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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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I agree it should be scrapped but replaced by what? Try getting oil or coal power stations commissioned now, and we dont seem to be particularly successful in increasing our nuclear power station numbers. I am not convinced wind /wave/solar /other renewables can generate all we need either.
The problem with political parties of whatever colour have shown themselves too short-termist
And perhaps they should just say that there is a viable coal mine close by. Therefore mining and burning that will about equal the ecological damage caused by the present system - but with the advantage of providing local employment - it can stop once 'alternative fuels' actually work and keep us warm.
I have presented my views on this scandal many times before and I’m afraid you’ve started me off again!.
“Perhaps insufficient could be sourced from the UK and they import the difference ?”
It isn’t the source of the freshly felled timber that is the main concern, OG (although that is a big enough concern for the reasons Tora has pointed out). It is the fact that freshly felled timber is being used at all. Even worse than that, because (allegedly) new trees are planted to replace those felled, the emissions from Drax (which, per unit of power, are far greater than if coal was burnt there) are not included in the UK’s total at all.
“What a diddlydonk idea that would be,stop the subsidy to drax,let drax close down and let people have no electricity,”
The question that is more pertinent is “what diddlydonk agreed, in the first place, to provide huge subsidies for a perfectly good power station to convert to burning wood, especially when that wood had to be processed and shipped 5,000 miles? And what diddlydonk continues to provide those subsidies which are said to be used in part to develop “Biomass with Carbon Capture & Storage (BCCS).?
Drax has been burning wood in ever increasing quantities since 2013. At the outset it said its BCCS system was to be introduced “in the near future”. Eleven years on, there has never been any sign of large scale BCCS coming to fruition. In March 2021 they published this press release:
“Work to build BECCS could get underway at Drax as soon as 2024, creating tens of thousands of jobs and supporting a post-covid economic recovery
By 2027 Drax’s first BECCS unit could be operational, delivering the UK’s largest carbon capture project and permanently removing millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.”
Two pilot projects were launched (one in collaboration with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries) and their latest release says this:
“With an effective negative emissions policy and investment framework from government we could deploy bioenergy with carbon capture use and storage (BECCS) on two of our biomass generating units by 2030.”
So the project, which has received billions of pounds from consumers’ energy bills, slips further into the future. There has been no explanation why the project has slipped by six years in the last three, just demands for ever greater sums in subsidy.
So back to the wood burning itself.
The plant consumes about 7m tons of wood pellets a year. This requires about 14m tons of freshly felled timber. Here is a BBC “Panorama” report from February, where the logging policies adopted by Drax in environmentally important forest areas in British Columbia were investigated:
https:/
Drax responded by saying that most of its wood pellets were sourced from the by-products of the timber industry such as sawdust and bark. This has proved to be not entirely correct. Drax has logging licences in the USA and Canada and, far from simply utilising waste by-products from the timber industry, they are involved in tree felling for their own purposes on an industrial scale. Drax runs 17 pellet processing plants in the USA and Canada and the emissions from the deforestation, processing and transatlantic shipping are enormous.
As well as that, it is now fairly common ground that burning wood – especially from in the quantities involved and where it is sourced from sensitive areas – is not a clean way to produce electricity. The emissions from burning the wood are said to be placed against those countries where the wood originated. Quite why this is doesn't really matter. Wherever the emissions are accrued makes no difference – you can’t pee only in the deep end of a swimming pool and say you’re not causing pollution.
Drax is a confidence trick of epic proportions. It has been perpetrated by spivs and accommodated by useless and ignorant politicians, eager to burnish their “green” credentials in the ridiculous and unattainable quest to reach “net zero”. It is adding considerable amounts to energy consumers’ bills and, if anything, is causing more pollution than the coal plants it replaced.
As most readers will know, I have no particular concerns about the so-called "climate emergency". Whatever the UK does will make not a jot of difference whilst China burns more coal than the rest of the world combined and has either in planning or under construction, coal fired power stations which will add capacity equivalent to twenty times the UK's total from all sources. I don't particularly care how our electricty is generated. But I don't like being taken for an idiot and that's what Drax is doing to UK energy consumers.
The politicians need to be brought to their senses and take measures to end the scandal now.
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