April 17, 2012
Politics, STVEdinburgh Leave a comment
This story first appeared on STV Edinburgh here.
The election pundits say that Mike Ferrigan, also known as Professor Pongoo, a six foot penguin from planet Piper, stands little chance of getting elected as an independent councillor in May’s local council elections.
Afterall, independent candidates struggle at the best of times to compete with the better resourced election machines of the established parties. And in the Pentlands ward where he is standing, more than 40% of the electorate gave their first preference to the Conservative candidate last time.
Could an independent dressed as a penguin with strong environmental policies be a step too far for most locals?
Ferrigan thinks not. He believes that the pundits have underestimated the power of the Penguin to take votes from across the political spectrum.
He has even promised to wear the penguin costume to every full council meeting if he gets elected. He said: “I will make a pledge to wear the Penguin costume in full council meetings.
“The purpose of doing that will be to bring some lightness and humour to the affair. This may help to bring about a more consensual approach to politics within the chamber.
“Hopefully people will calm down a bit, stop being so confrontational and wagging fingers at each other, and instead they’ll have a bit of a laugh, sit around a table and discuss the common good of all as opposed to the common good of all the political parties.”
The penguin is not just a novelty. It has policies too, many of them informed by his involvement in putting together the Occupy Edinburgh manifesto requests.
These include calls for the council to do more to support the development of new co-operative enterprises and a community right to buy for surplus council assets.
Asked why he wanted to stand as an independent, Mr Ferrigan, a former member of the Scottish Greens and an active supporter of the Occupy Edinburgh movement said: “I’m disillusioned with the Greens. They’ve become establishment. But right from the mid-eighties I’ve been interested in politics, but not party politics.
“I feel that party politics has destroyed the economy, and it’s destroying the planet at a very quick rate.
“So what has motivated me to do it is to try to provide a new consensual voice.
Even though he proudly avoids carrying a mobile phone, he insists that he is committed to supporting a “bottom-up politics.” He plans to use Facebook and other social networking to hold regular online referenda to help write a “community manifesto,” and find solutions to problems in the area.
He said: “Communities should be able to make their own decisions and have their own finance available to put those decisions into action.”
He points out that he is one of only two candidates to live in the Ward and his work educating local school pupils about Climate Change means that many of the local children – and by extension their families – are already familiar with his Professor Pongoo alter ego.
His independent status, his established local profile as an environmental campaigner, and his pledge to devolve more power to local communities have come together to inspire at least some of the locals to vote for the first time ever.
His neighbours in the Currie street where he lives, certainly view him as a credible alternative to the party politicians they’ve had to choose from before.
May Higgins, who is 49, works at Heriot Watt University. She said: “I’ve never voted before because I don’t have any faith in politics whatsoever. But put it this way – he’s made me interested.
“I do believe in the community, and I want to see things done. Mike is a community person and he’s actually made me think.
“I think he’s sincere, and I think he’s a hard worker. I have known Mike in the community for a while, and I think everybody young and old can relate to him.”
Sandra Elliot Pride, 53, who lives in Currie and works at Balerno High School said: “In the past I’ve always voted Labour.
“If Professor Pongoo got in he might be able to achieve more of a voice for the people here. People are increasingly paying all their dues, and we see cuts, and we know their have to be cuts, but they seem to sometimes be slightly unfair cuts.
“The people who are being affected are perhaps less well off and there are less well off people in this area. It’s a vibrant area, and it’s not regarded as a disadvantaged area, but there are people who live in this area who are hidden disadvantaged.”
Rebecca Doig, is a 29 year old teacher who lives in Currie. She was keeping a watchful eye on her two children in a local Playpark. She said: “My husband has been going on about the Penguin ever since he put a leaflet through the door.
“I suppose he’s standing on Green issues and they are really important. I might put him as my third choice, but I think my husband will probably vote for him because he’s a penguin.”
“I think the novelty thing will work. He’s got a memorable name and a memorable logo. At a local election, people don’t know very much, so that might work. He could get in, you never know. Stranger things have certainly happened and I imagine that the turnout will be really low.
“I think he’s fairly well thought of locally because he does a lot of work in the schools and things like that. He goes in and does talks with them, and he goes to libraries too. People locally probably do know him quite well.”
The environmental message that Mr Ferrigan is basing his campaign on seems to resonate well with young families in the area. Neal Beaton, 30, lives with his family in the ward. He said: “I think his ideas are very good. Renewables are quite a current issue.
“I think it’s always hard for an independent to get in, but people might be a bit disillusioned with the Tories and the Libdems. There’s always a possibility he might slip through.
“I think some people here might think that being represented by a penguin is a bit beneath them. But it’s happened before hasn’t it? It’s always fun – and there have been monkeys elected before in England.”
The older generation of Pentlands residents are perhaps less convinced of Mr Ferrigan’s election bid. Local James Anderson, 79, who is retired, said: “My priority is keeping the council tax low.
“I don’t think Mr Ferrigan has got a chance, but he’s got as much right to be in the parliament as the rest of the rogues.”
To win a place in the Chambers, Professor Pongoo must win support throughout the Pentlands ward, which spans a varied demographic from Wester Hailes in the east to Balerno in the west.
To do this, he’s adopted another tactic that some of the other parties may struggle to follow. He’s producing three different leaflets, and using his local knowledge is highlighting policies that he thinks will appeal to the different communities.
Local residents will have a chance to quiz Professor Pongoo, along with the other five candidates standing in Pentlands Ward at a Hustings event on the 3rd of May.
More information on the event is available on the specially set-up Hustings website.
A full listing of all the candidates standing in the city is available here.
June 26, 2011
Cycling, Leith, Music Leave a comment
This video is a product of a litany of silly things, the first of which was thinking that I should try to make any music at all, let alone one with a children’s Bontempi Keyboard that is out of tune with itself.
The second silly thing involved cycling for as long as I could around the North Edinburgh cycle paths no handed with my phone so I could video the trip.
I’ve been wanting to do something similar to this for literally years, and if it weren’t for copyright, and a lack of talent the sound track would be Four Tet and the filming would be less shoogly and better put together.
If I could work out how to put it on the Innertube Map then I would. But I can’t work out how to post video to multiple “stops.” Perhaps Tom Allan could assist?
May 18, 2011
Edinbuzz, Hyperlocal 2 Comments
The Guardian Edinburgh blog is to be wound up this month, and that, as they say is that. Late to the wake that I am, Ali George has inspired me to add my two cents, to all the other two cents that have been written about the impact that the service had.
The recipe seemed deceptively simple. Get a talented journalist the tools to do decent multi-media journalism, a brief to work with people in a way that they feel most comfortable, whether that’s photos, or audio, or film or the written word, and combine it with that brand and off you go with a flying start to shake the torpid local media scene up.
From the perspective of someone who had been running what some considered a “hyperlocal” site in the city before the Guardian came to town, it was a breath of fresh air. Here was a service that not only linked out to the source of their stories – it actively celebrated the source of those stories. A minor revolution to someone who had got into the habit of seeing at least one of the stories in the Greener Leith weekly email appear subsequently in the local rag, without so much as a link on the web version of the story.
At that time, I never really thought it mattered that much for Greener Leith, whether the Evening News linked to us or not. Afterall, as a charity, focussed on improving the local neighbourhood, I was grateful that the organisation was getting publicity. Any publicity. I still am. Any disgruntlment I felt, I mentally filed under “bloggers vanity,” and tried to ignore it.
But the extra traffic, and the search engine ranking improvements, and the credibilitiy (at least in some circles!) that all those links from the Guardian to our little website have helped me, and others, to understand what you might call ‘media power,’ and how it works. Links have a value, website visitors have a value, and by promoting and colloborating on stories both websites were arguably more successful for it. Because of this, The Guardian has, in a way, directly supported the development of Greener Leith in a way which no other large media organisation has. I’m certainly tremendously grateful for this.
Partly as a consequence of those links, Greener Leith now has the audience, influence, and ambition (and the stats to prove it) to promote our content and our approach to grant funders and other people. The Guardian Edinburgh blog (along with all the Talk About Local folk) undoubtedly played a role in helping us to see the value in our content, and building that value.
I can’t tease out quite how much The Guardian Edinburgh blog has helped Greener Leith. But, the stats are interesting. According to Google Analytics, in the last 12 months, the five top traffic sources to the Greener Leith site are:
But there’s more to it than traffic stats. Although I don’t get to see him often enough, I got to meet, work with and develop some fun ideas with Tom, the first Guardian Beat Blogger for Edinburgh. And whilst, I never have had a chance to spend the same amount of time with the Mike who followed in his footsteps, they both did an incredible job – and both contributed to projects like Edinbuzz. As Tom says – that is an ongoing legacy in itself that is to be celebrated. In fact, now that I work for STV Local, I realise just how incredible a job they’ve done.
Five years ago, when Greener Leith started, it was viewed in some quarters as a seditious act to post the papers for local community meetings online, with commentry to try to explain what they meant. But the local news scene is different in Edinburgh now. For noteworthy council meetings in the city chambers, it is not uncommon to have three people live tweeting the proceedings. Sometimes even local councillors join in from the floor. Sometimes, these days, the Guardian Beat Blogger may not be amongst those tweeting.
The Guardian undoubtedly helped to raise some folk’s aspirations for, and understanding of, what local news could be at a city-wide level. For the first time it seemed some people at least (how inclusive was it really?), could take part in the process of producing news about their city underneath an established brand, which felt less mediated by a giant, mysterious editorial beast with unknown motives.
Perhaps more importantly in my view, there was another voice, with a Guardian set of news values, interpreting what was going on in the city chambers, and other city institutions in a sustained way. Perhaps these are a few of the reasons why there’s been such an outcry at the decision to fold the service.
And looking to the future in Edinburgh, the city-wide independent sites like the Edinburgh Spotlight and the Edinburgh Reporter will keep evolving in their own ways, building their own audiences, and perhaps revenue streams. There’s a new independent start-up poised to launch, the Evening News are rumoured to be planning a relaunch of their website and of course there’s STV Edinburgh, where I work now. Unsurprisingly, STV Local is a service that I hope will be able to more than fill some of the gaps that will be left in local people’s RSS readers. So whilst the Guardian will be missed – and it has undeniably influenced many websites in the city – it is by no means the end of good quality local news in the city. Today there seems to be more of that than ever, and more opportunity for local groups to be heard too.
At the end of the day it’s just particularly rubbish, for Mike, Sarah, and the beat bloggers in other places that the Guardian did not see fit to spend time figuring out how to make it all financially viable, and investing in that important part of the equation properly. They are good people, and it’s surprising that the Guardian don’t want to keep them.
Yeah it was an experiment, but we liked it.
November 10, 2010
Biomass, Climate Change, Leith Energy, Forth Energy, Forth Ports, Manomet 5 Comments
In preparation for the 28 day period where people can submit objections to the Forth Energy plans, I’ve expanded and re-written the post below, with links to key resources on the Greener Leith website here:
http://www.greenerleith.org/forth-energy-fact-myth-leith/
This post has been revised several times as I’ve found new sources, and spoken to other people. I’m actively seeking constructive criticism and/or help to work this out. Last updated at 13/11/2010
I’m just back from a visit to the Forth Energy exhibition about the Leith Biomass plant, where I tried to discuss the sustainability case for the plant with 3 and sometimes 4 Forth Energy staff at once. Quite intimidating it was, as they all seemed bigger than me and they almost had me convinced with some arguments that I hadn’t considered before (It would seem others have had similar experiences). It was only on the way home that I had a ‘wait a minute’ moment and having digested the experience, I’m now feel even clearer that the Forth Energy environmental arguments don’t stack up.
So let me start at the beginning, (I felt that I had to) as this can be very hard for non-specialists to work out. I feel I should state at this point that I have an MSc in Energy and Environmental Management – and I have been working in the environmental sector for a number of years, but I still have felt the need to start from first principles. This is my personal view on the sustainability of the proposed Forth Energy plants. I’ve tried to link to my sources wherever I can, so that you can judge for yourself whether they are credible. They seem like it to me.
When you burn wood, just like coal, you release carbon. With a large plant like the one proposed by Forth Energy – you burn lots of wood and therefore release lot’s of carbon. What makes biomass ‘greener’ than coal is that, if you plant enough trees, eventually you can reabsorb that carbon back out of the atmosphere and lock it up again. In contrast, when you burn coal the carbon is released and there is no comparable mechanism for re-absorbing the carbon released, so over time – coal is much worse for the environment. However, the key point that Forth Energy staff would not acknowledge is that it takes time for biomass plants to deliver a carbon saving. Any carbon saving.
When I went to speak to representatives of Forth Energy today, they referred constantly to their claim that their plant emits only 11% of the carbon of a coal power station over the lifetime of the biomass plants operation. This claim is the main basis of their sustainability argument and it is repeated ad infinitum in the press. They argue that the 89% emissions saving is delivered as soon as the biomass plant is turned on – because it means that somewhere else a coal powered plant is turned off. Or to use their language, biomass displaces coal as a fuel for electricity generation. However, it shouldn’t take anyone long to work out that this argument doesn’t really work. We’ve already established that burning biomass emits carbon – just like coal. Indeed, some research suggests that the emissions associated with power generated from biomass are 50% greater than coal per unit of energy generated.
To put it another way – imagine, you work for the National Grid. You have a slider switch that controls two power plants that generate the same amount of electricity. One of the plants is a coal fired plant, and the other burns biomass. You can either turn on the biomass plant or the coal plant depending on whether you push the slider to the left or the right. If your priority was to cut carbon emissions on that particular day, it wouldn’t make any difference where you put that slider – carbon would still be getting pumped into the atmosphere in very large quantities. And some would argue that it would be the biomass plant producing more carbon than the coal plant.
Forth Energy staff told me today, repeatedly, that the biomass plant would deliver an instant 89% emissions saving, by allowing that person at the national grid to turn off a coal fired plant and replace it with a biomass plant. (I offered to record my conversation with them but they declined, so you’ll have to take my word for it). The only circumstances I can imagine in which turning on a biomass plant could be said to deliver an instant carbon saving is if the developers had planted an entirely new dedicated forest to supply it, and left it to grow to maturity, prior to building and running the plant. I think we can be certain that this is not a situation that applies to Forth energy. Indeed, Forth Energy staff told me they’d not signed any fuel supply contracts yet.
So, it seems clear to me that building a biomass power plant won’t deliver an instant carbon saving by displacing coal. To reach that 89% saving, Forth Energy are going to have to run the plant for a long time. And this is where the idea of a “carbon debt” comes in. To run that biomass plant, Forth Energy will need to cut down millions of trees, transport them to Leith and burn them, and release lot’s of carbon. That carbon is only taken out of the atmosphere again when an equivalent amount of trees have regrown to re-absorb the carbon.
But actually, the situation is not as simple as how long a replacement tree takes to grow. Forth Energy should know this, as I’ve sent them the link to the latest research undertaken by the Clean Air Task Force, that identifies the factors they need to consider. They are:
1.The lifecycle of the wood (e.g., logging debris, whole trees, trees vulnerable to catastrophic events) in the absence of the biomass energy opportunity.
2. The type of energy that will be generated (heat, electricity, combined heat and electricity), because different types have different efficiencies and thus different CO2 emissions profiles.
3. The type of fossil fuel being displaced (coal, oil, or natural gas), because different fuels have different emissions profiles.
4. The management of the forest—management can either slow or accelerate forest growth, and therefore recovery of carbon from the atmosphere.
In the Clean Air Task Force Review, they present a graph that shows the cumulative carbon effects of burning and planting trees for a hypothetical plant burning wood. This is an elaboration of a research model, first developed by a team of researchers at the Manomet Centre for Conservation Sciences. Whilst this graph is based on certain assumptions about the fuel source that do not directly apply to the Forth Energy plants (the Forth Energy plants will burn some ‘recovered waste wood’ too), it’s a useful illustration of the principle (to see a larger image click on the graph):
You’ll note that even after 32 years of running this hypothetical biomass plant, net carbon emissions are still 147% of those that would have been produced by simply burning coal. So far from producing an instant carbon saving, the biomass plant above generates an increase in net carbon emissions compared to coal for many decades. Clearly, there are plenty of circumstances where biomass is not going to be an answer to the very urgent problem of climate change. This requires us to cut our emissions now, not increase them in the short to medium term.
That is why Scottish Government legislation specifies a target of an 80% cut in Greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Similarly subsidies for Renewable Energy are paid over a 20 years timescale, and most reasonable people would agree with me here – that in return for receiving a public subsidy, a power plant should deliver a meaningful carbon saving within this timescale.
When you speak to Forth Energy staff they will try to dismiss the Manomet research model as inapplicable to their proposals. Largely, because the graph above would vary somewhat if you made different assumptions about the lifecycle of the fuel sources used – that’s the first factor in the Clean Air Task Force list.
It’s impossible to know what other assumptions have been made about the other types of fuel crops that will be burnt by Forth Energy in Leith. However, they say that up to 30% of the fuel could come, not from virgin timber, but from waste wood, short rotation coppice and even straw. Whilst undoubtedly cleaner than coal, in most cases these crops do not seem likely to deliver that 89% saving against coal when used just to generate electricity – like the proposed Forth Energy plant in Leith. Indeed, they can be worse than burning natural gas for electricity from a carbon emissions point of view, and it would seem that they are unlikely to deliver much, if any, carbon saving over UK grid electricity by 2030, as this assessment from the Environment Agency (the equivalent of SEPA in England and Wales) shows:
Despite the difference in the fuel sources, I believe the “Manomet model,” that seeks to place the cumulative carbon flux from a proposed plant in a time sequence, is valid and can be applied to any specific plant. It just happens the Forth Energy would prefer not to plug more specific numbers into this model for the Leith plant. It’s not hard to tell why. Based on their findings, the Clean Air Task Force research concludes:
“Further promotion of utility‐scale biomass should be discontinued immediately as a threat to climate, and forests.”
When I discussed the second factor in the list – the type of energy generated – with Forth Energy staff things started to get really odd. You’ll recall they were very keen to talk about displacement when they were talking about electricity generation. But when it came to heat, the Forth Energy staff dismissed what happens to the heat as ‘irrelevant’ to the carbon equation. So when I pointed out that this cannot be true and that research I’d seen shows that dumping the majority of the heat in the sea (as is the current plan in Leith) will increase the length of time the plant will take to pay back its carbon debt – I was met with emphatic denials. “The heat is a bonus” they insisted.
Now, clearly it isn’t just a bonus. If there’s any opportunity for ‘displacement’ it’s by using the heat generated by the plant to displace the use of fuel used (usually natural gas or oil) for space heating in nearby buildings. Using the heat will clearly reduce the demand for fossil fuel from other sources. Not using the heat from the plant, is pure and simply a waste – and means more wood must be burnt, releasing more carbon, per unit of useful energy out of the plant. The Manomet research study compared various predicted carbon dividend or debts, that a biomass plant (burning hard wood from commercial timber plantations in the states) would deliver, depending on the type of fuel that was being displaced.
Whilst the numbers in this table are not directly transferable to Scotland – the trend it illustrates still applies. Biomass used to replace oil or gas in a combined heat and power (CHP) situation (where the heat is used constructively rather than dumped in the sea) delivers a carbon saving much more quickly than a situation where biomass is simply used to produce electricity. In the case of electricity produced by burning natural gas, that large negative number in the 2100 box implies that the biomass used to replace this fuel will take many, many decades – if not centuries to deliver a carbon saving. The Forth Energy plant in Leith will only burn biomass for electricity when it becomes operational. And remember, we don’t have centuries to tackle climate change.
And this is where my conversation with Forth Energy got even stranger. It’s been very hard to get a straight answer out of Forth Energy over the length of time that they used to produce their “Life Cycle Analysis”. Today, they told me emphatically 25 years. So, bearing in mind the graph above, even allowing for the fact that Forth Ports claim they’ll be able to source fuel from sources that may suck up carbon more quickly than the forests used in the model in the Manomet report it’s extremely hard for me to understand how they can possibly claim a 89% carbon saving over coal power in 25 years. Even allowing for faster growing fuel sources, it looks to me as if they’ll be lucky to achieve parity with coal in 25 years, let alone an 89% saving. Hardly a compelling reason to build the plant or provide the plant with hundreds of millions of pounds of subsidies for “renewable energy” over the first 20 years the plant will operate.
But there’s a further factor that doesn’t play well for the Forth Energy plans. In Scotland, the discussion is not even about whether this plant can achieve carbon savings compared to burning coal, or even gas, for electricity. In Scotland about a third of our power comes from renewable sources already, and this is set to increase to 80% by 2020. If this were to represented in the first graph above – it would mean that the flat horizontal line that represents emissions from fossil fuels, would start higher up the graph and be tilted, so that the line rises towards the top left corner. We could call this line “business as usual in Scotland”.
It relates to the third factor in our list that affects how long any given biomass plant will take for the plant to deliver a carbon saving. If the energy generated by the biomass plant is ‘displacing’ an energy mix that is already comprised of a high proportion of low carbon fuels (e.g. Natural Gas, Wind, Solar, and even Nuclear) then it seems likely that it will be even longer before the Leith biomass plant realises any kind of carbon saving at all.
Now, Forth Energy claim that it is unfair to compare their plant to the average carbon emissions embodied in grid electricity, because the power they generate from the biomass plants will be displacing coal power from the grid – and when there is lots of wind power being generated, then all the other power stations are basically ‘turned off’ in order to accommodate it in the grid. But remember Scotland has the potential to generate 123% of its electricity demand from renewable sources. A few decades into the future, if we’re going to be generating a sizable proportion of our energy from renewables or indeed a surplus of renewable energy, there may not be much coal fired plant left to displace.
Furthermore, in the unlikely event these Forth Energy plants do find a heat customer willing to pay to be connected to the plant to use even a small part of the heat that they generate – then they’ll have to keep running the plant almost continuously anyway to supply them. On this basis it would seem entirely reasonable to compare the energy they generate to the average carbon intensity of the grid – both now, and looking into the future.
When you consider all this, it makes that Forth Energy carbon saving claim of 89% delivered over 25 years of operation, seem even more unlikely to me.
And of course we haven’t even considered the fourth factor. That is the management of the forests where the fuel is sourced, and this is also another aspect of the plans which simply cannot work. The scale of the timber demand of these plants, and proposed plants like them elsewhere in the UK is simply huge. And although Forth Energy claim that they will only source their fuel from third-party certified sources, the scale of the demand for biomass will have an impact globally. Indeed, on current evidence the UK demand for wood fibre imports, as a consequence of these plants, and the others like them proposed around the UK, is set to equal the entire current global trade in wood fibre. This means that third party certified wood may become too expensive for other industrial uses, leading to job losses in the UK, and it would also seem likely that this demand will trigger a growth in timber use from non-certified, poorly managed forests by other users.
The impact of a ‘biofuels land grab’ in the third world, whether directly caused by Forth Ports, or indirectly by other timber users who find themselves priced out of the certified timber European market – could exacerbate carbon emissions, as more and more ‘virgin forest’ (which is a good carbon store and net sink) is replaced by intensively managed monoculture commercial plantations (which store less carbon). This conversion will therefore produce a further net emission of carbon. Now Forth Energy may claim that it is unfair to implicate their proposals in a global environmental problem. But the combined timber demand that their plants will require is absolutely huge – and many, many orders of magnitude greater than the smaller, more efficient, biomass plants being built or proposed in other places in Scotland, that use timber entirely sourced in Scotland. Furthermore, if Forth Energy intend to use faster growing ‘energy crops’ then is likely to contribute even more to carbon emissions from indirect land use change. So whilst these crops, like short rotation coppice, can be harvested more frequently, and thus lock up carbon more quickly as they grow, if their use was expanded rapidly to a commercial scale more land use changes would result – often at the expense of land used for producing food, or other types of forest which work as a better carbon store and absorb more carbon over the long term than these types of energy crops.
There are links to various reports in this Guardian article that show that these indirect land use changes, driven by the growth in commercial biofuel explotation will lead to increased carbon emissions, a loss of biodiversity and increased staple food prices.
For these reasons set out above, I’m feel more certain than ever that the Forth Energy claims for their plant are indeed likely to be ‘greenwash,’ and that without truly independent research that applies a model similar to the Manomet approach to the specific circumstances surrounding the Forth Energy biomass proposals, we will never get to the bottom of the true carbon impact of these plants. Until then, The Scottish Government should refuse planning permission and support call a moratorium on all large, electricity only, biomass proposals.
Other strange things Forth Energy said #1:
In our conversation Forth Energy staff said they were looking at using Eucalyptus trees, grown in Scotland, as a possible fast growing feedstock for their plants. Whilst it is possible to grow Eucalyptus trees in Scotland, to my knowledge there are no commercial scale plantations of these trees in Scotland and no plans to establish them. Even if there were, it would take at least 25 years, at least, for any commercial plantation to get established and reach maturity. 25 years is the predicted lifetime of the plant.
Other strange things Forth Energy said #2:
I put it to them that their suggestion, that the proposed plant on Leith Docks would ever supply the council HQ next to Waverly station, with heat was, frankly silly. They argue that it was technically possible to this and therefore it was not misleading to include this site as a possible heat customer of the plant. This is true – it may be technically possible to supply heat to that distance. It is certainly desirable to build an extensive heat network covering the north of the city.
However, they provided me with no credible evidence that they could overcome the political, practical, regulatory and financial challenges of digging up the whole of Leith Walk, Leith Street and Carlton Road and retrofitting the council HQ to deliver this vision. The fact remains that on the basis of the current plans, the heat that is generated by the plant will be dumped into the sea.
Correction/ Update at 12.11.2010
Here are the typical CO2 savings Forth Energy claim for the similar Dundee plant. In fact, they claim higher savings than those I cited in this post originally, and I’ve amended it accordingly. Nevertheless, the difference makes no material difference to my main point – Forth Energy do not provide information on when the claimed savings will be realised, depsite their staff claiming that “all the assumptions are in the environmental statement.” If these savings are only delivered many decades, or indeed centuries, after the projected lifetime of the plant, we must question how useful this development will be.
Furthermore, contrary to claims by Forth Energy staff, there is no information on how long the Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) conducted by SISTECH assumed the plant would run for.
Also – there is an interesting table included in the appendices which shows what emissions are included in the LCA and what has not been counted. You can see it here:
Note that the LCA is based on the ‘expected electricity/heat output’ and not the actual heat use at the time of construction. So, there we have it – in order for the Forth Energy claims to stack up they must use the heat. It is not “a bonus,” as Forth Energy staff claim. It is a fundamental foundation to their carbon reduction claims.
You will also note that the model does not take into account the carbon released from land use change, for example from soils, when forests are harvested. Most of the carbon stored by forests is in fact sequestered in the soil over many decades, and logging tends to cause this captured carbon in the soil to be released relatively rapidly.
There are a number of other flaws with the LCA. For example, when it comes to wood waste, it assumes that all wood waste that is diverted from the waste stream to the biomass plant would have otherwise gone to landfill – and would immediately decompose releasing methane to the atmosphere. This is not the case. Because of the increasing landfill tax, there are greater and greater incentives to recycle, or re-use wood. Even burning waste wood in a different, more efficient, wood fired CHP plant, where the heat is actually used would deliver a better carbon saving than burning it in the plant proposed for Leith!
Furthermore, even where wood waste is land-0filled, the decomposition of wood takes places slowly over a number of years. Therefore, any time based analysis of the climate change impact of the proposals would need to take account of this. Lastly, in many land fill sites, the methane produced by decomposing biological material is captured and burnt to produce electricity, converting it back to CO2. As the Forth Energy report states, 1KG of methane has 23 times more impact on climate change than 1KG of Co2. By assuming that all the wood waste burnt in the Forth Energy Biomass plants is helping to avoid an immediate release of Methane elsewhere Forth Energy can claim “Even though the overall percentage of wood waste to be included in the fuel mix is very small (<2%), the avoided methane emissions are significant.”
Similarly, whilst the LCA readily ascribes an optimistic carbon saving to waste wood diverted from the waste stream and burnt inefficiently, it does not ascribe a carbon cost to burning timber that could otherwise be used for activities that do not lead to such a rapid release of atmospheric carbon. For example, use of timber in furniture or as a building material.
All of these assumptions serve to over-estimate the CO2 savings the plant will deliver in the short – medium term.
November 9, 2010
You know the web2.0 world is a fickle place. It feels like just last week “the @somebodyIfollow daily” was a diverting tweet to follow up on… and then Paper.li was ubiquitous. And the last thing I wanted to do was check-out another reformatted, slow to load on my mobile, day old list of links from people I mostly follow anyway. And judging by the response that Sarah Hartley got in this tweet:
Now our twitter streams are full of Dailies thanks to paper.li, what do we all think? Great community opportunity or spammy as hell?—
Guardian Local (@gdnlocal) November 09, 2010
I’m guessing I’m not alone in finding paper.li a teensy bit spammy. But at least paper.li have recognised this – and they’re improving what they do in the right direction. For a start you don’t have to have a Daily anymore, you can have a weekly. If everyone just switched to the Weekly setting, then that would go a long, long way to dealing with the spammy accusations. And perhaps I might be more interested in seeing a weekly summary of the big news from someone or a topic. If there was a setting to make the weekly version come out on a Sunday morning then perhaps reading a bunch of Sunday paper.li weeklies could be a sort of user generated alternative to the Sunday papers.
This said, I’m keeping @edinbuzz on a daily setting for the time being, as it’s about the only regular tweet to come from my experimental semi-automated local news aggregation toy…
November 8, 2010
It’s been odd watching hundreds of millions of pounds of public money floating inexorably towards Forth Ports over the last year. One can’t help but wonder whether we should just nationalise them. Given that it’s only public money that’s likely to keep the regeneration of the likes of Leith and Dundee docks afloat for the foreseable future, it must surely be cheaper than what’s going on at the moment?
Lest you think I’m exaggerating let me explain where all these millions are coming from. First of all, Forth Ports have successfully netted the first ever TIF money in the UK. The Scottish Government has approved the use of “Tax Incremental Finance” in the UK, to help restart the regeneration in the Leith docks area – after the private sector property collapse that lasted long enough to deliver us the decidedly mixed blessing of Western Habour.
To date we’ve got some massive awful looking flats, a gap site, a big ASDA and a central wasteland, that will one day, apparently be turned into a public park. Now, in a deal that I’m still finding hard to fathom, the city of Edinburgh council has been given permission to borrow £84million on the basis that it will get to keep more of the business rates that may then flow from the renewed regeneration of the area that the public investment will help to stimulate.
But giving Forth Ports access to what is effectively an £84million tax payer subsidised mortgage hasn’t been altogether straight forwards. Recently, there’s been a bit of a stooshie, between local Leith councillor Gordon Munro, and the council administration. Gordon had the temerity to suggest that there should perhaps be an elected official or two to represent the interests of local people on the executive group that’s going to spend the £84million. In this response in the Guardian, Cllr Cardownie (currently of the SNP) said “To put laypeople on this kind of committee, I think Forth Ports would be aghast at that.”
Yes, I added the italics there. Imagine upsetting Forth Ports by putting local people on a board that’s responsible for spending £84million of local tax payers money! It would seem self evident to Cllr Cardownie that the money belongs to Forth Ports and not the council. Yet it is tax payers who must service the interest on the debt, until the day the hoped for business rate uplift comes in. Of course, few people dare to ask, what if it doesn’t?
Of course, this proposal should also be seen in the wider context of the plans to regenerate the docks. Last time Forth Ports went to get a major bit of planning permission for the docks, they got away with pleading poverty to the planning committee. So, Forth Ports were let off the hook when it came to paying for public infrastructure.
No more expensive commitments to invest in the road infrastructure around Leith to deal with the extra cars that will be generated by the ongoing development. No more annoying commitments to deliver carbon neutral developments. No more requirements to build affordable housing for the time being. Instead – lot’s of jam tomorrow. The council agreed to agree later on virtually all the public sector infrastructure costs – with Forth Ports only required to pay if they feel that they can afford it later.
And a few months pass, and look! The TIF money will now be used to provide some of the public infrastructure stuff like access roads, promenade walkways, improving Ocean Terminal, and improving the lock gates of the docks to allow bigger ships in. Now one may be labouring under the impression that the first job of a port operator is to ensure that ships can get in and out of the ports they, er, operate? How wrong you would be! Rather than spend money on the ports they claim to run – these days Forth Ports prefers to invest in shopping centres.
That’s right, they recently bought out the Bank of Scotlands share of Ocean Terminal to become the sole owners. And of course, now the TIF tap is running – the tax payer is going to lavish more cash on the shopping centre, to fix lots of the design problems that Forth Ports built into it in the first place. So a definite win all round for Forth Ports shareholders there.
But it gets better. Alex Salmond recently announced loads more millions for improving Scottish ports infrastructure – to allow them to provide a better base for the offshore renewables industry. Forth Ports were on the panel that drew up the report and hey, it looks as though that’s another £35million coming to a port near us. Again, with no local oversight. So another easy win for Forth Ports shareholders there too.
The icing on the cake however, is the joint venture Forth Ports has formed with Scottish and Southern Energy. Cleverly they called it Forth Energy. It’s hard not to imagine that the two chairmen of these companies didn’t just get together one evening after dinner with the aim of coming up with a scheme that would suck up the most public subsidy possible in the shortest space of time.
By building four huge biomass plants on Forth Ports land, this company is likely to receive nearly £1billion pounds of public subsidy through the Renewable Obligations Certificates scheme – even though there’s some dubiety about whether the plants will actually deliver any carbon savings at all any time soon. And they still get to keep the cash they make from selling the electricity too! Much easier and more profitable than building hundreds of offshore wind turbines.
Best of all for Forth Ports shareholders the plants are all of such a massive scale, that normal planners, with their normal planning rules and local democratic oversight are mysteriously circumvented and it becomes the job of an obscure part of the Scottish Government to decide whether the plans sink or swim. So, never mind the local plan or inconvenient land use designations – even if they were based on a plan that Forth Ports gave the council a few years earlier. Nope, you can ride roughshod over all that stuff (it was so last year) and all you have to worry about is 28 days public consultation and that’s it.
Now let’s not be too unkind. Some of this public money will no doubt deliver public good. It will be great to see the Port of Leith functioning properly both as a vibrant cruise liner terminal and as a place for the manufacture and servicing of offshore renewable energy installations. These are developments that will no doubt prove beneficial to the whole of the city, not just Leith.
But Forth Ports cannot continue to expect to have their cake and eat it. They cannot have cruise liners AND giant power stations, all funded by the tax payer – these two things in close proximity must, in any case, appear to be mutually exclusive to any rational person. And the views of local folk must be taken into account more. Clearly most Leithers don’t want to live in the shadow of a giant power station, or see their neighbourhood slowly ruined by sterile big box corporate regeneration. But to make this happen our city councillors must have more of a voice, and more of a vision, for the kind of places they want to create and the kind of a city the Edinburgh should be in the future. It’s public money Forth Ports is relying on, so it would be nice for local folk to see a bit more give, and a bit less take, would it not?
October 30, 2010
Yeah, so I’m doing this because I’ve got into my head that I need a bit of the web that I can call my own. And hasn’t free wordpress got good lately?
Al Reads
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