This changes everything!

Kenneth Richter

08 March 2013

When we raised concerns about the climate impacts of burning trees in power stations in our Dirtier than Coal? report in November last year we received a lot of support, but we also met some disbelief:
Were we over-egging things a bit when we said burning whole trees (as opposed to forestry residues) in power stations could result in climate emissions worse than coal?

Today the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) presented its new biomass carbon calculator and the preliminary findings confirm our analysis. Out of the 12 scenarios they presented only those that involve the burning of forestry residues and the use of abandoned land result in any emission savings compared to fossil fuels.

All scenarios that include the intensification of forest management resulted in higher emissions than the UK grid average. The use of previously unmanaged UK broadleaf forests results in emissions that are a staggering four times worse than coal.   

While DECC pointed out that these results are preliminary and will undergo further fine-tuning over the coming months the overall picture from this is very clear.

This has huge implications for which forms of bioenergy should continue to receive support as renewable energy and which ones must be treated as worse than coal. Making sure our renewable energy actually delivers on its promise to reduce climate change rather than add to the problem is hardly a "bourgeois" concern as John Hayes seems to think.