Npower have said they need a 24/7 disposal option from the start and if you say a thing enough times you can begin to believe it.
However it has been proved that they have recycled more ash than they produced in 2006 so their 24/7 ash disposal was there all along - it just meant they had to work a bit harder to recycle rather than conveniently pump it away off site where as far as they are concerned, out of sight is out of mind!

RWE npower do have an alternative 24/7 disposal option other than Thrupp Lake, they just have not stated what it is. In line with all the other UK power stations they should not dump the ash to landfill but continue to recycle it. This is a dinosaur of a power station with an attitude to match! Act now, npower, leave Thrupp Lake and its wildlife alone, or people will switch in droves ... hopefully to Powergen who clearly do not destroy lakes, behave responsibly towards local communities and generate electricity sustainably!!

RWE npower are at the bottom of the recycling Premiership. They will have to work very hard to avoid regulation...Meanwhi
le the Big Three, Scottish Power, Drax and E.on fight it out at the top of the Table, having invested in key players to build new teams before the going got tough. There's so much at stake in appearing to be green these days that npower have lost the plot. They give away so much dosh keeping cricketers rich and off the telly, so everyone thinks all’s well if the grass is green. Then there's all that greenwash to keep them busy - and let's face it, they just managed to paint the first letter of their name green so far, so there's more greenwashing to come.

But now npower managers must have greener faces, green with envy that is, when they see how they are placed, way out of reach of the Big Three at the Head of the Premiership. And the shade of green will darken when Town Green status is awarded to Thrupp Lake. What will the managers do during the transfer window?

Maybe they haven't been so foolish after all, but they sure as hell have been pretending they were. They have an ash stockpile at the power station. They almost completely empty it before each winter and it is then available 24/7 throughout the winter months, although their landfill-capping contract takes 8000 tonnes of ash each month for the landfill (dumped in their back yard) which comes from London and elsewhere, and they have other markets, especially for the 10,000 plus tonnes per month of ash they can sell after purifying it with their latest purifying gizmo, that they picked up for a snip at £3M.

Sorry about the arithmetic, but someone has to do it or the League tables would never be presentable. Let's assume that during the colder 6 months of the year npower disposes of 18,000 tonnes of ash per month - that's 108,000 tonnes over the six months. And let's suppose that at the same time they top up their ash stockpile with 300,000 tonnes of ash, ready for the construction season in the warmer 6 months. That means they can produce more than 408,000 tonnes and find a home for it 24/7.

But hang on, can they actually produce that amount of ash? Well … not really. You see they are only allowed to generate 1,600,000 tonnes of the stuff (in 20,000 hours) before they have to close Didcot A (they can't stay in the Premiership for ever you see, and I warned they would get regulated! And they won't be able to transfer Didcot A to anywhere in Europe once the 20,000 hours are up). So if they produced over 400,000 tonnes of ash each six months they'd have to shut down the station in a couple of years. And where will that leave us? Will the lights go out in 2 years time?

So let's have a look at this lights-out problem. Either Didcot A runs flat out and they will turn off the lights for good in 2 or 3 years time, or it keeps shutting down (when the electricity price is low of course) and they will keep the lights on for a few more years (but not all the time, only when they are making loadsadosh).

So the lights can either stay on continuously for a couple of years or so, or they can flicker on and off according to the price Didcot A is getting for its electricity. But hang on, didn't the Didcot A managers terrify our county councillors by saying they had to have Thrupp Lake available 24/7 or the lights will go out? The lights will go out anyway because Didcot A will be regulated. They should stay off the greenwash - there are rehabilitation programmes these days, after all - and put some real effort into being green.

So let Didcot A leave Thrupp Lake alone. They never needed it. It was a very poor purchase and never suited their blundering style. Never mind, it only cost them £3M., and they can earn bonus green points if they give it to the community as a nature reserve. I wonder if they have thought of that? I hope they have.