Green power firm burning 150-year-old trees
Government giving huge subsidies to ‘eco-friendly’ companies in pursuit of carbon-neutral target
TREES which take more than a century to regrow are being used to supply subsidised “green” British power stations intended to stop climate change, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.
Drax, which runs Britain’s biggest biomass operation, is sourcing wood pellets from Russian trees that can take 150 years to regrow – five times longer than the net-zero target deadline.
Biomass – any organic matter burned to create energy – is the biggest single source of renewable energy in the UK, accounting for 11 per cent of its entire electricity usage.
It has helped the UK reach a milestone this week, with a record-breaking two months without coal burning. But there are concerns that one of the major planks of the UK strategy to become carbon neutral by 2050 could leave the global climate worse off.
The industry receives direct subsidies worth around £1billion every year, the vast majority of which goes to Drax, which has converted four of its six coal plants in Yorkshire into the UK’S biggest biomass operation.
It also receives effective tax breaks worth at least £333million a year, according to a new report, because its emissions are considered carbon neutral under a British law introduced by the European Union, and are not taxed.
This is on the basis that the trees cut down are replanted, ultimately sucking up the same amount of carbon dioxide as they release when burnt, which can be higher than from coal.
There is growing criticism of this classification. “If the Government is, rightly, going to get rid of coal, but then burn this stuff instead because it is classified as renewable under the EU directive, it is pretty obvious that the directive is badly designed,” said Dieter Helm, a professor at the University of Oxford, who wrote the Government’s 2017 review on how the UK could meet climate change goals affordably.
The Ember think tank has called for the Government to tax carbon emissions from biomass, which it estimates could be worth up to £754million a year, as the UK leaves the EU. “Biomass power stations are in receipt of a huge tax break, based on an outdated assumption that burning wood is carbon neutral,” said Phil Macdonald, the head of Ember. “Meanwhile, renewables like offshore wind guarantee emissions cuts, for less than half the price of burning wood in a power station.”
The world’s largest dedicated biomass plant is currently under construction in Teesside. Critics say it is driving tree-felling and the destruction of biodiversity in the southern US, the main source for the UK’S wood pellets.
The Telegraph has also found that a company in Russia, which last year supplied pellets to Drax, is harvesting its wood in areas where the trees could take up to 150 years to grow back. ULK, which last year sold 7,300 tons of pellets to Drax, is based in the Arkhangelsk region, where climatic conditions mean trees grow much more slowly than elsewhere in Russia. “For 150 to 200 years, the wood in those forests grew and took in carbon,” said Alexei Yaroshenko, forests campaigner with Greenpeace Russia. “The compensation will happen when it will be too late for the climate, too far in the future.”
Drax and its US supplier Enviva say they only use sustainable biomass, according to the highest UK and internationally recognised criteria. Drax also says it does not use wood that creates a carbon debt, and only takes sawmill residue from Russia.
The Government is considering extending subsidies for converted biomass plants to support the development of technology to capture and store carbon emissions. That could embed biomass imports – which, it has been argued, should only have been a shortterm fix to move away from coal – in our energy systems for the long term.