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Bonfire of the subsidies—Europe’s wood subsidies show the folly of focusing green policy on “renewa…
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21575759-europes-wood-subsidies-show-folly-focusing-green-policy-renewables-bonfire[font face=Serif][font size=5]Bonfire of the subsidies[/font]
[font size=4]Europe’s wood subsidies show the folly of focusing green policy on “renewables”[/font]
Apr 6th 2013 |From the print edition
[font size=3]TO GO by the Domesday Book, the record of taxable lands produced for William the Conqueror in 1086, the manor of Drax, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, was not much of a place: six villagers, a priest and a value to its lord of a single pound. But it did have five leagues of woodland.
Today Drax is home to one of the most impressive pieces of engineering in Britain, a power station with a value to its owners of £2.5 billion. But it does not have much woodland. And, given the way Europe’s renewable-energy subsidies work, the appetites of that facility, and others around Europe, may mean that wood is in short supply in many places before long.
In 2009 the European Union set itself the target of getting 20% of its energy from renewable sources. For all the fields and roofs covered with solar panels and the once-empty uplands enlivened by wind turbines, by far the biggest power source in the plans is biomass: wood, crop residues and other burnable recently living stuff. The EU’s planners want to get 1,210 terawatt hours of energy from biomass in 2020, compared with 494TWh from wind. About 80% of that biomass energy would be used to heat things—wood-burning stoves and boilers are widely used in many European countries. But the 20% used to generate electricity would still equal all the energy expected from solar panels and offshore wind. With wind power not growing at the rate that planners want, biomass may be called on to do even more.
The dash for biomass, though, has many problems (see article). As with wind and solar power, investment in biomass does not happen without subsidy; current plans to convert half of Drax’s 4,000 megawatt capacity from coal to biomass depend on getting an extra £45 per megawatt hour from the government on top of what the electricity sells for. It also takes a lot of land to produce power with biomass. Generating 2,000MW of electricity from wood in a sustainable way requires a forest of some 6,600 square kilometres—which is more or less, as it happens, the area of the whole West Riding.
…[/font][/font]
[font size=4]Europe’s wood subsidies show the folly of focusing green policy on “renewables”[/font]
Apr 6th 2013 |From the print edition
[font size=3]TO GO by the Domesday Book, the record of taxable lands produced for William the Conqueror in 1086, the manor of Drax, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, was not much of a place: six villagers, a priest and a value to its lord of a single pound. But it did have five leagues of woodland.
Today Drax is home to one of the most impressive pieces of engineering in Britain, a power station with a value to its owners of £2.5 billion. But it does not have much woodland. And, given the way Europe’s renewable-energy subsidies work, the appetites of that facility, and others around Europe, may mean that wood is in short supply in many places before long.
In 2009 the European Union set itself the target of getting 20% of its energy from renewable sources. For all the fields and roofs covered with solar panels and the once-empty uplands enlivened by wind turbines, by far the biggest power source in the plans is biomass: wood, crop residues and other burnable recently living stuff. The EU’s planners want to get 1,210 terawatt hours of energy from biomass in 2020, compared with 494TWh from wind. About 80% of that biomass energy would be used to heat things—wood-burning stoves and boilers are widely used in many European countries. But the 20% used to generate electricity would still equal all the energy expected from solar panels and offshore wind. With wind power not growing at the rate that planners want, biomass may be called on to do even more.
The dash for biomass, though, has many problems (see article). As with wind and solar power, investment in biomass does not happen without subsidy; current plans to convert half of Drax’s 4,000 megawatt capacity from coal to biomass depend on getting an extra £45 per megawatt hour from the government on top of what the electricity sells for. It also takes a lot of land to produce power with biomass. Generating 2,000MW of electricity from wood in a sustainable way requires a forest of some 6,600 square kilometres—which is more or less, as it happens, the area of the whole West Riding.
…[/font][/font]
