£3bn coal power plant will test strength of Ed Miliband's environment rules

New plant in Scotland will have to prove that carbon capture technology works

Tim Webb
guardian.co.uk, Friday 12 March 2010 18.54 GMT
The first application to build a coal plant in Britain since energy secretary Ed Miliband introduced tough new environmental rules will be submitted next week, the Guardian has learnt.
UK-based conglomerate Peel Group is pressing ahead with the £3bn project to build a 1.6GW plant at Hunterston in Scotland, which will partially fit experimental carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. Its former partner, Dong Energy, dropped out last year, citing the recession. The application, which is expected to be submitted to the Scottish government on Monday, signals Peel's confidence that the unproven technology can work.
Hunterston is likely to become the UK's first CCS plant, ahead of the controversial Kingsnorth project in Kent, which E.ON still hopes to build.
Miliband announced that Kingsnorth, and Scottish Power's project at Longannet, will move into the final stage of a government-funded competition to build what it had said would be the UK's first pilot CCS plant. But no winner will be announced until next year, making Peel's project the most advanced. The technology is supposed to allow coal plants, which emit twice as much carbon as gas plants, to capture and store their emissions underground, but the technology has not been proven on a large scale and the government is relying on it working to meet its carbon targets.
Last year Miliband announced a radical new policy to force all new coal plants to be partially fitted with carbon capture technology. The government hopes the technology will be technically and commercially proven by 2025, by when all existing plants that have partially fitted the technology would have to use it to capture and store all emissions. But ministers have not spelt out what happens if the technology does not work or cannot be fitted to the whole plant. Environmental groups such as Greenpeace are concerned that if this happens, plants like Hunterston built under the new policy will remain open and end up emitting vast amounts of carbon dioxide.
Greenpeace has campaigned for an "emissions performance standard" which would restrict the operation of coal plants that had not fully fitted the technology. A coalition of Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and rebel Labour MPs narrowly failed to include the provision in the government's energy bill in a recent vote.
Joss Garman, climate campaigner at Greenpeace UK, said: "This application is a worrying sign that the government has failed to shut the door completely on dirty coal in the UK. Despite huge uncertainties over their ability to pay for carbon capture and storage technology, [Peel subsidiary] Ayrshire Power has decided to go ahead with these plans and call Labour's bluff.
"It will take a brave minister to shut down a functioning plant in the future, even if it has failed to deliver the clean coal technology it promised in 2010. That's why an emissions performance standard is needed from the start, to warn companies they face tough legal consequences if they fail to keep their promises."
Peel Group, which is backed by Saudi investors, owns airports, ports and a 28% stake in UK Coal. It is run by John Whittaker, 28th in last year's Sunday Times Rich List with £1.3bn.