Does Jeremy Corbyn Really Support Coal?
I am very surprised by this report in the Daily Mirror, which talks about Jeremy Corbyn and coal. Here’s the first paragraph.
Jeremy Corbyn could bring back coal mines despite vowing to ‘keep fossil fuels in the ground’.
The article goes on to talk about carbon capture technology to burn coal without producing any carbon dioxide.
I have been to learned lectures on this technology and there’s about as much chance of making it work economically, as landing an astronaut on the Sun.
I may be wrong about carbon capture technology, but we would be better spending the investment on insulating our woefully energy-inefficient buildings, so everybody had a lower energy bill.
We obviously need more electricity and there are better ways of generating it without the carbon problem.
My preferred methods would be.
- Importing electricity generated by geothermal and hydroelectric power stations in Iceland using an undersea cable. The so-called IceLink is described on this page on the National Grid web site.
- Tidal power in the Severn and other western estuaries. The Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon is a project that has started.
- Offshore wind and wave.
- Solar panels on buildings. Technology is improving and costs are falling.
- Local energy generation using small-scale systems like the Bunhill Energy Centre in Islington.
I also believe that if we funded research in our best Universities, we could fundamentally change our energy use, generation and conservation.
We might even be able to do without using more of the following types of power generation in the future.
- Coal, with all its problems of pollution and the carbon dioxide it generates.
- Nuclear, with all its problems of high cost and unacceptability by certain sections of the population.
- On-shore wind, with all its visual intrusion.
I think the future is going to be scientifically green.
I suspect that in twenty or thirty years time, our main uses of fossil fuels, like oil and gas, will be in the production of needed chemicals, heat energy for industrial processes and powering transport.
British And French Engineers Can Work Together
In the Sunday Times today, they are talking about a £4billion project to import electricity into the UK from Iceland, It is called Icelink and it would appear to have the backing of both the UK and Iceland governments. There’s more about it in this article in Utility Week.
So it got me thinking about undersea electricity connections around the world. There is a list of them here. And there is forty-four of them
Perhaps the best known is the connection between Kent and France, which is called the HVDC Cross Channel. It is actually the second one and it has been running for nearly thirty years. A section in Wikipedia describes its significance.
Since the commissioning of the 2,000 MW DC link in the 1980s, the bulk of power flow through the link has been from France to Britain. However, France imports energy as needed during the summer to meet demand, or when there is low availability of nuclear or hydroelectric power.
As of 2005 imports of electricity from France have historically accounted for about 5% of electricity available in the UK. Imports through the interconnector have generally been around the highest possible level, given the capacity of the link. In 2006, 97.5% of the energy transfers have been made from France to UK, supplying the equivalent of 3 million English homes. The link availability is around 98%, which is among the best rates in the world. The continued size and duration of this flow is open to some doubt, given the growth in demand in continental Europe for clean electricity, and increasing electricity demand within France.
So it would appear it’s been successful and proves that we can work with the French on an engineering project.
It strikes me that we need to connect all of our power systems together in Western Europe. The UK is being connected to Ireland, Iceland and Norway and the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany are getting in on the act.
What you won’t find from reading about the cables, but you will in some newspaper articles, is that Norway will have the ability to store electricity in a pumped storage system in the future.
So when the wind is blowing and we have too much electricity, the Norwegians will pump water from a low to a high lake and when we want it back, the water will be released through a turbine. It’s like putting your KWh in a bank!
The Anonymous Widower 