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Should The New Government End The Subsidy Of Biomass
The Drax power plant in North Yorkshire get £2million a day subsidy from us tax payers. They have received £11Billion during the life of the facility.
Time to end this waste of money?
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To answer he question, the government most certainly should end the subsidy for the reasons I have stated (and many more besides which I have expanded on in other threads).
It it most unlikely that they will, for two reasons:
1. Drax produces about 5-6% of the UK's electricity.This doesn't seem much, but because of the fragility of the country's capacity, especially when so much is dependent on intermittent supplies such as wind and sun, it is significant.
2. Probably more relevant, even if (1) could be overcome, is that the country's energy strategy is now in the hands of one E. Miliband, probably just about the most fanatical "net zero" proponent Mr Starmer could have chose as Energy Secretary.
Mr Miliband's fanaticism and self-confessed zealotry seems to outdo any pragmatism or realism he might consider. For example, his plan to build huge solar farms overlooks the fact that almost all solar panels are manufactured in China. As I outlined earlier, that country takes a slightly different approach to its energy strategy, preferring to do whatever it takes to secure its energy supplies with little or no concerns for "net zero" or anything similar. Their solar panel production plants are almost certainly powered by energy produced using coal.
So, this country closes near enough all its coal fired power stations in the pursuit of "net zero". Instead it embarks on a large programme of installing solar capacity (which for at least 50% of the time over a year will produce nothing). In order to achieve that it buys stuff from a country which burns more coal than the rest of the world put together and shows no sign of decreasing that consumption.
All Mr Miliband is doing is exporting this country's emissions offshore and fuelling an industrial revoluion in China, enabling them to make and sell us all the stuff we need because we've sacrificed large chunks of our energy industry.
And Mr Miliband thinks he's clever.
As I write, 11% of the UK's electricity demand is sourced from wind, 7% from so-called "biomass" (i.e. wood burnt at Drax) and 17% from solar. This last source will diminish to zero over the next couple of hours and not resume fully until about 10am tomorrow (if the sun shines) leaving gas (currently 28% and nuclear (currenly 14%) to pick up that slack. There is absolutely no chance of this country reaching "net Zero" any time soon, if ever. All politicians will do is impoverish its people, cripple its businesses and crash its economy trying to do so.
Judge rightly recognises that we are importing solar panels from China where they are manufactured at a lower cost than we can achieve mainly due to out "energy policies". Another thing to consider is that the average lifespan of a solar panel is 25 - 30 years, meaning that between 2030 and 2060, 9.6 million tons of toxic solar panel waste is expected. (and rising as we conver more green fields with them) We condemn nuclear energy plants because of the potential for polution and the decommissioning costs, however a recent study has shown that solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit than nuclear plants. As yet there is no way to recycle useless toxic solar panels without creating more pollution than they are being credited with eliminating by the eco loons. One giant ponzi scheme.
Drax burns wood pellets which are not fossil fuels* so are classed as a renewal source and the carbon they produce is not counted and therefore helps us achieve low emissions. But it is a very dirty fuel source and releases lots of CO2 when it is burned. So it is a con to call it a green fuel.
But even before a single pellet is fired, it has racked up a great deal of carbon to produce it. The trees** are felled in US forests and taken in big deisel lorries to be processed. That involves chipping them into small pieces and then drying them by heat. That is then compressed and made into the pellets. A lot of electricity from gas or coal is used to do all that. The finished pellets are transported by lorry and rail from the north west of the US to the a port on the Atlantic east coast, many hundreds of miles away. They are then put in deisel freight liners and transported to a North Yorkshire port before going by road or rail to the Drax facility. None of the carbon used and emitted in that process is counted and so it gets a huge green subsidy (£11Billion so far).
* The carbon in the wood is not fossil, but these big old trees can be hundreds of years old.
** It is claimed that the wood is waste from the forest floor, but in reality they are felling grown tree for burning.
"** It is claimed that the wood is waste from the forest floor, but in reality they are felling grown tree for burning."
Yes gromit, that claim is toal nonsense. They are burning the equivalent of 14m tons of timber each year (the difference between that and the 7m tons net being the moisture driven off that you mention). You would not scavenge that amount of material from the forest floor. They also have logging licences which they would not require if they were merely scavenging.
Here's an article explaining a little more of Drax's activities in the US:
"There is also strong scientific evidence that biomass burning, while helping countries reach their Paris goals on paper, in reality adds globally dangerous amounts of unreported climate change emissions to the atmosphere.
It’s often claimed that biomass is a ‘low-carbon’ or ‘carbon-neutral’ fuel, meaning that carbon emitted by biomass burning won’t contribute to climate change. But in fact, biomass burning power plants emit 150% the CO2 of coal, and 300-400% the CO2 of natural gas, per unit energy produced,” according to the Partnership for Policy Integrity.
Also, when harvesting forests for biomass, wood residue makes up only a small portion of pellets; instead, clear-cutting whole trees is the profitable business model used in the U.S. Southeast, where the pellet industry has been centered. Exports there total some 8 million tons of pellets annually, which is gradually reducing one of the largest U.S. forest carbon sinks and impacting biodiversity."
The entire Drax industry is a gigantic confidence trick which has conned gullible politicians into believing that clearing vast areas of mature forest and burning it is better for the environment than burning coal.
Drax currently requires around 200 sq miles of deforestation annually to feed it. That's more than the area of Greater London every three years. I'm not particilarly fussed about environmental issues but even I believe that is not a good idea. And I certainly don't want to pay to subsidise it.
The Drax subsidy scheme ends in 2027. This government should end it and if Drax wants to continue its activities it should fund it in its entirety. It won't do that because without government subsidies on a huge scale it is not a going concern. So that should be the end of it.
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