Brexit forces Northern Ireland buyers to cancel orders for 100,000 trees
Exclusive: Ban on plants being moved across Irish Sea is major setback for tree-planting programmes in region

...The problem arises from three new rules applying to Northern Ireland, which is observing EU customs and regulatory rules on plants and animals as part of the Northern Ireland protocol.

A ban on British soil being moved into Northern Ireland emerged two weeks ago, with garden centres protesting about a block on supplies from British nurseries. Fulton said he had been told washing all the soil off roots could be the solution.

“That’s just not practical. We got an order in last year of 56,000 trees in one go. You can’t wash 56,000 trees’ roots. It would be too big a cost and the nurseries are just not going to do that,” he said.

If bare-rooted trees were available in sufficient quantities, buyers would then face Brexit paperwork involving health certification and customs for the plants.

A further barrier stems from the EU’s list of species prohibited or restricted for import from third countries, which now includes the UK. The list is designed to protect Europe from diseases and pests, but includes native trees including oaks, alder and birch, important for mixed woodlands.

Mike Harvey, director at Maelor Forest Nurseries in Wales, which sells about 32m trees a year, said it too had had to stop selling to Northern Ireland, with a recent order for 1,000 oaks about to be cancelled.

What enrages Harvey is not so much the ban on movement of trees to Northern Ireland, but the continued importation of trees from Ireland for forestation projects. He said Brexit gave the UK an opportunity to close the border to EU trees and give the country a fighting chance of stopping the “drift of disease from south-east Europe to the north-west”.

The diseases, which some put down to climate change, include ash dieback and the Xylella disease, which has entered the UK via olive trees and can affect several species of broad-leaved tree.

“It’s typical that the EU puts these restrictions in place and applies them rigorously in Northern Ireland but we leave the borders open to trees coming in from the EU including Ireland and the Netherlands,” Harvey said. “If we want to control disease and give ourselves a chance, it’s actually a good thing to stop transportation of these trees between our islands.”

The obstructions have emerged just as Northern Ireland’s environment minister, Gordon Lyons, launches a campaign to remind farmers they have only weeks left to apply for funding to plant native woodlands to help deliver on a pledge to plant 18m trees by 2030.

A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said it had “intensified work with the EU … to address the outstanding issues raised about the operation of the Northern Ireland protocol, such as those concerning the movements of plants, trees, soil and growing media”.

It said the UK-EU joint committee to be held no later than 24 February would “provide the necessary political steer and approval to this work”.

It appears that just as the EU put its own internal problems before the Good Friday Peace Agreement, it also puts its own political needs ahead of its supposed "green" agenda. Worse still, the UK government lets them.

A quick calculation suggests the efficiency of ITM's electrolyser in optimal conditions is about 50% - 36kg of 33kWh/kg H2 at 20 bar for 2.35MWh input. I guess performance fall off is dramatic because their grid solution simply employs lots of these units, rather than attempting to scale up. The idea will be to use only those that can be used efficiently if the supply is less than plant capacity, but of course the marginal units employed will be at suboptimal operating regimes because they will be being switched in and out as power input fluctuates. Extra power for compression to pipeline pressures or storage pressures (they offer 350bar and 700 bar for H2 vehicles) will eat into that.

Batteries can be used as smoothing capacitors, but with say at best 80% round trip efficiency for adding them it suggests that to be viable the avoided performance drop in the electrolysers is substantial.

tomo

I used to use an underground car park at our building when I was working in Houston. I understood why open lots on the fringe of Downtown were as little as $1.50 a day even when no more than 3 blocks from an entry to the tunnel system - the air conditioned haven with its food courts, shopping and connection to most of the larger office blocks. We had a summer with 2 months of daily 100F + temperatures. I was very grateful for the rental Buick which had truly amazing A/C that would cool the car to 70F in the time it took to get to the start of Memorial Drive, about 2 minutes from the parking exit. Drove like a boat though, with very soft suspension.

There's a lot of loot swilling around the hydrogen game.

This update from BEIS:
https://forum.all-energy.co.uk/2020/11/04/rita-wadey-hydrogen-update-from-beis/
includes a set of slides to download. #7 shows many 10s of £m tagged for various projects and programmes.

Earlier on Idau commented: "At least if they haven't cheated by using grid power."
Looking at the figures, it looks very likely that most of the power comes from the grid. The turbine is rated at 225 kW. ITM's smallest electrolyser draws 700 kW at full output, before compression.
Unless the ITM built a special, one-off package, there is nowhere near enough "green" power to run the electrolyser efficiently. Indeed I've got a vague idea that those things don't run at low power levels.
Maybe there is another source of green power which has not been mentioned. Otherwise most of the power for the H2 comes from the grid.