Labour may not be much good, but the Tories would be a disaster for energy policy. Railroading big business interests through planning to an even greater extent than Labour, under the pretext of environmentalism.
There's perhaps one good policy and that is the right for every community hosting wind farms to keep for 6 years the business rates generated.
It is the fact that local communities have felt ripped off by big developers not caring about their interests that has held back wind farms in this country.
But a real revolution would be for community owned wind farms to be massively supported as they have been in Denmark for many years, as a result of which there has not been the level of public antipathy towards wind farms that there has been here.
It is the stop-start nature of British energy policy under the NFFO policy that has created this antipathy because only the big developers could stay the field and community developers were squeezed out.
The other Tory policies are to give every household in the country lb6,500 to upgrade the energy efficiency of homes; and publication of the planning guidance needed for new nuclear power stations.
The first is limited: some homes will cost more to upgrade than others, and the financial support should be in the form of loans that are paid back on the property from the energy savings created.
Housing authorities also need support to do a mass roll out of renovations of particular districts and streets at the same time which is more cost effective.
It is my argument that we can do without NUCLEAR POWER because it is not cost efficient and the timescale is too great. The figures produced by the nuclear industry cannot be trusted. Taxpayers will end up supporting the industry to an extent that we can afford even less now than we could before.
"CLEAN COAL" relies on carbon sequestration which is an unproven technology that will be incredibly expensive to implement.
EON gave as their reason for not going ahead with Kingsnorth a reduction in electricity demand. If electricity demand is further reduced by a mass roll-out of energy efficiency making everybody's bills cheaper (hooray!), then why would we need to build all these power stations anyway?
The Catch 23 Of Electric Cars
Ah - is it so that we can have an electric cars? But that's robbing Peter to pay Paul! - it's a more efficient use of fossil fuels to burn them directly in a car than it is to burn it in a power station and use the electricity to drive a car.
Why? The output from a coal-fired power station fitted with carbon sequestration is around 10% less in efficiency than one without - so you will only get 20-25% of the original energy in the fossil fuel from such a power station at the plug in your wall.
By the time you have factored in the conversion factors inside the engine of the car converting that electrical energy back into motor energy, you will be lucky to get 10%. Whereas around 50% off the energy in petrol or diesel goes straight into transmission.
The only way of implementing electric cars that makes any sense is if they are fuelled from renewable electricity generated locally to the charging point to minimise transmission losses. That means building more solar, tidal and wind.
