The descent into madness

Thursday, September 25, 2008

The descent into madness

We were writing about this in January 2006, lamenting the £10 billion plus costs of the EU's obsession withwaste and now chickens are coming home to roost.

From The Daily Telegraphand others, we learn of a report of a "hard-hitting report" by the Audit Commission which warns of council tax hikes arising from local authority failures to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill.

This is because, under the EU waste framework directive, councils must reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill by half of 1995 levels by 2013 or face fines of up to £180 million per year. If these are missed, they could cost councils £7 million each per year. This would equate to around £30 per household added to the council tax. Then, on top of that, our own provincial government is adding to the grief with its own targets, which could add another £2 million a year. 

The EU legislation sets up a hierarchy of options for waste disposal, with recycling at the top, incineration next and landfill last, but the Audit Commission is saying that recycling cannot cope with the volume of waste being produced and, therefore, more use must be made of incineration.

The Audit Commission states that around 30 new waste disposal plants are needed , mainly incinerators, which the The Telegraph suggests "cost a minimum of £20 million". From where it got that figure, it only knows but the most recent plans for a new incinerator, in Belvedere South London was priced at £200 million.

One thing the paper does get right, however, is in saying that they are "often very controversial". They are indeed, and hated by the greenies (pictured, right, protesting against the Edmonton site – also pictured above).

Thus, you get what must be the classic quote of the day, with Michael O'Higgins, chairman of the Audit Commission, pontificating that there needed to be a "mature" debate about waste. Instead of Nimbyism, he says, people should accept the reality that incineration plants were needed. 

Of course, they are not needed for waste disposal. As we have pointed out so many times, there is no shortage whatsoever of landfill. This is purely to meet the impost of the EU obsession and its irrational antipathy to landfill.

Needless to say, the cheapest and best way of dealing with the waste “problem” is to tell the EU what to do with its directive but, as always, there are not enough of our politicians with the courage to tell them to do that.

Thus, as we descend further into madness, we end up paying through the nose and then suffering the impost of totally unnecessary and expensive incinerators that no one wants. And, for this, we are supposed to be grateful?

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First report

Part of Monday was spent at a conference organized jointly by (deep breath) the Center for Security Policy with the New Criterion,Hudson Institute, City Journal – Manhattan Institute and our ownCentre for Social Cohesion. With such illustrious sponsors there were illustrious speakers, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mark Steyn, Daniel Johnson, Melanie Phillips, John O’Sullivan and David Pryce-Jones. Several postings will be needed to do it all justice and this is merely a preliminary musing.

The theme was “Free Speech, Jihad and the Future of Western Civilization” with a sub-heading mentioning libel tourism, a peculiarly British problem but that was not one of the main subjects. Since there were no lawyers on either of the panels, there could be no discussion of how the libel laws of this country can be changed as, we all agree, they must be.A repeated theme elaborated by several speakers was the notion that the danger we are facing through soft jihad is greater than any we have faced before as neither Nazism nor Communism were so obviously ensconced in our society. There were no schools named after Lenin or St Adolph churches on street corners. Thus, our refusal to fight the jihad is liable to destroy Western civilization in a way the other two ideologies could not.

Let me, respectfully, disagree with that. Well, I guess you expected that. The long analysis and disagreement is on EUReferendum2, though without pictures as I cannot think of any appropriate ones.

Too little, too late

The purchase by EDF – 85 percent owned by the French state – of the assets of British Energy for the sum of £12.5 billion is, on the face of it, both worrying and reassuring.

On the one hand, it puts a sizeable proportion of the British nuclear industry in the hands of a foreign – and some would say hostile – power. On the other, it is the only sure means of kick-starting our nuclear programme and replacing some of our ageing nuclear reactors.

EDF is saying that it will now commit to building four new reactors on two sites, Sizewell in Suffolk and Hinkley Point in Somerset.

The model will be the 1650 MW European Pressurised Reactor (EPR), the first of which type is already under construction in Flamanville on the Cherbourg peninsular (pictured), at a cost of about £1.4 billion.

At a cost roughly of £1 million per MW deliverable capacity (assuming a load factor of 90 percent) this compares favourably with the cost of wind which comes out at roughly £4 million for onshore sites and double that or more for offshore. As such, the investment in nuclear represent good value for the customer, wind only surviving with a massive subsidy.

These new power stations alone will nearly compensate (on paper) for the loss of six nuclear plants which are due to go out of service in the next ten years, the former expected to produce 6.6 GW as against the nearly 7 GW capacity of the six, although since some of the old stations are producing at relatively low load factors, EDF's contribution is set to add real capacity to the network.

On top of that, there stands EDF's proposal to hand back two of the British Energy sites to the government which will be packaged with other non-operational nuclear sites, for auction to other bidders. By this means, the hope is that we will gain another nuclear player which will add still further capacity.

The downside of this is that the first of the EDF plants will not be commissioned until 2017 – if all goes well – and will not deliver power to the network until 2020. The second player can hardly expected to bring capacity online any earlier, which means we are looking at a sizeable gap in capacity, expected to kick in from 2012 or even earlier.

How big that gap will be will depend on the fate of any replacement programme for the six coal-fired stations which are shortly to be knocked out by the EU's Large Combustion Plants directive, these accounting for a further 8.5 MW loss. 

Only one new coal-fired station is currently scheduled to replace the loss, at the controversial Kingsnorth site, but the fate of this remains in the balance by the intervention today of Lord Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency.

Smith is saying that construction of coal-fired power stations should be banned until or unless they can be equipped with carbon capture and storage (CCS). Currently an unproven technology, this will double (or more) construction and electricity generating costs and add considerably to the coal burn. With CCS, the feasibility of continued coal-fired generation is very much in doubt.

This, of course, leaves the prohibitively expensive wind programme - the unreliability of which means that it cannot even begin to fill the energy gap – and the "dash for gas", with generators commissioning CCGT (Combined Cycle Gas Turbine) plants such as the new 1650 MW power station at Staythorpenear Newark.

At about £4-500,000 per MW of deliverable capacity, these are considerably cheaper to build than nuclear plants – and massively cheaper than wind. They are thus an attractive "quick fix" for generators wishing to get new capacity online. However, the cost of gas and the uncertainty of future supply makes them a poor bet for the consumer, who will be faced with spiralling costs and the risks of outages if supplies become unavailable.

Even then, the CCGT programme is unlikely to make up for the expected shortfall and since, at this time, the only known nuclear programme will deliver just slightly more power than the stations scheduled for closure – and then only some years after they have ceased generating, it is difficult to see how the network is going to deliver the UK's electricity needs over the next ten years or more.

Now that is something we could have a "mature debate" about.

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