energy

News from the Sunshine State reminds us that nuclear power is only an option for companies with very deep pockets. Or a hand in their customers' pockets, to be precise.

Progress (ha!) Energy have tripled the estimate for the new plant it's planning to build in Florida, saying that the new price tag will be an eye-watering $17 billion, and they haven't even got permission to start building yet. How are they going to pay for this? Why, by bumping up bills for its existing customers of course. "You can't avoid the notion that nuclear has an upfront cost for the customer," said Jeff Lyash, president and chief executive of Progress (double ha!) Energy Florida. "It does."

And that's just the beginning. We all know that, once the diggers move in, the costs for a nuclear power station take on a mysterious life of their own, spiralling ever upward. Just look at the delay-ridden, cash-sucking plant currently being built in Finland. It's the same in this country as well, with costs for dealing with existing waste (never mind the waste generated by a hypothetical fleet of new nuclear power stations) going repeatedly skywards.

So if the day comes when another load of nuclear power stations are being built here, remember it won't be private companies picking up the elephantine costs: one way or another, it'll be us.

John Hutton, the man responsible for Britain's energy policy, gave his explicit support this morning for a new generation of coal-fired power stations.

Choosing the stormiest day of the year so far to deliver a speech to members of the right-wing think-tank the Adam Smith Institute, the Secretary of State for Business flew a dangerous kite when he insisted that coal has a "key role" to play in energy provision, and accused anyone who disagreed with him (that's us, folks, along with Prince Charles, Al Gore, the head of NASA, opposition parties and thousands of others) of playing "gesture politics".

The ROCA 3 CHP plant in Rotterdam provides electricty and heat to 400,000 homes

Due to popular demand (well, demand anyway), The Weekly Geek now has its very own RSS feed.

Back in 1882, Thomas Edison built the United States' first electric power plant. Pearl Street Station, which supplied the good folks of Lower Manhattan with electricity for lighting and steam for manufacturing, was around 50 per cent efficient.

125 years on, the typical UK power plant is just 38 per cent efficient. But those modern power plants that have been built on the same principles as Edison's are reaching efficiency levels of up to 95 per cent.

So how did Edison do it? And where are we going so wrong?

In this week's slightly tardy Weekly Geek, we're looking at combined heat and power (CHP): the system Edison was using, and the heart of any truly clean and efficient decentralised energy system. (Those who read the first Weekly Geek on decentralised energy may notice a fair bit of crossover.)

My carbon footprint according to Defra

As I've been winding down my experiments with carbon calculators, I've been noticing more and more just how variable they can be. The results they spit out fluctuate wildly but as they all ask slightly different questions, that's not surprising. What surprises me are the differences between what they claim the CO2 emissions of your average Briton are, and if your trying to figure out whether you're a relatively big emitter or a teeny tiny one, that can be something of a problem.

Excellent news reaches us from the Philippines where a ban on old-fashioned incandescent bulbs has recently been announced.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo announced plans for phasing out inefficient bulbs by January 2010, adding the Asian archipelago to the growing list of countries, including Ireland and Japan, which are slashing their emissions by shifting to compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). So pressure is building up on our own government - and indeed the entire EU - to bring in their own mandatory efficiency standards for light bulbs.

Following the disclosure last week that power-generating company Eon has been negotiating behind the scenes to get the government's backing to build the UK's first new coal-fired power station for 30 years, Greenpeace's lawyers have written to the energy minister, John Hutton, to insist that the government hold a public inquiry.

You wouldn't necessarily expect the Financial Times, that bible of the corporate world and the money markets, to be a champion of environmental causes but they've been upping the ante on renewable energy, specifically wind power.

This week, they've been publishing a series of articles and news reports on the UK wind farm industry and they've been particularly critical of how various government policies, which were put in place to encourage the development of renewable energy industries, are actually having the opposite effect. It has been scathing about the renewables obligation, a mechanism which has all of us paying extra on our energy bills to subsidise new projects such as wind farms.

Coal UK: cancelled due to climate change

This morning, energy minister Malcolm Wicks made his way to Lord's Cricket ground in London to deliver the opening speech for the coal industry's annual shindig.

He was expecting, we assume, to evangelise on the glorious future of coal in the UK, to the rapt and thunderous applause of his chums in the industry.

He probably wasn't expecting to find two metre fences blocking four of the entrances to the industry-government love-in, complete with climate change campaigners chained to the barricades.