Another energy bill? The battle is under way.

It seems like only yesterday that the 2011 energy act was established. Well, it wasn't long ago was it. But they are at it again!

New government new energy policy. The Department of Energy and Climate Change have an overview of the work done so far on a new energy bill, it's all being 'worked up' at the moment and thus parliament isnt yet involved although the same cant be said about politics.

The BBC are already reporting on a battle between DECC and their advisers at the Committee on Climate Change and the Treasury. 38 Degrees has already got a campaign going to prevent what they are calling a 'second dash for gas'. The Carbon Brief has done some good work looking into exactly what is going on at DECC in terms of policy on gas power policy.

The Primary Documents:

• The Draft Bill
• The Parliamentary Briefing
• The Energy and Climate Change Committee (HoP) response
• Informal Working Group response (HoL)

Some Summaries for those short on time:

• The Carbon Brief on The Energy Cold War Turning Hot
• The Carbon Brief summary of the Energy and Climate Change Committees' rather lengthy response.
• Guardian Eco-Audit of Draft Bill (with lots of interesting NGO responses).
• WWF Scotland response to the Draft Bill

Further Background:

•  Green Party MP,  Caroline Lucas responds.to the Energy and Climate Change Committee
• Generators and Industry respond to the Energy and Climate Change Committee
• Jim Watson of Sussex energy group contributes to this report by IPPR.
• Dieter Helm of Oxford University has written about the energy bill.

Home del.icio.us Digg This!

Emissions Performance Standard for Fossil Fuel Plant

I`ve just noticed that the Tories and Lib Dem's are supporting an Emissions Performance Standard in the current energy bill. An emissions performance standard is basically a limit on how pollouting a given application can be; in this case we are talking about power plants but similar regulations can be placed on cars or other vehicles.

In the case of Cars there does seem to be a certain sense to limiting the emissions of the most polluting cars. For me the key point is everyone playing their part. I don't think people are encouraged to buy efficient cars if sports cars and big four wheel drive vehicles getting 10mpg are used on the same roads. Why bother? Of course in Europe we have been persuaded to accept feet wide averages from car manufacturers so they can have both very polluting and very efficient cars.

Now emissions performance standards for the UK's generation fleet are being proposed but whilst i would support this for cars, i`m less sure for the generating network. The reason is intermittency. Renewables don't supply a constant level of power and some periods of high demand correspond with periods of low wind supply. Because we are dealing with rare events (very low wind and very high demand) actually running plants at these times produces very small amounts of polloution even if we are talking about unabated coal. So the key priority is having this capacity available at low cost.

A EPS for all new plant would make sense; the lib dem proposal is somewhat arbitarily linked to coal. An EPS for all existing plant would possibly be very costly. I`m all for getting coal out of our generating mix but this is most economically done by reducing the hours per year that they can work. This way they can still perform a valuable emergency service in the future whilst not significantly impacting carbon reduction goals.

Home del.icio.us Digg This!