ROSS CLARK: It’s madness that burning wood pellets from USA is considered ‘green energy’ in the UK

My bet is that when you hear the term ‘renewable energy’ the first thing that pops into your head is images of wind turbines or solar panels.

What you don’t think of is the chimneys of Drax Power Station in South Yorkshire pumping out clouds of smoke from the burning of wood pellets sourced from trees felled thousands of miles away in North America.

Yet as 50 MPs of all parties pointed out in a letter to the business and energy secretary Kwasi Kwarteng this week, government policy perversely counts this scenario – which happens day after day at Britain’s biggest power station – as a zero-carbon form of energy.

The MPs, led by Conservative Peter Bottomley, Father of the House of Commons, have demanded that the Government withdraws subsidies for wood burning – and stops trying to pretend it is contributing to Britain’s efforts to become ‘net zero’ by 2050.

‘Biomass’ – as we are supposed to call wood and other vegetable matter nowadays – accounted for 29 per cent of what the Government calls ‘renewable’ energy in 2019. 

Drax is the world’s largest biomass-burning power station and alone supplies 12 per cent of the UK’s renewable energy.

Yet to call burning wood ‘zero carbon’, as the government does, flies in the face of reality.

Chatham House released an October report that found burning wood pellets from the UK made from U.S. forest emitted between 13 and 16 millions tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. This is equivalent to six to seven million gasoline cars.

Actually, burning wood at a power plant emits around ten times more carbon dioxide per unit of energy (measured as kilowatt hours). 

How on earth have we arrived at the crazy situation where, in the name of achieving net zero emission targets, we are burning a fuel transported halfway across the world that’s even more polluting than the coal it’s replaced?

My bet is that when you hear the term ‘renewable energy’ the first thing that pops into your head is images of wind turbines or solar panels. What you don’t think of is the chimneys of Drax Power Station in South Yorkshire (pictured) pumping out clouds of smoke from the burning of wood pellets sourced from trees felled thousands of miles away in North America

How on earth have we arrived at the crazy situation where, in the name of achieving net zero emission targets, we are burning a fuel transported halfway across the world that’s even more polluting than the coal it’s replaced?

Drax received huge amounts of money from the Government in order to transform coal into wood pellets. All of this was paid for by our energy bills. 

As the MPs say in their letter, they ‘cannot understand why it was decided to give Drax £4 billion of subsidies in electricity bills to create even more carbon dioxide’.

Even though government assistance for new biomass plants has been cut in recent years; existing contracts will continue to allow us to subsidise biomass plants through our bills until 2037.

You can’t make wood burning carbon-neutral, unless you believe that trees will eventually absorb the carbon dioxide that was emitted during wood pellet production.

It takes only minutes to fire a tree, and it can take decades to regrow the same tree and absorb all of that carbon dioxide. 

A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018 concluded that the ‘payback time’ for this carbon debt ranges from 44 to 104 years, depending on forest type.

Wood burning can be argued to be carbon neutral if it burns unwanted branches, offcuts, and thinnings that would otherwise be left to rot. 

The Chatham House study found that just half of wood pellets used in UK power plants are made from full trees, not trimmings.

It would be a scandal if Britain saw the forest being chopped down for its biomass. The environmental damage would be obvious. 

But as the forests are in North America the Government perhaps hopes it is a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. 

Other than the emissions from burning wood, emissions also come from machinery that is used to fall the trees to make wood pellets and ships to move the material across the Atlantic.

Carbon emissions are not the only issue. Particulate pollution can also be caused by wood burning. These tiny particles of matter can harm the heart and lungs.

Particulate pollution caused by burning wood at very high temperatures in power station boilers can be much higher than that from wood burning in open fireplaces and domestic stoves. 

As 50 MPs of all parties pointed out in a letter to the business and energy secretary Kwasi Kwarteng (above) this week, government policy perversely counts this scenario – which happens day after day at Britain’s biggest power station – as a zero-carbon form of energy

The government subsidises us for wood-burning stoves. Some are eligible to receive payments through the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), which offers homeowners thousands of dollars for heating their homes with wood, rather than using fossil fuels.

According to the Government’s own Air Quality Expert Group between six and 25 per cent of particulate pollution in urban areas in winter comes from wood-burning.

London and other major cities have been imposing eye-watering daily penalties on diesel car drivers, claiming they pollute the air. However, the government is also paying homeowners for filthy wood stoves.

This is madness.

Of course we all want clean energy and it is in our interests to cut carbon emissions, but the Government’s unilateral, self-imposed deadline of reaching net zero by 2050 is leading it to seek desperate solutions which will actually damage rather than improve the environment.

Meanwhile, of course, China shows little sign of abating its coal-burning power stations – it demanded, and got, a commitment from the COP26 climate conference only to ‘phase down’ emissions from coal, whatever that means.

Britain is already making strides in decreasing carbon emissions by using less coal and replacing it with cleaner, more efficient gas plants.

We are generating significant quantities of electricity from wind and solar energy — or at least we are when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. 

Not only are there emissions from burning wood, but also from machines used to cut the trees and turn the wood into pellets. There is also pollution from ships that transport this material over the Atlantic. [File image] 

A good day can produce more than 50% of our electricity from solar and wind, but yesterday’s sun set and the winds dropped, this was only eight percent.

We certainly need a more reliable form of low-carbon energy, but burning biomass isn’t the answer. Nuclear energy is the only real way to reduce carbon emissions in our electricity sector.

The reliable baseload for nuclear already produces at least 15% electricity. 

However, all but one of our nuclear power stations are due to reach the end of their lives over the next decade — and the new station at Hinkley Point C in Somerset is not even open yet.

The recent negative reputation of nuclear is partly due to Japan’s Fukushima accident in Japan ten year ago. It reminded us how devastating economic consequences can result from a nuclear disaster.

If the weather is good, wind and sun can provide more than half of the electricity we use. But yesterday, the sun was setting and the winds dropped, and that number fell to eight percent.

Hinkley Point C has a high-cost electricity plant. The operators are guaranteed a high price per gigawatt-hour once it starts producing electricity. There’s also the fact that this project relies heavily on Chinese money at tense times for China.

There is only one way to carbonize the electricity sector: go nuclear. 

Rolls-Royce received backing from a group of investors recently to design a small series of modular nuclear reactors. These will alleviate fears of nuclear accidents. They could also be producing electricity by 2030.

That is a far better direction for energy policy than paying out billions for ‘zero carbon’ wood-burning power stations which are, in fact, spewing out more carbon dioxide than the coal plants they replaced.

Ross Clark’s novel on climate change, The Denial, is published by Lume Books.