New Green Infrastructure- Action is needed now
February 4, 2011I listened to an interesting programme on Radio 4 this morning ahead of today’s Summit in Brussels about European Energy Policy.
The North German plains are covered in wind turbines. They produce far too much energy for the people who live around them. More often than not the turbines are switched off, because the extra energy cannot be transported to other parts of Germany or Europe.
In South Germany, where the weather is much sunnier than in the north, many people and businesses have installed solar panels; but when they produce extra capacity beyond local need, the energy is simply wasted. Again the problem is that the energy cannot be transported.
In Denmark big waste incinernators could produce energy far beyond local need. Again the capacity to trasnport the energy even from one part of a town to the other is not there.
What is needed in all those cases are new super grits and new pipelines which would allow our new low or non carbon enegry installations to work to their full potential. As the manager of the waste incinereration plant in Denmark said on the programme: ” World wide massive pipelines are being built to transport oil and gas across the globe, but we don’t invest in simple networks that transport our green energy across Europe.”
These are the Green Infrastructure projects that the new Coalition Government together with other European countries should commit to. Action is needed now.
The EU wants to cut Green House Gases by 90% by 2050. The big decisions of how this can be achieved will have to be taken in the next five years.
