Biomass is not green.
The ‘Stop Burning Trees Coalition’ took to the streets this week (5th March) outside the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) to demand an end to government funding for electricity generation by tree burning polluters.
Biomass energy generation has been touted as a green way of generating electricity from waste wood products. In practice it is anything but sustainable. Some years ago, an Ofgem Audit found that Discovery Park Commercial Biomass was burning wood harvested from old growth forests in Latvia and Estonia.
A recent Panorama programme has exposed this behaviour in the commercial biomass industry. Drax, which runs Britain’s biggest power station and receives billions of pounds in green energy subsidies from UK taxpayers, is cutting down environmentally-important forests to produce wood pellets which are then classed as renewable. The BBC discovered that some of the wood comes from primary forests in Canada that have taken thousands of years to develop.
Absolutely insane
Ecologist Michelle Connolly said “It’s really a shame that British taxpayers are funding this destruction with their money. Logging natural forests and converting them into pellets to be burned for electricity, that is absolutely insane”.
Drax has already received £6bn in green energy subsidies, and is to receive even more to build a carbon capture and sequestration plant. If these sums had been instead used to build solar and wind farms these would have produced far more electricity for much less CO2 generation, and in the process reduce our electricity bills and improve our energy security.
The case for small scale biomass
Small scale biomass clearly has its place on farms, where extracting excess wood through good woodland management can both increase biodiversity of woodland, extract quality timber and use the remaining wood for biomass. Even better is to leave the remaining wood to decompose and add to the soil biome and mycorrhizal life of the woodland, creating life for a diverse range of species in wood habitat piles.
Farmers with woodland could actually gain by using additional wood cuttings to create biochar (a charcoal-like wood product). Crumbled and put into the soil biochar increases soil carbon sequestration and improves soil structure and vitality.
The Green response
The Green Party supports and encourages practices like these that look at the whole solution for the benefit of people, biodiversity and the planet’s health, rather than provide public money to industries hiding behind the fig-leaf of greenwashing.
Steve Roberts, Green Party Parliamentary candidate for Thanet East commented that ‘It is shocking that timber from old growth forest is not only being burned to create energy, it is being shipped to Kent and burned on our doorstep. It is disgraceful that this practice has been funded by the UK government’.
When will the three main parties finally admit their support of Commercial Biomass was wrong?