When you hear the words ‘renewable energy’, what images spring to mind? Wind farms, solar panels and tidal energy turbines? What about a power station covering the area of 17 football pitches, with a 100 metre tall chimney that belches out the smoke from millions of tonnes of wood that has been shipped over from Florida? This is what Forth Energy is attempting to build in four locations around Scotland, including in Leith where people live just 200 metres from the proposed site. If the application is successful it will potentially receive billions of pounds in renewable energy subsidies from the Scottish Government.
Scotland has a growing reputation for being a world leader in green technology and renewable energy, and rightly so. With 25% of Europe’s tidal power and 10% of its wave power and a target of 100% renewable electricity by 2020, Alex Salmond’s vision of Scotland as the “Saudi Arabia of renewables” is fast becoming reality. However behind these impressive figures a number of environmentally irresponsible projects are being pursued that undermine the Scottish Government’s commitment to a sustainable future. As well as the wood-burning power plants, there are also plans to conduct ‘fracking’ for natural gas, a controversial new extraction technique which has already been banned in France, Switzerland, South Africa and several US states.
Included in the SNP’s 100% renewable energy target are the four biomass plants, but whether these can genuinely be considered renewable, or even cleaner than coal power, is debatable. The Managing Director of Forth Energy, Calum Wilson, is adamant that his biomass plants are “a low carbon source of renewable energy” and offer “significant carbon benefits over traditional fossil fuels.” These claims are potentially true for small-scale biomass plants which provide heat as well as off-grid electricity to local communities, but these criteria do not apply to the proposed plants which would make no use of the heat produced and are too large to generate electricity efficiently.
Wilson’s statements are based on the notion that for every American tree that is cut down to be shipped to Leith another will be planted, therefore the carbon dioxide that is emitted from the plant will be reabsorbed by the new trees. The problem with this is that even if the millions of tonnes of wood burnt by the plants every year could be replaced, which is unlikely given existing pressures on forest resources, it could still take as long as 270 years before there is any carbon saving in relation to coal power, according to a report published in April this year by a coalition of European NGOs. Although there are many complex variables involved, in simple terms this is because the carbon is released into the atmosphere as soon as the wood is burnt but it takes a lot longer for a tree to reach maturity and reabsorb the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Clearly biomass is not a low carbon energy source as Forth Energy would have us believe.
Another environmentally destructive project which has gone relatively unnoticed amidst the Scottish Government’s grand plans for renewable electricity is the decision to allow the exploitation of methane trapped in coal seams through a controversial process known as ‘fracking’. This involves drilling into coal beds and then pumping millions of gallons of water, sand and a mixture of potentially toxic chemicals into the ground in order to force open cracks in the coal, allowing methane to flow up the well. When this technique has been used to extract shale gas in the US as much as 8% of the gas has escaped into water supplies and the atmosphere. Coal beds are much shallower underground than shale seams, meaning that the potential for leakage is even greater. In some states in America the water supplies are so contaminated with methane that people can set their tap water on fire, while methane in the atmosphere is around 56 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere. Fracking has also been linked to earthquakes, and the first attempts to frack in the UK were halted earlier this year after two minor earthquakes near Blackpool. Despite these concerns, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency has granted a company called Greenpark Energy a license to begin fracking in Dumfries and Galloway, while Dart Energy, an Australian company, has acquired licenses to exploit coal bed methane in Fife.
The Scottish Government has until now proven itself to be willing to take the lead in shifting to a low-carbon economy, however it must not be fooled by those wishing to exploit the generous subsidies available for renewable energy. Companies such as Forth Energy and Greenpark Energy are giving obsolescent fuel sources the veneer of sustainability and glossing over their potentially disastrous impacts on health and the environment.
Published in The Student
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