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Green groups welcomed the announcement which Greenpeace said put the Scottish Government streets ahead of its UK counterpart. Unless it has nuclear in the sentence the Westminster clowns can't see anything else as being worthwhile. VOTE SNP FOR A CLEANER SAFER SCOTLAND INDEPENDENCE

[italic]Yesterday's announcement comes several years after Tullis Russell proposed a biomass plant to cut its rising gas bills but hit a "myriad" regulatory problems.[/italic] Now how did that happen?.

This is very good news. In the meantime, would Mrs Curran like to tell us how the poorest amongst us can hope to pay our gas bills this year under her caring government? She might ask Darling Alistair when she gets him up to Glasow East. He's bound to have some ideas, no? No. No idea at all.

Excellent News, apparently the 'waste energy' is enough to power the whole of Dundee! Coupled with another announcement this week that the first Wind/Hydrogen Plant is to be constructed in North Ayrshire..... The future's bright, the future's Green Not Nuclear!

What is the winter fuel allowance for scots in the coldest part of the uk if you are under 65 hee haw. Yeah that makes the fact our oil is yet again propping up the economy all the better for the english. We have an abundance of cold windy places to set up these schemes and they are far more welcome than nuclear. Scotland as mentioned in the article is the only part of the countrys of the uk even trying to be inventive on our renewable energy demands yet we are turning down wind turbines far faster than we allow them to be put up. roll up offshore energy companies how much are we paying to set them up , hee haw really thats not surprising with this or any other group of elected officials in charge.

Great stuff. Shame it'll all be dependant on the wind blowing... No, hang on, it won't will it. I thought we were telt we would need nuclear for when it wisnae windy.

Big boy you dont read enough everybody knows it is now possible to store wind energy as hydrogen gas and that is the same gas that powers westminster when the PM speaks. We are told it will power fuel cell cars like silent feraris and every ned will be able to get one.

tris,12:55am. The poorest amongst us. Get a grip of yer drawers tris. Stop the patronising.[bold]bold[/bold]

Green? It is only called green for political reasons. Burning ANYTHING to produce electricity is not the way forward. Calling trees 'biomass' makes it all right then! Over 80% of this renewable energy target, or is that aspiration, will involve the burning of something to raise steam for a steam turbine which will run at a thermal efficiency of 33% or so. This means that 2/3rds of the heat is discarded! A much better idea would be to use wind, wave and tidal energy (Gentec venturi) to raise the steam required instead of this dodgy engineering practice.

well done the Alex Salmond. Your government delivers on policies that people want, and are commited to developing a generation infrastructure base that utilises a raft of green technologies such as wind, wave, hydro,biomas together with technologies such as carbon capture from more traditional coal burning plants. Not for an SNP government the legacy of more nuclear, but then again the SNP do not want atomic weapons either. ( Footnote Salmond has long campaigned to have carbon capture technologies commenced in the North East to compliment the existing oil and gas technolgies there. However, Gordon Brown's treasury have not supported his call, no doubt preferring to retain the billions of green taxes for their proposed future nuclear expansion)

[bold]Bla bla bla firt minister and bla bla bla carbon footprint!!! It is rather intriguing that 50% of the enregy generated is send to the national grid.....and yet we will see electricity go up by umptiens pumds......scottish power will claim that the whole sale prices or somethin have gone up....and yet more and more of their electricity produced comes now from wind farms....and now this bio fuel plant. For me, the end consumer there is no financial benefit as my utility bill keeps rising. Screw the utility company and and we f*t alex, come back and tell me that my energy bills come down![/bold]

So the plant costs 100 million, and half the power will be used to supply a plant employing 540 people... still a photo opperchancity for Mr Salmond ahead of a by-election - so well worth 8 million pound of tax payers money. How much discarded wooden furniture is there anyway? Id imagine it will mostly be trees that are going to be the fuel - not a particularily green solution

Good idea Mr Salmond but first of all will you kindly renationalise the power industry. It belonged to the people before the wicked witch of westminster stole it and gave it too her friends in industry and as long as it remains in their hands then prices will never come down.

Folk in England pay water bill at Post office if they can find one!My mate in Lancs is on dole he gets £112 fortnight ,Pays £38 for gas & elec combined with card every fortnight as well as £15 a fornight for his water bill,he goes 2 days a week not eating .But he does drink lots of water !.

Alec SALMON announces £8m grant to ..... TullisRussell chief exec Chris PARR Greenpeace chief scientist Doug PARR Sounds a bit Fishy

John Sauven guardian.co.uk, Friday July 18, 2008 Nuclear power failure Gordon Brown says the UK is at the forefront of a global 'nuclear renaissance'. But despite all the rhetoric, the real picture is grim. Just this week Prime Minister Gordon Brown confidently assured us that the UK was at the forefront of a global "nuclear renaissance" and that within a few years we'd be home to at least eight bright, shining new reactors. We're told a week is a long time in politics, but it must seem an absolute eternity to the ever more bedraggled British nuclear industry. Yesterday the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) published its annual report and the predictable news was that the cost of decommissioning existing reactors and dealing with our legacy of radioactive waste has rocketed yet again. The bill now stands at a whopping £73bn, up from £53bn in 2006. That's an increase equivalent to the entire cost of the London 2012 Olympics each year. Some experts believe that the real total might be more than £85bn. This is a staggering amount of taxpayers' money. Just to put the figure into context, it's about the same cost as the entire Apollo Programme that took man to the moon. Sadly, unlike JFK's lunar mission, in this case we have nothing to celebrate. What that money buys us is merely desperate grappling with the radioactive and toxic legacy of nuclear power. The NDA claims the overall figure will be kept down because it will generate revenue through its commercial operations. But the idea that the NDA's commercial operations can guarantee this income is laughable. A big slice of the revenue they want to rely on for a century or more depends on two of the biggest white elephants in nuclear industry history – Thorp and the Sellafield Mox Plant. The Thorp reprocessing facility was shut for years following dangerous radioactive leaks and is now closed until Christmas while a new evaporator is fitted. Meanwhile it was recently announced to surprisingly little fanfare that the Mox plant, which cost nearly half a billion pounds, has produced next to nothing since it was built. Relying on these for a guaranteed income is like putting your faith in a sprig of flowers to ward of the plague. The fact that the NDA is playing a central role in working out how much waste from new reactors might cost to dispose of should make all of us stop and think about the merits of any new nuclear programme. The taxpayer is picking up the tab for all these failures and cost increases now, and as the Public Accounts Committee stated recently, it is impossible to guarantee that the taxpayer will not pick up the tab for new nuclear power stations too. Government promises that there will be no subsides for its new nuclear programme are almost worthless. Despite all the rhetoric and improbable promises about the benefits of new nuclear reactors, the real picture is grim. Much like the recent news that British Energy is paying twice as much to get two of its creaking UK reactors back on line (the bill is now more than £100m). And the rumours that French state-owned nuclear utility Electricite de France is having second thoughts about buying British Energy. But before we conclude that this is a British malaise, this week brought the startling announcement from France that all its nuclear reactors must now be checked so that leaks of radioactive waste into local rivers, as happened at one site last week, don't happen anywhere else. This comes hot on the heels of the construction blunders at the new reactor site in Flamanville that led to the French nuclear authority suspending the project. These are the reactors and companies that are touted to deliver Brown's "nuclear renaissance", but unless stopped, the prospect is of a much more disastrous and expensive rerun. A fall from the giddy heights of Brown's expansive nuclear dreams at the start of the week takes some beating. However, the one thing the nuclear industry really excels at is shooting itself in the foot. Which means we can probably expect more of the same before the summer's out.

[quote][bold]jonny bond[/bold] wrote: What is the winter fuel allowance for scots in the coldest part of the uk if you are under 65 hee haw. Yeah that makes the fact our oil is yet again propping up the economy all the better for the english. We have an abundance of cold windy places to set up these schemes and they are far more welcome than nuclear. Scotland as mentioned in the article is the only part of the countrys of the uk even trying to be inventive on our renewable energy demands yet we are turning down wind turbines far faster than we allow them to be put up. roll up offshore energy companies how much are we paying to set them up , hee haw really thats not surprising with this or any other group of elected officials in charge.[/quote] Your starting to sound like a nationalist jonny ;-) That's the spirit

[quote][bold]girfut[/bold] wrote: Alec SALMON announces £8m grant to ..... TullisRussell chief exec Chris PARR Greenpeace chief scientist Doug PARR Sounds a bit Fishy [/quote] A Paper Making Company & Green-peace Scientist? Clutching at straws a wee bit aren't we? [quote][bold]A FIFE paper-making firm could close with the loss of more than 500 jobs unless the legislation regarding connections to Britain’s National Grid is changed.[/bold] [italic]www.thecourier.co.uk /output/2006/01/28/n ewsstory7972861t0.as p[/italic][/quote] So not just cutting Co2, but saving 500 jobs too. [bold]Well done the Scottish Government.[/bold]

Good, excellent news. Jwil; yes 'How did that happen?' I see the dark hand of BritLab or some energy company getting involved in stopping them losing revenue.

At least the SNP Government is trying to develop and put in place non nuclear options for creating affordable energy.for the people of Scotland. It's noticeable that the few posts by unionist supporters are all negative. None offer alternative solutions to the rising cost of energy bills, merely criticism of the SNP Government's efforts on their behalf. Quite in the spirit of Carping Curran, though.

The future belongs to someone else.... Just remember that none of this technology is Scottish and that none of it is built here. We can build as many biomass power stations as we like but we need to bear in mind that like wind technology every new one we put up improves some other country's corporate CV and improves their export figures not ours...

Girfut, Sounds a bit fishy, very good. Parr Smolt Grilse And the adult fish Salmo Salar, the Salmon.

Theres a fair thicket o deid wid doon Holyrood way, ready for the furnace now.

Forgive my ignorance but surely removing trees for fuel will have little or no impact on reducing CO2 in the atmosphere. When burning wood, CO2 is produced, and with less trees to absorb the CO2 surely this is not as eco-friendly as it may sound. And I wonder which country Salmond will have the parts for this plant imported from, and which set of East European migrant workers will build it on the cheap while half our country sits in their filthy council houses drinking cider or buckfast at the taxpayers expense.

Vespa the biomass is often the waste left when forestry operations such as tree felling takes place, trees from sustainable forestry. Instead of being left to rot it is collected and used, have you any idea how many people work in the forestry industry in Scotland? I did not till my neighbour who used to work there informed me, another major employer and generator of wealth that is not widely acknowledged. Scandinavian countries use wood pellets to fire their domestic boilers and several businessmen in the North east are pioneering the same here. Open your mind to change, thats what the supporters of independence believe in.

Here's the plan: Energy generated from hot air created when salmond opens his mouth: 250 Megawatts Energy created from biofuel conversion of nat B--S--- : 500 Megawatts There's also savings from recycling of 1 million copies of the unused and unwanted nat election manifesto

Jack, it is not the C02 which will be produced from burning the wood. The point is that the tree will absorb C02 and release it when burned. This is what we call carbon neutral. Burning coal which is C02 captured millions of years ago therefore releases C02 which was stored millions of years ago thus increasing the C02 in the planet now. Biomass is carbon neutral. This will add to our fuel mix. We need to stop thinking in a centralised generation mindset. Where we have a good spread of large and small scale generation using a mixture of technologies ranging from marine, wind biomass micro along with reductions in consumption by improved energy efficiency, better insulation and use of heat source technologies which will replace the reliance on fossil fuels to heat (which consumes 80% of our energy) we can meet the energy demands of the next 50 years without resorting to nuclear. Nuclear as is, is now pretty much safe and dependable energy. However what the international atomic community has failed to answer is the storage of waste. Until this is dealt with it is not the way forward. Once solution developed in Finland does seem to be the best way but the costs make it uneconomic meaning that the private companies expected top invest in nuclear cannot make a profit if they are forced to follow this method thus we will be left with oil drums of waste in shallow pits as is the way currently. Also this waste has a life of 10,000 years. Think of it think how long that is. Even simple things of the linguistics of communicating what the hell is in these storage pits over such a long time is problematic. Seems to me we have two routes. Reliance on dirty fuel of coal and oil or renewables. Renewables needs massive investment to really make the seismic shift required. Without this we should stick with coal and be damned because tinkering around the edges is a waste of time. Time for the world leaders to make a choice and invest in renewables rather than spending trillions of dollars on a pointless war

I still want to see Hydro-electric power counting as part of Scotland's renewable (so-called) obligation. However I also accept that nuclear power should still be generated. Long term decommissioning costs will always be high but it is still much safer than a lot of things. (I live near Torness incidentally.) Read James Lovelock's Revenge of Gaia for an explanation of relative safety.

[quote][bold]JC[/bold] wrote: Here's the plan: Energy generated from hot air created when salmond opens his mouth: 250 Megawatts Energy created from biofuel conversion of nat B--S--- : 500 Megawatts There's also savings from recycling of 1 million copies of the unused and unwanted nat election manifesto [/quote] Oh dear....... nothing positive to say.... What a great future you offer Scotland. [italic]Collective Myopia[/italic]

[quote][bold]Balliol II[/bold] wrote: I still want to see Hydro-electric power counting as part of Scotland's renewable (so-called) obligation. However I also accept that nuclear power should still be generated. Long term decommissioning costs will always be high but it is still much safer than a lot of things. (I live near Torness incidentally.) Read James Lovelock's Revenge of Gaia for an explanation of relative safety.[/quote] Safer than what exactly?

The Sun is blazing down in Florida. In 30 minutes the Sun delivers enough energy to power the planet, even in Scotland solar energy can be captured. And as always the Danes are streets ahead. Once people on Samsø started thinking about energy, a local farmer explains, “it became a kind of sport.” Photograph by Joachim Ladefoged. Jørgen Tranberg is a farmer who lives on the Danish island of Samsø. He is a beefy man with a mop of brown hair and an unpredictable sense of humor. When I arrived at his house, one gray morning this spring, he was sitting in his kitchen, smoking a cigarette and watching grainy images on a black-and-white TV. The images turned out to be closed-circuit shots from his barn. One of his cows, he told me, was about to give birth, and he was keeping an eye on her. We talked for a few minutes, and then, laughing, he asked me if I wanted to climb his wind turbine. I was pretty sure I didn’t, but I said yes anyway. We got into Tranberg’s car and bounced along a rutted dirt road. The turbine loomed up in front of us. When we reached it, Tranberg stubbed out his cigarette and opened a small door in the base of the tower. Inside were eight ladders, each about twenty feet tall, attached one above the other. We started up, and were soon huffing. Above the last ladder, there was a trapdoor, which led to a sort of engine room. We scrambled into it, at which point we were standing on top of the generator. Tranberg pressed a button, and the roof slid open to reveal the gray sky and a patchwork of green and brown fields stretching toward the sea. He pressed another button. The rotors, which he had switched off during our climb, started to turn, at first sluggishly and then much more rapidly. It felt as if we were about to take off. I’d like to say the feeling was exhilarating; in fact, I found it sickening. Tranberg looked at me and started to laugh. Samsø, which is roughly the size of Nantucket, sits in what’s known as the Kattegat, an arm of the North Sea. The island is bulgy in the south and narrows to a bladelike point in the north, so that on a map it looks a bit like a woman’s torso and a bit like a meat cleaver. It has twenty-two villages that hug the narrow streets; out back are fields where farmers grow potatoes and wheat and strawberries. Thanks to Denmark’s peculiar geography, Samsø is smack in the center of the country and, at the same time, in the middle of nowhere. For the past decade or so, Samsø has been the site of an unlikely social movement. When it began, in the late nineteen-nineties, the island’s forty-three hundred inhabitants had what might be described as a conventional attitude toward energy: as long as it continued to arrive, they weren’t much interested in it. Most Samsingers heated their houses with oil, which was brought in on tankers. They used electricity imported from the mainland via cable, much of which was generated by burning coal. As a result, each Samsinger put into the atmosphere, on average, nearly eleven tons of carbon dioxide annually. Then, quite deliberately, the residents of the island set about changing this. They formed energy coöperatives and organized seminars on wind power. They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using. The residents of Samsø that I spoke to were clearly proud of their accomplishment. All the same, they insisted on their ordinariness. They were, they noted, not wealthy, nor were they especially well educated or idealistic. They weren’t even terribly adventuresome. “We are a conservative farming community” is how one Samsinger put it. “We are only normal people,” Tranberg told me. “We are not some special people.” This year, the world is expected to burn through some thirty-one billion barrels of oil, six billion tons of coal, and a hundred trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The combustion of these fossil fuels will produce, in aggregate, some four hundred quadrillion B.T.U.s of energy. It will also yield around thirty billion tons of carbon dioxide. Next year, global consumption of fossil fuels is expected to grow by about two per cent, meaning that emissions will rise by more than half a billion tons, and the following year consumption is expected to grow by yet another two per cent. When carbon dioxide is released into the air, about a third ends up, in relatively short order, in the oceans. (CO2 dissolves in water to form a weak acid; this is the cause of the phenomenon known as “ocean acidification.”) A quarter is absorbed by terrestrial ecosystems—no one is quite sure exactly how or where—and the rest remains in the atmosphere. If current trends in emissions continue, then sometime within the next four or five decades the chemistry of the oceans will have been altered to such a degree that many marine organisms—including reef-building corals—will be pushed toward extinction. Meanwhile, atmospheric CO2 levels are projected to reach five hundred and fifty parts per million—twice pre-industrial levels—virtually guaranteeing an eventual global temperature increase of three or more degrees. The consequences of this warming are difficult to predict in detail, but even broad, conservative estimates are terrifying: at least fifteen and possibly as many as thirty per cent of the planet’s plant and animal species will be threatened; sea levels will rise by several feet; yields of crops like wheat and corn will decline significantly in a number of areas where they are now grown as staples; regions that depend on glacial runoff or seasonal snowmelt—currently home to more than a billion people—will face severe water shortages; and what now counts as a hundred-year drought will occur in some parts of the world as frequently as once a decade.

[quote]The point is that the tree will absorb C02 and release it when burned. This is what we call carbon neutral.[/quote] This is what I call utter tosh! It would be better NOT to burn anything to raise steam fro the turbines - converting the kinetic energy in the wind, tide or waves into heat is pretty simple thing to do. The heat in MWh(thermal) can be sold to power stations to reduce their coal, oil or gas burn rates - in direct proportion. Of course, it takes a wee bit of vision to see the blindingly obvious, judging by the crass comments above I doubt if anyone will comprehend this suggestion - and will advocate stoking the boilers with anything that burns for evermore - anything, that is, that has a green label on it!

To progress all we have to do is instead of Scotland think Samsø . Whether we are causing climate change or not is irrelevant, we need sustainable forms of energy free of the grid and the hydrocarbons that cause so much grief on the planet. Places like Samsø and Unst and Iceland prove it is possible, why not in Scotland?

greenheat man your point seems to be a strange one. Why do we burn anything? To produce steam which powers turbines which in turn create electricity. therefore If we were to produce electricity from marine (wave &Tidal) and wind why then use that energy in an unproductive way to create steam to power a turbine to reduce electricity? Quite a bizarre proposition. By burning certain types of fuel we can achieve carbon neutral fuel. Seems like a logical step in the right direction. Not perfect but the right way forward. However the issue remains that we need base load capacity. Nuclear is excellent for this apart from the points I raised above. However hydro is also an excellent means of base load. Until we can resolve a renewable source of base load which will meet the gigawatts of energy required we are going to find it hard to reject fossil and nuclear. Not to say it can't be done, it can but only with massive investment. the work by Herriot Watt uni on deep sea tidal turbines in the Pentland firth is very exciting and if their conclusions are accurate we could solve quite a lot of our energy issues from that one source. We as long as the nimbys stop blocking the construction of a high voltage line which will be able to transmit the energy to the required locations.

Balliol II hydro is counted but it does not qualify for ROCs as it is deemed an existing energy source and thus should not earn ROCs which are aimed at encoragning new renewable energy. however if you were to build a new hydro plant as SSE have done that will qualify for ROCs so not quite sure what youa re getting at with that point Exisitng hydro does though qualify for REGOs which can be traded in the EU and thus can earn the owner money if sold in the trading scheme to EU countries which do reward older renewable generation. However that generation would then be added to the purchaser's renewable mix rather than the UK's to prevent double counting. Ahh the vagaries of the ETS

I see the hootsmon on-line decided not to mention this article, and the daily rectum had it buried inside the toilet paper and reduced to a few lines. "true colours" springs to mind.

[quote][bold]JC[/bold] wrote: Here's the plan: Energy generated from hot air created when salmond opens his mouth: 250 Megawatts Energy created from biofuel conversion of nat B--S--- : 500 Megawatts There's also savings from recycling of 1 million copies of the unused and unwanted nat election manifesto [/quote] Here's a better plan Grab JC, put him over your knee Skelp his ar*se 50 times and demand he repeats after you I must stop waffling pi*sh. Imust stop waffling pi*sh.

Is it true Maggie Currant phoned her local chapel enquiring if they would be holding a biomass?

[quote][bold]Toophingers[/bold] wrote: Is it true Maggie Currant phoned her local chapel enquiring if they would be holding a biomass?[/quote] A very green comment! ;o)

Well done the Scottish Government .This is where we need to be.We need to forge ahead with energy production from renewable sources. I daresay other overpopulated countries will have to continue with the nuclear option,but Scotland will be producing lots of renewable energy for domestic consumption and export long before they have got their nuclear power plants through the planners.

[quote][bold]pencildick[/bold] wrote: [quote][bold]JC[/bold] wrote: Here's the plan: Energy generated from hot air created when salmond opens his mouth: 250 Megawatts Energy created from biofuel conversion of nat B--S--- : 500 Megawatts There's also savings from recycling of 1 million copies of the unused and unwanted nat election manifesto [/quote] Here's a better plan Grab JC, put him over your knee Skelp his ar*se 50 times and demand he repeats after you I must stop waffling pi*sh. Imust stop waffling pi*sh. [/quote] There would be a fair glow from those wee red cheeks after that skelp'n Enough to heat Glasgow East I'd imagine....