2024-01-30
The closure of the blast furnaces at Port Talbot has caused the usual ruckus from those who value home-based steel-making. They make good points, but steel-making doesn't exist in a vacuum, it exists in an energy market.
Our energy market has been (rightly or wrongly) severely skewed over many years by the closure of coal mines and what is euphemistically but inaccurately (in my view) termed the Green Energy agenda.
(Call me old-fashioned, but any agenda that seeks to restrict the (currently tiny) amount of the primary plant-growing gas in the atmosphere cannot be regarded as "green")
Now coal has well-known undesirable features and I doubt that anybody seriously wants to go down the mines again to hack it, so it's not as straightforward as reverting to coal-fired power plants, but nuclear is certainly an option, as is gas (if we could abandon our obsession with the Russians being the devil incarnate and rebuild/build a pipeline). Windmills are simply not up to it, nor are solar panels unless we can find another more constant source of solar energy than the sun, and even then I shudder to think of the acreage of our formerly green (as in "vegetation") and pleasant land that would need to be covered in hideous panels sufficient to drive an arc-furnace.
Which leaves precisely ... what exactly?
