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Bishop Hill Dec 10, 2012 Climate: Parliament Energy: biofuels Guido Fawkes is reporting that a renewables company chaired by Tim Yeo has been awarded £50 million of state funding.
Bishop Hill Nov 23, 2012 Energy: biofuels Ethics There's a fascinating blog by someone called Bernie Bulkin at the DECC website. Mr Bulkin is the chairman of the Office for Renewable Energy Deployment and he's writing about burning wood for energy.
...the impression [is given] that our policy is simply to divert whole, mature trees from construction and manufacturing and turn them into energy. It isn’t. We don’t think this is sustainable, and it is not what our Bioenergy strategy suggests. The evidence gathered for that Strategy shows that the current typical practice of taking the residues from timber production deliver greater GHG benefits than leaving the forest unmanaged.
Bishop Hill Oct 10, 2012 DECC Energy: biofuels Old coal and nuclear power stations are coming to the end of their lives. We face a race against time to ensure our energy security. We need to secure £110billion of investment in a secure, diverse and low carbon power mix. It is a huge challenge, but an equally huge opportunity, with the Coalition’s reforms to the electricity market having the potential to support a quarter of a million jobs, many of these highly skilled. New nuclear, gas-fired power stations, carbon capture and storage and renewable energy will bring new investment to all parts of the country, developing supply chains which won’t just serve the UK market, but the global market too. [Block quote added 7.45pm, 11.10.12]
From Powering the Nation, article by Energy Minister John Hayes for DECC
http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/news/housemag/housemag.aspx
A number of unanswered questions within that paragraph, such as why don't we prevent the closure of the older power stations until we are sure we can manage without them.? Where is £110 billion coming from? What reforms to the energy market- smart meters? No thanks. A quarter of a million jobs- ever heard of Bastiat? CCS?- it doesn't work.....and so on.
[Update: figure on last paragraph corrected to £110 billion, 5.00pm]
Bishop Hill Sep 26, 2012 Energy: biofuels Insanity is a possibility, but more likely this is just the great law of unintended consequences - so often a feature of well-meaning politicians. Drax, a major UK energy generator is about to convert one of its major power stations to burn wood. Since wood is categorised as a renewable energy source this plan will enable them to escape the EU's strictures against fossil fuels.
Drax Group Plc will spend $1 billion to turn the U.K.’s biggest coal-fired plant into western Europe’s largest clean- energy producer. The U.K. utility plans to convert one of the facility’s six units to burn wood pellets by June, Chief Executive Officer Dorothy Thompson said in an interview. Drax at a later date plans to switch over two more units to the fuel, investments that if completed would mean the facility harvests a forest four times the size of Rhode Island each year.
Bishop Hill Jul 20, 2012 Climate: Oxburgh Economics Energy: biofuels The drought in America has had predictable knock-on effects on expectations of this year's harvest. There is certainly a sense of panic in the FT's report (H/T RP Jr):
The world is facing a new food crisis as the worst US drought in more than 50 years pushes agricultural commodity prices to record highs.
Corn and soyabean prices surged to record highs on Thursday, surpassing the peaks of the 2007-08 crisis that sparked food riots in more than 30 countries. Wheat prices are not yet at record levels but have rallied more than 50 per cent in five weeks, exceeding prices reached in the wake of Russia’s 2010 export ban.
Bishop Hill Feb 22, 2012 Christopher Booker Climate: other Energy: biofuels Ethics Christopher Booker sends this excerpt from his splendid book, The Real Global Warming Disaster. It describes events in 2008 and ties in nicely with my Entrepreneur post a couple of days ago.
In startling contrast, however, one Commission proposal met with a storm of protest. This was its requirement that by 2020 10 percent of the EU’s transport should be powered by biofuels. Over the previous two years a sea-change had been taking place in attitudes towards biofuels, not least among many of the organisations normally looked on as the EU’s closest environmental allies.
Bishop Hill Sep 14, 2011 Energy: biofuels The New York Times is reporting that the European Agency has been double-counting the potential reductions in carbon emissions from shifting to biofuels.
“The potential consequences of this bioenergy accounting error are immense since it assumes that all burning of biomass does not add carbon to the air,” the committee wrote.
I don't suppose that this will make the slightest bit of difference to government policy in the UK though. Expect subsidies to continue to flow to biofuel projects.
(In related news, 13 windfarms had to shut down during the recent windy weather here in the UK - it was too windy. H/T Jiminy Cricket in the comments)
Bishop Hill Aug 16, 2011 Climate: WG3 Energy: biofuels Greens Research published last week in the US journal Science found that not only could bioethanol replace petrol with big energy savings, it would produce up to 15% less greenhouse gas emissions.
Turning corn into ethanol is not environmentally sound," said Bill Freese of the Centre for Food Safety. "It's really an environmental disaster."
Once again, we see that environmentalism is very bad for the environment and that its combination with big government can bring about catastrophe.
Bishop Hill Jun 20, 2011 Climate: WG3 Energy: biofuels In the comments on the last thread, Pointman wonders whether there might be problems with some of the other chapters of the IPCC renewables report. This thread is for any findings on the bioenergy chapter, which can be found here.
