New power station plans for Shoreham (From The Argus)

Didn't they just build a new one? I remember the old one being blown up!

"...enough energy for all of Shoreham, Southwick and Portslade for a year"

For a year? Isn't a power station in continuous operation? What's happens after a year? Or is this just sloppy wording?

PaulOckenden wrote:
"...enough energy for all of Shoreham, Southwick and Portslade for a year"

For a year? Isn't a power station in continuous operation? What's happens after a year? Or is this just sloppy wording?

sloppy wording, paul. i hope so, anyway. why do they need a second power station there anyway?

More rainforest to be cut down to grow the plants to produce the vegetable oil then. Hardly very green! If it is waste oil it is a different matter.

anything green is gr8!

burning chip fat or rape seed oil is hardly green - they should put a few wind turbines up but then the nimbys would say they spoilt the view!

nucular

Fantastic news, wish there was a wind farm to go with it. Forward thinking Shoreham Port Authority

Oops, nuclear?

Will this be in the middle of the proposed new harbour housing estate?

freddo wrote:
burning chip fat or rape seed oil is hardly green - they should put a few wind turbines up but then the nimbys would say they spoilt the view!

So the carbon captured during photosynthesis and then released again isn't 'green' (when compared, or otherwise to same with petrochems)? Maybe you could explain pls.

If you insist Dicky.. Although a little research on your part would have been a little easier and shown that you had some interest...


1. The well known “but” is the carbon cost of transporting biomass. We can confidently expect that the biomass will be imported from Russia and Canada. There are many London Local Authorities whose view of complying with their own sustainability and low carbon rules is to permit biomass boilers (with a back up from natural gas boilers) ignoring the problems and carbon cost of delivering constant volumes of low mass bulky biomass pellets to be burnt in the middle of the United Kingdom’s largest city.

2. If you leave wood to decay only a proportion of the carbon dioxide is emitted into the air; some of it is sequestrated in the soil; burning it prevents soil sequestration and commits all the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it does the most harm.

3. People burning biomass have no control over the people who farm and crop the biomass. To overcome the transport emissions and lack of soil sequestration that burning creates, it is certainly necessary to plant enough biomass to cover these losses, not just to replace the biomass. Merely planting enough biomass to recreate what you have burnt ignores the losses.

4. Burning biomass harms air quality; this is a health issue. We may, if we are not careful, lose all the benefits of the Smoke Control Legislation enacted in the 1950s.

The Environment Agency has now realised that burning biomass can be more polluting than burning fossil fuel. Their studies show that while burning waste wood and MDF produce the lowest emissions burning willow, poplar, and rape seed oil creates the highest emissions. They have also studied the effect of farming grasslands to produce biomass crops – something that I reported over a year ago. Like me, they have found that the carbon dioxide spikes created when ploughing virgin land outweigh the benefits that the crop grown for burning brings.

The Environment Agency has suggested that we need to report biomass burning emissions; this is a very important suggestion, and one that we should act upon immediately.

We must stop looking on biomass burning as a sustainable and environmentally friendly source of energy. It has a role to play, but like fossil fuels, biomass burning must be carefully regulated and controlled. It should be used as a last resort, rather than as an alternative to the genuinely renewable and relatively harmless technologies of solar and wind.

Its most important role will probably be in combined heat and power operations of a certain scale. Provided these are close to the source of the fuel, carefully regulated and properly maintained and their emissions counted biomass has a future in the mixed energy requirements of the future. If we rush into large scale biomass burning we shall find that we have simply replaced one source of emissions with another.

Simples! EEEK!

Burgess901 wrote:
Oops, nuclear?

I thought the other spelling looked quite good actually!

Good dissertation "My point of view", but I think you have overlooked that the plant may be intended to take local waste products that had to be transported and disposed of anyway. I.e. any energy produced is a net green gain.

Please can people stop being such lemmings and so easily fooled by the use of the word "Green"!!



All authorities and advertising companies have now realised that most people never look beneath the surface the moment they hear the magic word!! (Seems there's many people who've posted here like that...)


This power station may be a LITTLE less polluting than standard ones (though there's no proof of that here), but it still pollutes, massively, worsening air quality for our kids to breathe. Especially compared to wind turbines, or solar panels. Please remember that before you embrace the idea so unquestioningly!!