Friday
Oct292010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill More workers sacrificed to green god
Chris Huhne's extrarodinary mishandling of the UK's energy policy continues apace. It appears that users of virgin wood are being priced out of the market for their raw materials because of subsidies to bioenergy companies who compete for supply.
Mike McKenna, director of Kronospan's Chirk factory, said the subsidies for electricity generators which use biomass encouraged them to take "the easy option" of burning freshly felled timber.
He told BBC Radio Wales: "The easy option for them is cutting down trees and burning them for electricity generation.
"That's because the subsidies are worth more than twice the value of the wood.
Quite, quite mad.
Reader Comments (53)
We do need to put a stop to this, or the Greens will start taking the credit for the soon-to-become-obvious cooling...
We do need to put a stop to this, or the Greens will start taking the credit for the soon-to-become-obvious cooling...
Hopefully no sensible person would put a decrease in temps down to the slowing of the increase in carbon emissons in the western world (but still increasing rapidly in the developing.
But when the Govt is still hanging on to AGW even with all the evidence to the contary we are short of sensible people in positions of power. Depressing itsn;t it.
@ Rob Schneider. Thanks Rob - I've sent an email.
@Paul Boyce. Thanks.
If you go to the site and click on the "Generation by Fuel Type (Graph)" page, you'll find a "Current / Historic" button at bottom left.
Click on this and then the "Historic Data csv" at top right. This will allow you to download the last three months' data 48 times per day. (i.e. every half hour). You can then save it as an Excel Worksheet or whatever. Work out which column is which (the Generation by Fuel Type (Table)) will help here, and you can start exploring the data. Wind at present is fairly high at 2.6% ish. Just look at some of the quite long periods in August when wind was only supplying 0.1% or less!