ft a year.  Depending on demand, this could strip an enormous area very quickly while waiting for the trees to reach maturity.  And the fertilizers required for fast growth?  Replanting? Energy, energy, energy.


I get concerned that the arguments for AGW confused and blur the very distinct, cost effective and admirable pursuit of economies and conservation of fuel supplies.  This is simply an ill-thought out, contradictory, knee jerk to "greenism" and as such it is a perfect example of yet another doomed Liebour Party supported policy.

The windmills of your mind

Apart from the cost of maintenance to keep these "bird slicers" (a minor amount of carnage, of course, but I love the term) running, what they fail to tell you is that this variable power source requires a conventional power source as a backup: a fossil fuel burning one.

Now what they also give the impression is that when the wind stops blowing just as EastEnders starts, they press a button and the standby power station does the business.

Let me tell you, having worked on a power station and refinery in a former life, one does not simply press a big start button and voila: instant power. It can take several days to "black start" a power station.

In order to get the power to the grid quickly, the power station must be in "standby" mode i.e. its furnaces lit, the steam generated and pressured and possibly the turbines rotating.

So while these windmills are busy spinning away keeping the thicky green eco-nazis happy in blissful ignorance and couscous salads, a nasty old backup power station is quietly burning fossil fuels in the background.

Tax, tax and more tax and subsidies to large corporations.

These idiots simply wont be happy until horses are towing our Volvos.