A Biomass mess
31 Jul 2013
The government needs to stop pussy-footing around and make up its mind on whether it is for or against biomass.
Prior to joining Process Engineering earlier this month, much of my time was spent writing for a leading magazine in the wind sector, Windpower Monthly.
In a funny kind of way, it makes me feel at home that the government is making as much of a mess of its energy policy in the process-intensive sectors as it is when it comes to wind turbines.
Policy-makers seem to be particularly confused when it comes to biomass.
Energy and Climate Change secretary Ed Davey in a BBC interview earlier this month said that importing wood and burning it as biomass was not the long-term answer to the country’s energy needs.
This statement followed both the government’s proposal to cap the number of new dedicated biomass plants eligible for financial support under the Renewables Obligation (RO) scheme to just 400MW, and the announcement that only converted coal or combined heat and power (CHP) biomass plants will be eligible to receive support under the contract for difference (CfD) feed-in tariff (FIT) subsidy that is set to replace the RO in 2017.
So far so clear, right? The government doesn’t like burning organic material for electricity, unless you can get heat out of it as well or, like Drax, you are burning it instead of burning coal.
Either the government supports biomass or it doesn’t. This pussy-footing around weakens market confidence
And yet, last week Davey saw fit to grant planning permission to RES’ 100MW Blyth Port project, which does neither.
Indeed RES’ project manager for the scheme told me that so far CHP has been ruled out as unviable, and that they were going to be one of the 1GW of biomass projects competing to secure the RO within the 400MW cap.
It is almost as if the government is encouraging firms to fritter money away developing their projects before finding out they have failed to make the grade (the ground rules for how exactly new biomass projects can qualify for the RO cap are expected to be announced shortly).
Either the government supports biomass or it doesn’t. This pussy-footing around with all sorts of caveats only serves to send out confusing signals and weaken market confidence in UK energy investment, both in general terms and particularly when it comes to biomass.
