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What a mess.....
Scottish Water was in trouble with its sewage treatment plant at Daldowie outside Glasgow. Here, a plant costing £65 million had been installed to turn 50,000 tons of sewage sludge each year - nearly half of Scotland's entire sewage residue - into pellets.
For four years, this had been feeding Scottish Power's giant 2,400-megawatt power station at Longannet in Fife with a "carbon-neutral" equivalent of 42,000 tons of coal, enough to provide electricity for 30,000 homes. But it was then the subject of a legal action awaiting judgment in the Scottish courts, this whole process is threatened with disaster.
Last winter the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (Sepa) ruled that the sewage pellets were not "fuel", but "waste". When the EC Waste Incineration Directive (WID), 2000/76 comes into law at the end of the year, Scottish Power would no longer be allowed to use the pellets to make electricity.
This set Scottish Water a huge problem. Under other EU laws it cannot dump sewage sludge at sea or in landfills. It is becoming all but impossible to use sewage sludge as fertiliser on farm land. On Sepa's interpretation of EC law, the only practical means of disposal was to burn it at great expense in incinerators - but only so long as these served no useful purpose, such as generating electricity. And the incinerators did not yet exist.
What about the courts, you may ask? What about them?
As we recounted at the time, Scottish Power had sought judicial review of Sepa's ruling, citing cases in the European Court of Justice that seemed to justify its claim that where a material can be used as fuel, it is not waste.
The judgment had been expected in September, but in fact it was only last Wednesday that the judge, Lord Reed, finally came up with his ruling. He fully upheld Sepa's interpretation of EU law and, unless an appeal succeeds, this means that Scottish Water will be in serious trouble.
The only way it will be able to dispose of sewage will be to have it incinerated, at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds. In other words, it is all right to burn it, but only in a way which produces nothing useful.
So... let's recap:
* 30,000 homes will have to buy their electricity from somewhere else
* to generate this extra power, more (non-renewable) coal will be needed
* incinerators will have to be purchased with taxpayers' money
* and while said incinerators are being purchased and installed (over the next two years or so), the sewage sludge will be stored... where? [my suggestion would be "in Brussels", but no one ever listens to me]
* no one is going to lose their job for this appalling example of environmental regulation gone mad
* and no one is going to be hanged, either. [more's the pity]
Somebody please remind me of the benefits of insane enviro-regulation. I must have missed that part of the memo.
The only good thing about this is that it's happening in neo-socialist Scotland, and not in Texas.
Commentary and source material are from a BLOG online...it has been edited by me to remove ....rude commnetary on other nations and to remove the graphic language.
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