UK must go green to stimulate growth, says Chris Huhne

Mr C Huhne, Sir: you are well ahead of the gane here. However there is a misunderstanding in some Governments that by "Going Green" this will cost more money than by staying with the status quo.

Here is but one example which has been raised before and one which the UK Government has continuously ignored from the start.

You have a policy for waste treatment in the UK (and there are other countries in the EU that have also) that tips its favour towards the most expensive form of waste treatment ever, that is incineration gasification and higher order thermal treatment processes. Let me cite an example I read in the Yorkshire Post (in your country) about a project in York City and North Yorks Councils where the proposal is to incinerate the waste for the collective population. This project is so high priced that it cannot be bought out right at the start without going to a PFI (private finance initiative) funding route. Here then becomes the crux of the matter, the Government then steps in to support the costs of this multi-hundreds of million €uro project and the local councils give out huge subsidies to increase treatment costs and to underwrite a base-load of waste being the minimum needed for treatment and to subsidise the energy output from the proposed plant. In addition the authority carefully writes in clauses to allow pass-through of legislation that (is well known) which will have the effect of increasing the capital expenditure on this proposed project after it has been commissioned - often within less than 4 years after commissioning!

So this means that here there is an example where a proposal is put up which is expensive from the start and the only way for it to be contracted is to propose it be built under a long-term operations contract in order to make it appear from the Tax Payers’ eyes that it is value for money and thus Bankable. This is subterfuge and dishonesty from the start, as with all PFI programmes in the UK they are now being bailed out by the Government because the premises under which they were let was not quite as they were made up to be.

Just down the road from York City an entrepreneurial company is about to start building a cellulose to ethanol plant which (nearby at South Milford just 23 kilometres away to the south of the city) and it will do exactly the same as this York City plant (treat the waste) for a fraction of the cost. I read here then that the incineration proposal has a capital cost of over €300 million whereas the cellulose to ethanol conversion plant has a capital cost of under €100 million! Importantly though whereas the York incineration plant needs a treatment fee of €110 per ton to treat the South Milford plant will live at less than €60 per ton. I implore you to consider the issue here for there is no such thing as Government Money: this is loaned to the Government by the Tax Payers to be stewarded carefully.

This is not a one off scenario in the UK, for Leeds city and Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire and Staffordshire and many others in the UK are being fostered with this issue: and the same occurs in Ireland and Poland and Greece and Portugal and many other countries. Now put this into perspective then just for the UK. The Environment department in your Government has said that the UK needs to spend over €20,000 million in these incineration plants to meet the various needs of diverting waste from land fill. Really, if you was to look at this in detail and even suggest that 2/3rds of these incineration plants were taken out of the system and were built as cellulose to ethanol plants you would save the country – the UK, and its Tax Payers – €13,000 million in expenditure. And in the process you would avoid the needs to import oil (refined as gasoline) rated as being 45 million barrels of oil equivalent a year. (In other words your Country’s balance of payments would be better by €4000 million or $4700 million per year!) You would also save importing goods to build these plants equal to around €5000 million a year.

Now with this one item alone you need to take stock of what you have stated here. The Green drive in investments for the economy growth need not incur extra costs to the economy. So on behalf of your Tax Payers I implore you to take note of this issue just as we are attempting to do the same in SE Europe. Between us we could help alleviate the hardships currently being experienced across Europe.