London's Green Fuel Source?

This week the Mayor of London and the Greens on the London Assembly launched the London Climate Change Action Plan, a key component of which is a switch to combined heat and power stations (CHP).

Local CHP plants are far more efficient than centralised power plants supplying a grid, for two main reasons: a) the heat produced when generating electricity is used for domestic or industrial heating rather than being treated as waste (so more of the energy released from the fuel is used) and b) because the electricity is used locally, the huges losses due to transmission over a vast national grid are reduced dramatically.

So even if they are powered by coal, oil or gas, CHP plants are a massive improvement on the current centralised generation system. But we can go one better and today's Guardian carries an excellent article spelling out the benefits of locally produced wood pellets, which are near carbon neutral.