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A leading energy efficiency champion, Andrew Warren, has alleged that the Government is slashing its energy efficiency programme by 80 per cent.

The Government’s ten point plan to tackle the climate emergency includes large amounts of money to pave the way for a programme of ‘small modular reactors’ (SMRs) and payments to gas interests to establish pilot schemes for producing hydrogen from gas with carbon capture and storage (ccs). Finance will also be available to support hydrogen production from windfarms.

What is becoming clear, amidst the low cost pledges to ban petroleum based cars and install 40 GW of offshore wind by 2030, is that the funding package will be dominated by large payments to nuclear and gas industry interests, and largescale cutbacks to the energy efficiency programme.

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The undersigned believe that a future based on 100 per cent renewable energy underpinned by traditional and advanced energy efficiency and storage techniques is not only practicable, affordable, but immensely preferable to one that involves nuclear power. Renewable energy offers us a rapid path to net zero carbon transition that, unlike nuclear power, does not involve the need for decommissioning of radioactive plant, nuclear waste or concerns about safety or security threats. With this in mind we regard the prospect of the Government effectively offering unlimited sources of funding to EDF to build Sizewell C nuclear power plant with dismay and urge people to send in their objections to their MPs at this prospect.

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Just how many innovations can you pack into a project? Well not many more than the tidal power-flow battery hydrogen project that is set to be deployed at the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney! But perhaps newest of all, it is an important step forward towards developing techniques, in this case flow batteries, to store renewable energy in the long term.

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The oil and gas industry is poised to gain several tens of millions of pounds for what will turn out to be mainly a license to carry on generating carbon dioxide. A flagship ‘blue hydrogen’ scheme, that is one involving production of hydrogen from natural gas and removing part of the carbon dioxide, is to be launched on Humberside if a consortium receives £75 million from the Government. Yet, for all this money, less than 30 per cent of the carbon dioxide produced on the site will actually be captured.

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It should be obvious now that Scotland can supply 100 per cent of ALL of its energy by renewables. Yet the Scottish Government has not pledged to do this yet. So let’s campaign for this commitment now!

We are asking you to sign the petition which has the following wording (in italics)

‘The Scottish Parliament should commit to a target of sourcing 100 per cent of all energy used in Scotland (not just electricity) from renewable energy by 2045 or earlier to complement the established legal goal of achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions in Scotland by 2045. This would be assumed to be achieved when a) the annual Scottish renewable energy production is a least as much as total annual Scottish energy consumption and b) all non electricity consumption in Scotland is sourced from renewable energy.’ This is necessary because:
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BP is trying to boost production of ‘blue’ hydrogen from natural gas and limit output of ‘green’ hydrogen from renewable energy. It is trying to do this using grossly inflated projections of future hydrogen use and thus claim there will not be enough renewable energy to sustain a global net zero economy. However green groups are fighting back against such efforts.
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A Government report confirms that renewables would be at least one third cheaper than a Hinkley C type nuclear project, and that is even despite the fact that the report ignores the cheapest available storage technologies.

The report, issued by BEIS tries to take into account the extra system costs of absorbing renewable energy. In doing so the report completely ignores what many people think are going to be the cheapest way of integrating renewables, but, such is the cheapness of renewable energy sources such as offshore wind, solar pv and onshore wind, even then renewables comes out much cheaper than Hinkley C.

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by David Toke

Car manufacturers are stopping production of some of their cheapest and most popular electric vehicles (EVs) just in advance of EU assessments about how far the car manufacturers should reduce the emissions that their fleets produce. Is this a coincidence, or are car manufacturers once again cheating the public?

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by David Toke

EDF are trying to bamboozle ministers to back a scheme that would pay EDF massive subsidies and premium prices to produce hydrogen that renewable energy would generate for less than half the cost. EDF are scrabbling for PR tricks to obscure the fact that they are asking for a blank cheque from British electricity consumers to fund the proposed Sizewell C plant, on top of which EDF will also be paid a high guaranteed premium price for all of their electricity production. Sizewell C will get massive subsidies to generate hydrogen from electricity while renewable energy schemes will be paid no subsidies at all to do the same.

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By David Toke

The natural gas industry has scored a success in persuading the Environmental Audit Committee to back its plans for using hydrogen to substitute for natural gas in domestic heating. But this spells disaster! Even if the hydrogen came from renewable energy this would still be a colossal waste of renewable energy resources. But the reality is much worse!

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BP’s decision to cut oil production by 40 per cent and shift to renewables big time by 2030 is likely to last about as long as oil prices stay fairly low, which might not be as long as people think. BP’s green programme announcement is obviously a good move to reverse the slide in its share prices. Indeed BP’s previous ‘green’ rebranding as ‘Beyond Petroleum‘ in 1998 produced good trading results and put it in a position to scrap a lot of its investments in renewables a few years later and continue to invest in new oilfields. The same is likely to happen again.

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As different types of corrupt pro-nuclear handouts in the USA unravel the British Government is expected to support bringing in a legalised version of bankrupt US nuclear financing practices to fund Sizewell C nuclear power plant.

The US nuclear power industry is in danger of implosion as corrupt practices used to maintain its old power plant and pay for new plant are the subject of prosecutions. In Ohio the Speaker of the House of Representatives has been arrested on account of charges that he was bribed to ensure that nuclear power and coal plant in Ohio were given bailouts whilst policies supporting renewable energy and energy efficiency were cut back.
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A massive plant that will produce ammonia from renewable energy is scheduled to be operating in Saudi Arabia in 2025. This will enable renewable energy to be stored long term and thus dispenses with any need for so-called ‘baseload power’ from fossil fuels or nuclear power.

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The Government has just announced a £40 million research programme into so-called advanced modular reactor technology that is highly unlikely ever to see any practical use. That is because the so-called small modular reactors (SMRs) are much too expensive for civilian use.

In an important sense it is nonsense to talk about research to develop SMRs as a ‘new’ technology simply because they already exist. They power military submarines and also US aircraft carriers. Their design is simply a smaller version of the Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) design that dominates the world nuclear power industry. Indeed PWRs began as small projects housed in submarines which were then developed up in scale so that they could produce electricity more cheaply.

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David Toke writes: Jonathon Porritt is, in my opinion, the most influential British green political thinker. Here I’m interviewing him about his new book ‘Hope in Hell – A decade to confront the climate emergency’, published by Simon and Shuster.

See the interview above through youtube