When the BBC website last week reported the EU’s latest wholly unrealisable
plan to achieve a 40 per cent cut in our CO₂ emissions within 16 years – Ed
Davey, who is interviewed in today’s paper, actually wanted 50 per cent – it
was inevitably illustrated with one of those pictures of cooling towers.
They were belching what readers might imagine were clouds of smoke and
nasty, “polluting” CO₂. But in reality, what emerges from those cooling
towers is steam, given off by heat from the gas that drives the turbines –
and all that colossal amount of heat literally goes up the chimney.
I heard no more startling fact last week than the finding of a new study, to
be published next month, showing that the heat we waste in this way is “very
significantly” more than all the heat we get from the gas used to warm
Britain’s 25 million homes.
So why don’t we save billions of pounds a year by following the example of the
countries that use that heat to warm buildings? In Denmark nearly half of
its buildings are kept warm by “combined heat and power”, or CHP, piping
heat from power stations to whole districts of towns and cities."
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