ethicalrecyclist

Global People's Climate March.

Sunday 21st September, thousands upon thousands around the world marched in the hope that politicians and corporations will get their act together and do something about climate change. Newcastle hosted an enthusiastic crowd with several familiar faces from Hexham but unsurprisingly no members of the Fourstones anaerobic digester scheme. Unsurprisingly as one of those involved is reliably quoted  as saying, "I couldn't give a f#@k about the environment".

Maybe we should really be marching on Northern Power Grid and demanding it back. Unfortunately our dimwitted politicians gave it away for buttons in a frenzy of privitisation back in the nineties and it is now owned by Berkshire Hathaway, a US company that, last time I looked, was worth 50 billion dollars but it is probably far more than that now. Its CEO is Warren Buffett, worth 63 billion dollars, the third richest man in the world, so it's nice to know that part of the reason we are having this Anaerobic Digester dumped on this plot is in order to make him even richer.

Warren Buffet is against distributed generation systems like the Energiewende scheme in Germany. The advantage of a distributed system is that you can develop local microgrids  so that cooperatively owned solar, wind and ad plants (using waste!) can be run by local communities and the heat and power can be used most efficiently, (up to 69% of power can be lost in long distance transmission). If we had that infrastructure we could all be generating power in a low impact and environmentally friendly way but instead we have the imposition of unjustifiably huge AD plants like the one proposed, or the vast wind farm applications like the one threatened for Talladh-a-Bheithe on Rannoch Moor by another land owner/generator syndicate. Where it all goes wrong is when the farmer (at Burmoor Farm near Wark for example) has the great idea of installing a farmscale AD plant on his land and then goes to Northern Power Grid (aka Warren Buffett, the third richest man in the world) only to be told that he has to cough up a couple of million quid to get connected to the grid because Warren doesn't want any competition thank you. The only way to make it happen is to scale up your project and put it right next to an expensively landscaped substation, miles from anyone who could use the heat produced by your CHP unit and forced to use energy crops as feedstock to generate enough return on the investment.

The deadline for objections is now the 4th November but probably best to get it in a few days ahead of the committee meeting so that someone has a chance to read it.

FYI this is the email from Joe Nugent:

Dear Adrian,

Please disregard the date on the website stating 18^th October 2014. This relates to the recent letter confirming the revision of the suffix to RENE and this letter did not afford a further notification period i.e. 21 days.

The 21 days notification period was set by the formal notification letters, site notices and press notice.

However, in terms of letters of objection, support or general representation these can be submitted right up until the application is presented at Committee. This is expected to be 4^th November 2014.

Kind regards,

Joe

Joe Nugent

Senior Planning Officer

Major Projects, Minerals & Waste