Yorkshire Against New Coal

News was circulating on media web pages last night of a significant climb down from Eon, the electricity utility company who announced that plans to build the controversial Kingsnorth coal power station will not be going ahead and will be shelved for at least three years.

Kingsnorth would have been the first new coal power station to be built in the UK for 30 years and has been the focus of the environmental movement challenging the government about its intentions of a coal rennaisance – the dirtiest of all the fossil fuels.

Some of the Key stages in the battle of Kingsnorth include:

• Greenpeace occupied the power plant and a subsequent jury found the chimney team not guilty of criminal damage of a slogan painted down the chimney – the amount of damage from paint was far less than the damage caused by climate change from burning coal.
• In 2008 Climate Camp occupied a site nearby in protest – the event was national news after hostile police tactics were used against peaceful demonstrators.
• Recently, Ed Miliband announced that there will be no unabated coal power stations to be built in the UK – any new coal power station must now have some form of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and full capture by the 2020s. CCS has been announced as the holy grail of the coal industry.  Unfortunately the technology does not exist on a commercial scale anywhere in the world – this was a significant change in government policy won by environmental campaigners.

As we’ve been saying all along, we don’t need new coal power stations and CCS is a smokescreen.  What we need is a clean energy future based upon renewable technologies such as wind solar and marine.  We need to abandon the current centralised system of energy production and move towards a decentralised energy system – whereby energy is generated close to the point of use, and we also need to be looking at energy conservation.  All these elements will reduce our emissions of CO2, create thousands of jobs and help us to become international leaders in meeting our energy demands and tackling climate change.

If Eon can announce they will shelve plans for Kingsnorth – will SSE announce they will no longer consider building a new coal plant at Ferrybridge?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009, 10:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.