Changing Cockenzie from coal to gas would create ‘carnage’
from Sunday Herald, 21 June 2009
A plan to upgrade one’s of Scotland’s dirtiest old power stations from coal to gas has come under fire for failing to do enough to cut climate pollution and for threatening “environmental carnage”.
Spanish-owned ScottishPower has announced a proposal to turn the coal-fired station at Cockenzie in East Lothian into a modern gas-fired plant. Because it is so polluting, the old station has to close by the end of 2015, and the company is now “examining options” for its replacement.
But environmentalists say that it may not be necessary to replace Cockenzie if enough electricity is generated by renewable sources like wind, wave and tidal power. And they point out that that gas, while less polluting than coal, still results in significant emissions of climate-wrecking carbon.
“Replacing one fossil fuel plant with another is the logic of the 20th century,” said the Green MSP, Patrick Harvie. “Ministers and power companies should be drawing on our own clean energy resources rather than making our future dependent on unreliable Russian gas imports.”
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