The Times’ Natural Resources section reports on the CPS publication by Tony Lodge due to be published in the new year.
To view the article at The Times (£), click here.
Extract:
“The Liberal Democrat-led Department for Energy and Climate Change will be asked to think again before it is too late in a paper to be published in the new year by the Centre for Policy Studies.
The carbon price floor is a tax on high-emission electricity plants. By increasingly applying punitive taxes on coal or gas-fired power stations, its aim is to channel private investment towards renewable or low-carbon technologies, which in any case will receive other financial incentives through feed-in tariff schemes.
These mechanisms, many fear, will send the price of electricity soaring, over and above the existing historically high charges. The Centre for Policy Studies believes, however, that the regime developed by the Energy Secretary Chris Huhne will wipe out the economics of coal-fired power stations by the end of the decade.
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The author of the paper Tony Lodge, a leading energy industry thinker within the wider Conservative Party, told The Times: “The proposed carbon price floor could close most of the UK’s coal-fired power stations by 2020, as they would become too expensive to run. Consequently, the market for coal in the UK would collapse.”
Date Added: Monday 19th December 2011
