Return of King Coal reveals the lack of ambition behind UK energy policy

Coal-fired power stations are set to stay in Britain until well into the 2020s, as the dismal failure to increase renewable electricity generation to necessary levels comes to light.

Green-minded consumers will now be required to provide hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of subsidies to Britain’s coal power stations, which senior ministers say are necessary to avoid future electricity blackouts.

There could be no better evidence for the total lack of ambition behind the government’s policy towards renewables. The figures speak for themselves: Britain produced just 6.5% of its electricity from renewable sources in 2010, placing it third from bottom in the EU.

Percentage of electricity generated from renewables in EU countries:

Meanwhile, political will is driving a transition to renewable energy all over Europe. Denmark has a thriving green energy industry, with 28,000 workers employed in the production of wind turbines. This has radically transformed the Danish economy, and the country is on track to run entirely on renewables by 2050 .

Germany  is another success story, with 22% of electricity supply made up of green energy. Locally-owned energy cooperatives account for half of this total, while in the UK the corresponding figure is just ten percent.

The UK's exported waste: the hidden truth

    Tom Mooring, Flikr

Who actually knows what happens to the waste carefully sorted by UK households and businesses to be recycled? I thought I did - the glossy council advertisements told me that it was sent off to the nearest recycling centre to be processed into new materials for manufacturing. Yet underneath the propaganda lies an unwelcome truth: more than a third of the waste paper and plastic collected in Britain is actually processed in China - 8,000 miles away.

In its desperate search for raw materials to fuel industrialisation, China is buying up vast quantities of waste from UK councils and businesses. Meanwhile, with EU legislation driving up landfill costs, thousands of tonnes of contaminated waste that could be dealt with in Britain is being shipped abroad without any knowledge of the environmental costs.

“China is buying up everything it can. It is sucking in material from all over the world and it doesn’t give two noodles what it takes,” said one plastics recycler interviewed in an investigation by the Guardian.

This is depriving UK recycling firms of waste to process, and was identified by industry expert Chris Dow as one of the key barriers to the future growth of the industry. The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology notes in a report: “The ability of [reprocessors] to attract investment has been limited by… variation in recycling systems across England and the volumes of recyclate being exported.” In other words, the lack of recycling infrastructure in the UK leads to waste being sent abroad, which starves UK centres of waste to process.