Save The Coal - Burn a Forest!

“Drax Group Plc (DRX) will spend $1 billion to turn the U.K.’s biggest coal-fired plant into western Europe’s largest clean- energy producer. The utility plans to convert one of the site’s six units to burn wood pellets by June, said Chief Executive Officer Dorothy Thompson. It intends to switch two more units to wood at a later date, investments that if completed will see it harvest a forest four times the size of Rhode Island each year“

“While burning biomass releases carbon dioxide, the EU deems the technology carbon-neutral because trees absorb emissions in a similar proportion to what they release in burning. Opponents argue that it’s hard to ensure enough is being planted to compensate for what is burned.”

Opponents? By opponents do they mean sane people? Or do they mean greenies who are slightly less insane than the average greenie?

“Wood pellets are bulkier than coal, need to be kept dry and handled more gently. They can create dust if stored in the open. To deal with this, Drax is building silos out of plastics, foam, steel and concrete, with conveyor floors and capable of holding 700,000 metric tons of biomass.”

This is great … all those jobs and all that plastic and foam and steel and concrete (did you know concrete produces a lot of CO2?)

Green policies are saving the poor unfortunate coal and killing off four forests the size of Rhode Island (which is actually quite small but it sounds scary).

I like trees. I have no objection to trees being cut down to provide useful things like houses and paper.

But to burn vast quantities of trees and to build up a huge new infrastructure to burn wood instead of burning coal (or preferably natural gas) is insane. But thats what green policies do. They distort the market. They rewards people for doing insane things … like burning forests instead of coal or building wind turbines (and backup power plants) instead of reliable natural gas power plants.

Imagine … power plants burning forests will act as the backup power for unreliable wind turbines!

 

 

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