Sludge Watch ==> Longannet- Scotland's nasty coal & sludge burner..gets retrofit?

[maureen.reilly at sympatico.ca]

Sludgewatch Admin:

This is the real world politics of a country moving away from nasty old 
contaminating facilities ..like the Longannet facility that burns coal...and 
burns some sewage sludge.

Here the owner is looking at a clean up of the old chuffer - is it good 
enough?  I'm not sure.
I understand there is a  modern low emissions biomass plant planned for 
completion in a few years.
But what we see is when government takes a leadership role and REQUIRES 
renewable energy then you get improvements - away with the nastiest old coal 
burners and get cleaner renewable sources of energy.

Scottish sludge is an energy source looking for a facility.... The locals 
are horrified by the massive land application programs in store for their 
fields and forests .... 3000 tonnes per hectare.

..........................................................................

The Herald - Scotland

   Pursuit of power may be stalled

ALF YOUNG May 25 2006

THEY are not, by any stretch of the imagination, all his own work, since he 
only came on board in January. However, ScottishPower chief executive Philip 
Bowman can feel well satisfied with the group's latest results for the year 
to end March.
PacifiCorp was sold well ahead of schedule and, despite a comprehension 
short-circuit with some small shareholders, £2.25bn of cash will be returned 
to owners of the stock next month.
Profit before tax in the ongoing ScottishPower business is up 47%, ahead of 
expectations. This year's dividend is up 11%, with further growth of at 
least 7% over each of the next two years on the cards.
ScottishPower is rapidly consolidating its position as a leading provider of 
onshore wind energy in both the UK and the United States. So, there is 
plenty in its story with which its sharp-witted Australian-born chief 
executive can feel justifiably pleased.
But there are enough looming challenges to test his management mettle, too. 
So far, Bowman has presided over two major decisions. Arguably, he got one 
right and the other wrong.
The decision to reverse the previous ScottishPower executive's decision to 
keep the Longannet coal-fired generating station out of Europe's large 
combustion plant directive looks a shrewd move. Under the old policy, the 
2304 megawatt Longannet would have shut down completely by 2015.
By persuading his board to invest £170m in a seawater-based flue gas 
desulphurisation programme at the Fife plant, Longannet can opt in to the 
directive and stay (scrubbed-up and cleaner) in business well beyond 2020. 
In a world where more UK gas is having to be imported from unstable parts of 
the world against a rising price curve, cleaner coal-fired generation has 
found a fresh lease of life.
Even in Longannet's current unscrubbed state, ScottishPower's coal-fired 
capacity lifted its load factor in the second half of 2005/06 from 51% to 
61%. We can be sure that enhanced output made a valuable profit contribution 
to the group's bottom line.
And scrubbing-up Longannet and extending its life could prove very useful if 
the much-rumoured merger between ScottishPower and Scottish & Southern 
Energy were to materialise. Longannet might prove a valuable bargaining chip 
in the negotiations with the competition authorities over what needs to be 
sold off to win a green light.
Bowman's big mistake was to sanction retail price rises from March 1 (15% on 
gas, 8% on electricity) which fell well short of what the competition was 
introducing. Perhaps it was designed to bring in even more customers 
(another 136,000 had signed up in 2005/06).
But if it was predicated on a view that spiralling wholesale gas prices were 
near their peak, it now looks ill-judged. With growing warnings of further 
pressure on gas prices next winter – and Bowman himself predicting oil at 
$100 a barrel before too long – ScottishPower now says further tariff rises 
are "unavoidable" in the short-term.
But just how big will they have to be to catch up on the competition? And if 
the group has to compromise on the next increase, for fear of losing too 
many from its 5.25 million customer base, will that begin to raise questions 
in the City about how Bowman is positioning his ship?
There's one other tricky wrinkle facing Bowman's tenure at ScottishPower. 
The business he now runs is, in increasing measure, wind driven. It is 
already the UK's leading onshore windfarm developer, with 288 MW of capacity 
operational by the end of March. Since then, it has won planning approval 
for the largest onshore wind installation yet seen in Europe, the 322 MW 
Whitelee project south of Glasgow.
Construction starts this summer. Whitelee takes ScottishPower's windfarm 
projects in the pipeline to seven, which boost the group's overall wind 
capacity across the UK to 778 MW. Bowman and his colleagues are now well 
within reach of their target of 1000 MW of installed wind capacity by 2010.
They might even be there already if it weren't for the time it takes to win 
planning approval for each windfarm in the UK. Whitelee took four years. But 
across the Atlantic, at the group's remaining American subsidiary, PPM 
Energy, wind farm approvals are coming thick and fast.
Capacity there has tripled in the past year to 1405 MW. Another 1119 MW is 
under construction for this year and next. PPM has boosted its 2010 target 
by more than 50% to at least 3500 MW.
ScottishPower is fast becoming Big Wind. On the back of renewables 
obligation certificates here and tax breaks there, Big Wind is already a 
highly profitable business for Bowman. But Tony Blair's insistence, in 
advance of the government's energy review, that nuclear power is "back on 
the agenda with a vengeance", has set alarm bells ringing in Philip Bowman's 
ears.
He has been careful, this far, not to suggest a nuclear component should be 
ruled out of the UK's future energy mix. But Bowman has also been very 
insistent that the review should not muck about with the current renewables 
obligation (RO) regime.

"I would be very concerned," he told an energy conference in Edinburgh last 
month, "at any suggestion in the current energy review that the RO is 
somehow not working and should be revised. Interference now ... would only 
turn it into a poor incentive mechanism that no-one has any confidence in."

Switching any of the incentive currently underwriting the creation of Big 
Wind over to sweetening the building of a replacement generation of UK 
nuclear plants would be bad for ScottishPower's prospects. And Philip 
Bowman's reputation

...........................................................
http://business.scotsman.com/agriculture.cfm?id=125752006

Thu 26 Jan 2006
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Challenge of cleaning up sludge's image
FORDYCE MAXWELL
RURAL AFFAIRS EDITOR

SCOTTISH Water plans to stop recycling raw sewage sludge to land. But 
farmers fear it will take more than better waste treatment to persuade 
first-stage buyers such as maltsters to take crops from sludge-treated 
fields.

The problem for Scottish Water is immense and growing - an "organic 
material" mountain of 151,000 tonnes a year extracted from the one billion 
litres of waste water it deals with daily.

That is forecast to increase by 17 per cent to 175,000 tonnes by 2025 as 
treatment methods continue to improve.

Theoretically, sewage sludge is an environmentally friendly by-product after 
waste water is biologically treated and returned to the environment.

Last year about 57,000 tonnes (40 per cent of the total) was used as dried 
solids in land reclamation.

About 50,600 tonnes (35 per cent) was burned as dried pellets for power 
generation and 33,770 tonnes ( about 23 per cent) was recycled to farm land.

Most sludge used on farm land was treated, including by lime pasteurisation, 
to reduce bacterial content by 99 per cent, but some was still spread after 
only basic treatment.

That led to complaints about smell from residents in some areas, and 
unpleasant conditions in some forestry sites in the Borders.

Transport of sludge along country roads and through villages also led to 
complaints.

Yesterday Scottish Water started a consultation that proposes a long-term 
strategy to recycle only highly treated sludge to farm land.

That new strategy could swing the balance of recycling so that 48 per cent 
of sewage sludge is used to generate power, about 47 per cent of 
improved-treatment product is used on farm land and only about 4 per cent is 
used for reclamation.

Jon Hargreaves, chief executive of Scottish Water, said: "It is not a 
subject many people want to talk about but it is vital that we have an open 
public consultation about how to recycle it."

He said the company was now treating substantially greater quantities of 
sewage in Scotland than in the past. That was because many new treatment 
facilities had been introduced, often in areas where sewage was previously 
discharged with little or no treatment into rivers and the sea, he said.

In 2001, sewage from more than a quarter of the properties in Scotland 
received little or no treatment. Now only 5 per cent of properties are in 
that category.

But no matter how safe sewage sludge is or how green its credentials, it is 
emotion and perception rather than science that dictate where it can be 
used. Untreated sewage cannot be used on grazing land or on crops for human 
use and Scottish Water has greatly reduced use of that product.

Treated sewage sludge can be used, including within quality assurance 
schemes for grain and meat. However, many potential buyers, especially of 
malting barley, milling wheat and many types of livestock, will not take 
crops or animals from fields where sewage sludge of any kind has been 
spread.

Scott Walker of NFU Scotland said: "That's the commercial reality."