IT IS one thing for a massive, coal-burning power station to reach the end
of its days; it is another for plans for a new, cleaner, gas-fired station
to be scrapped at the same time and citing identical reasons, the
pernicious and illogical transmission regime of the UK’s national grid.
The new gas turbine plant at the site of the former coal power station at
Cockenzie in East Lothian was approved by Scottish Power in 2011 but now
this plan is to be abandoned in the face of what the company calls the
“disproportionate” transmission charging regime.
Longannet was the largest power station in Europe when it opened in 1970
and it is still one of the biggest on the continent, with only Drax in
North Yorkshire now bigger than it in the UK. But with the Fife plant’s
size comes a polluting capacity to match and after the economic failure of
the brief attempt at experimental carbon capture technology in 2011, its
days were numbered and closure has now been confirmed for next March.
Other technologies to limit carbon emissions were attempted, with some
success but it was always going to be a fight to survive in the era of
emissions targets. What did for it ultimately, in terms of the when not the
if of closure, was the transmission regime.
Had Longannet sat on the Thames rather than the Forth it would have
received a subsidy of £4m a year. Instead it faced penalties which, had it
continued operating until 2018, would have amounted to more than £120
million. This is the grid pricing structure which has now done for, not
just our coal-burning past at at Kincardine, but our potential gas-fired
future in Cockenzie.
The trade union Prospect criticised the grid regime, calling it “senseless”
to lose such huge capacity at a time of tight supply margins, while Energy
Minister Fergus Ewing bemoaned the effect of transmission charged on the
search for a balanced supply, including “new clean thermal plant” a clear
reference to Cockenzie.
Grahame Smith of the STUC said: “The current transmission charging regime,
which discriminates against all forms of power generation in Scotland, is
now simply untenable.”
But is there anything resembling a comprehensive UK national energy policy?
We struggle to discern one. For example the Government has signed off on a
deal for the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in Somerset which
guarantees to pay double the current going rate for generation costs when
it opens in 2023.
Share article
And the beneficiaries of this largesse? French state-owned energy company
EDF and the investors from the Chinese government. Or as Dr Paul Dorfman of
University College London put it: “It is essentially a subsidy of between
what we calculate to be £800m to £1 billion a year that the UK taxpayer and
energy consumer will be putting into the deep pockets of Chinese and French
corporations, which are essentially their governments.”
A phrase coined by Gordon Brown and much used by the Better Together
campaign was that the Union was all about “pooling and sharing” of
resources. Our current electricity charging regime is the antithesis of
that, and it requires action.
2 Comments