Biomass Fuel Subsidies to be Capped in U.K.

Bio­mass Fuel Sub­si­dies to be Capped in U.K.

- by Roger Harra­bin, July 16, 2013. Source: BBC

It is propos­ing that sub­si­dies for bespoke bio­mass burn­ing plants should be capped at 400 MW.

It will end sub­si­dies for bio­mass burn­ing in exist­ing sta­tions by 2027.

There was an out­cry in May when the BBC revealed that mil­lions of tonnes of wood were being shipped from the USA to help meet Britain’s renew­ables targets. 

Wood is classed a renew­able fuel because trees soak up CO2.

Burn­ing wood is count­ed as car­bon-neu­tral, even though it takes the life­time of a new tree to reab­sorb the car­bon emit­ted when an exist­ing tree is burned.

Tem­po­rary solution

Envi­ron­men­tal­ists are relieved, but say the pol­i­cy should nev­er have been approved in the first place.

The UK’s biggest pow­er sta­tion, Drax in York­shire, has been con­vert­ing half its boil­ers from coal to wood. Most of this wood it burns is import­ed, par­tic­u­lar­ly from the US.

Ed Dav­ey, the Ener­gy Sec­re­tary, told the BBC that bio­mass was a tem­po­rary solu­tion to meet cli­mate change tar­gets while renew­able ener­gy sys­tems were being developed.

“Mak­ing elec­tric­i­ty from bio­mass based on import­ed wood is not a long-term answer to our ener­gy needs – I am quite clear about that,” he said.

Car­bon conundrum

There has been fierce con­tro­ver­sy about the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of pow­er­ing British homes with Amer­i­can wood.

Crit­ics say that it takes 50 years or more for a new tree to absorb the CO2 released when an exist­ing tree is burned.

But cal­cu­la­tions by the gov­ern­men­t’s chief ener­gy sci­en­tist, David Mack­ay, on the car­bon emis­sions from wood-burn­ing are so con­tro­ver­sial that they remain for­mal­ly unpublished.

In a state­ment to the BBC, the ener­gy depart­ment, DECC, now acknowl­edges that burn­ing bio­mass in ded­i­cat­ed pow­er sta­tions offers poor val­ue car­bon sav­ings com­pared with wind pow­er or even gas.

It says it still aims to incen­tivise sus­tain­able bio­mass burn­ing for heat and Com­bined Heat and Pow­er, which uses left­over heat to make electricity.

A DECC spokesman said in the long term, it hoped to be able to burn bio­mass from sus­tain­able sources, then cap­ture the emis­sions using car­bon cap­ture and stor­age tech­nol­o­gy. This would actu­al­ly remove CO2 from the atmos­phere. There will be a debate, though, over what sus­tain­able means. 

The bio­mass pol­i­cy was large­ly ignored in the media until it became clear that mil­lions of tonnes of wood would be burned. At first, the firms involved said they were only burn­ing waste from the tim­ber indus­try, main­ly in the US.

An inves­ti­ga­tion by BBC News con­firmed alle­ga­tions by green groups that whole trees were some­times being pel­let­ed to be burned.

But the tim­ber com­pa­nies said those trees were being cut any­way, either as part of tree-thin­ning oper­a­tions, or as part of for­est clear­ance by the small pri­vate landown­ers who dom­i­nate forestry in the south-east­ern US.

This pre­sent­ed a more com­plex pic­ture, in which the key ques­tion was not whether whole trees were being burned, but whether bio­mass poli­cies were divert­ing mate­r­i­al from oth­er uses, such as pulp and paper. The fig­ures on this are unclear.

‘Seri­ous threat’

Har­ry Huy­ton from the RSPB said envi­ron­men­tal­ists were pleased the gov­ern­ment was step­ping back from sub­si­dies on biomass.

“We have con­sis­tent­ly raised our con­cerns around cre­at­ing a large and unsus­tain­able demand for wood for pow­er gen­er­a­tion in the UK because of the seri­ous threat this pos­es to cli­mate change and for­est ecosys­tems,” he told the BBC.

“We believe that the UK should focus on build­ing a bioen­er­gy sec­tor that is based on domes­tic feed­stocks, such as wastes and aris­ings from forestry and agriculture.

“Recent signs that gov­ern­ment sup­port for large scale wood-fired pow­er sta­tions is cool­ing are wel­come, but we need fur­ther action to ensure this sec­tor devel­ops with­out unac­cept­able impacts on our cli­mate and wildlife.”

The Renew­able Ener­gy Asso­ci­a­tion, which pro­motes bio­mass, is dis­mayed at the government’s change in attitude.

“It is mad­ness for the gov­ern­ment to have capped bio­mass burn­ing at a time when we are in a capac­i­ty crunch for elec­tric­i­ty,” said the group’s chief exec­u­tive, Gaynor Hartnell.

“Firms that have been work­ing hard to devel­op capac­i­ty have been told that only a frac­tion will now be needed.

“There’s been a big NGO [non-gov­ern­men­tal organ­i­sa­tion] back­lash against bio­mass and we have to make sure it isn’t dri­ven out altogether.”

Bio­mass, like bio­fu­el for trans­port, was an appar­ent solu­tion seized in haste after EU lead­ers in 2007 agreed that renew­ables would sup­ply 20% of all ener­gy by 2020.

The UK del­e­ga­tion did not realise this includ­ed oil and gas, as well as elec­tric­i­ty, and inad­ver­tent­ly signed up for a near-impos­si­ble tar­get of 15% renew­ables. Entre­pre­neurs stepped in to fill the gap and bio­mass will sup­ply a large por­tion of the EU’s target.

The gov­ern­men­t’s for­mer cli­mate change ambas­sador, John Ash­ton, told me: “The bio­mass pol­i­cy appeared with trace. I can’t remem­ber a sin­gle strate­gic dis­cus­sion over how it would be deployed. It’s no way to run a long-term car­bon reduc­tion strategy.”