Excerpt from National Review.  Whichever way you look at it, burning the world’s carbon sinks to meet the EU’s arbitrary renewable-energy targets is environmentally insane. Not only will the voracious appetite of Europe’s power stations for American timber threaten valued woodland habitats in forests across Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Virginia, it has damaging economic effects, as it pushes up the price of timber, with knock-on effects to the cost of building new homes. Without question, it is better for the environment to burn coal and plant trees than to cut down trees and burn them in power stations.

Since 2008, the growth of bioenergy — much of it sourced from North American woods and forests — has provided around half the expansion of renewable energy. The practice also highlights Britain’s hypocrisy as a co-founder of the Powering Past Coal alliance. Britain’s war on coal and huge subsidies for bioenergy has led to the conversion of the Drax coal-fired power station, formerly Europe’s largest, to burning wood pellets imported from the U.S. Just this week, Drax announced it is going to convert its fourth boiler from coal to wood. “Powering past coal” turns out to mean replacing coal with wood, achieved by burning American trees. Is this what greens want for developing nations?

At last year’s Davos meeting, Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina rounded on Al Gore when he criticized her government’s plans for a modern, low-emission coal plant. It’s no wonder that developing nations’ leaders are looking to the Trump administration for responsible energy-policy realism. The indications are that it will respond with a Clean Coal Alliance to push the technology and innovation agenda unveiled at last November’s Bonn climate conference.

This development couldn’t come too soon, as the West risks lagging behind the East in development of supercritical and ultra-supercritical coal technologies, which convert coal to electricity with great efficiency and lower emissions. Whereas the U.S. has one ultra-supercritical power station and 69 supercritical plants, according to an analysis last year by the Center for American Progress, of China’s 100 most efficient coal-fired power stations, 90 are ultra-supercritical.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455628/europe-bogus-clean-energy-schemes-european-union-coal

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January 22, 2018 at 09:58AM