Barry Gardiner – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Energy and Climate Change
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Barry Gardiner on 2016-06-06.
To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what her Department’s definition is of unabated coal.
Andrea Leadsom
We have committed to consulting on when to close all unabated coal-fired power stations. We will set out proposals to close coal by 2025, to ensure we stay on track to meet our decarbonisation pathway. We will seek views on what measures might be applied to existing coal power stations in order to achieve this.
In the UK new coal power stations can only be built if their carbon dioxide emissions will be at a level consistent with our decarbonisation targets. This includes compliance with an Emissions Performance Standard equivalent to 450gCO2/kWh for a plant operating at baseload, and which is about half that of a typical existing British coal station. In addition, any new coal power stations would need to meet planning requirements to demonstrate Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology on at least 300MW of the power station’s generating capacity and be CCS-ready on the rest.
