Emily Hall - one of the Kingsnorth Six - on the coal station's chimney stack
Crack out the balloons and the (recycled) paper hats - it's party time.
Kingsnorth is shelved. Again. Yesterday the news came out that Eon, the company behind the plans for the first new coal plant in the UK in over 30 years was scrapping its proposal to build another climate-wrecking monster to replace its current power station in Kent.
It’s not a permanent decision - the door is still ajar for them to build a new coal burner at some point in the future - but the statement is definitely another nail in Kingsnorth’s sooty coffin.
The first big victory against Eon came last October, when after a four-year campaign by us and others from across the climate movement, Eon announced it was delaying decisions over the new plant for a few years, blaming the recession and low energy prices.
Well that decision came yesterday, when they officially pulled out of the government’s bidding competition for testing new technology to capture carbon emissions at coal power plants.
Eon’s UK boss said, "the economic conditions are still not right for us to progress the project and so, simply put, we have no power station on which to build a CCS demonstration." So it’s being canned - for the moment at least.
But while we’re happy that coal simply doesn’t pay enough to justify building new dirty power stations, we don’t want the future of our climate to depend on fickle economic indicators. We need emissions limits.
That’s why we’ve been pressuring politicians to introduce a limit on the amount of emissions a power station can emit per unit of energy it generates. The Conservatives and Lib Dems were big fans of the idea (official name: Emissions Performance Standard) while in opposition, but there are signs that they’re dragging their heels now that they’re in office.
The Energy bill coming later this year is going to be the real test so we’ll be doing everything we can to make sure the government comes through on its earlier promises.
Until we get these emissions limits, Kingsnorth and the threat of dirty coal will still be lingering around, in the (very dark) background.
But while we keep a wary eye on the politicians, that doesn’t stop us celebrating yesterday’s news. Besides, with all the doom and gloom in the headlines, Kingsnorth is one cut we can all celebrate.
