Shock News! Govt Report Says Govt Is Right.

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
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By Paul Homewood

Shock news. UK government commissioned report gives it the results it wanted!

From PEI:

A report commissioned by the UK Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, has found that using biomass instead of coal is playing a positive part in decarbonizing the power sector.
The findings, by Ricardo Energy & Environment, come in a week where the biomass power sector has had to defend the technology’s reputation as a positive replacement for coal-fired power.

The study titled “Use of North American woody biomass in UK electricity generation”, reaffirms the positive impact of US biomass industry on US forests and carbon emissions.

No surprise there then!

According to PEI, the report shows that using wood pellets for energy generation supports healthy forests and generates significant carbon savings at a lower cost. Thanks to a strong forest market, to which woody biomass contributes, forest inventory in southern US forests has continued to increase year over year for the last several decades.”

So the fact that forests have grown for several decades has something to do with the fact that we are now burning them. You could not make it up.

Did anybody seriously expect that the report would come to any other conclusions? If it had, a large plank of the government’s decarbonisation strategy would have gone up in smoke.

After all, plant biomass is now producing 6% of the UK’s electricity.

Not everybody is convinced though, as PEI report:

However biomass’s doubters remain undeterred. RSPB website pointed out the introduction to the report, stating it “openly admits that ‘bioenergy is not carbon neutral’ because of direct and indirect land use changes. And it goes on to admit that its own emissions calculation methodology is the reason that high-carbon bioenergy is being classified as low carbon and as eligible for subsidy. This is an astonishing admission in a Government-produced report, and suggests the need for urgent action to fix a broken bioenergy policy that could be failing to deliver emissions savings.

The report’s findings are centred around a questionnaire sent to 56 stakeholders. As the Table below shows, the respondents are heavily skewed to those involved in the pellet supply chain – forest owners, pellet producers and users.

Even Drax were involved!