Energy Bill

Baroness Maddock Excerpts

Tuesday 16th July 2013 Grand Committee

I had a marvellous meeting with a member of the Aitken family. They have a very small business which promotes power generation for individual factories and distilleries based entirely on the wood that is left behind after the forest has been commercially felled and taken away. There is always a mass of stuff left behind that can be gathered up and used to generate fuel. I am sure that that is a great deal easier than replanting the forest once the rubbish has been removed. Their business is based entirely on removing the rubbish and burning it. That seems to me an admirable thing to do, and it is another example of how biomass can contribute to helping us solve our energy problems.

[Baroness Maddock]

My Lords, my name is attached to the amendment. I was not going to speak because of time, but the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, has reminded me of a presentation that I had some years ago. I may have got the town wrong but I think it was Barnsley. It was in a coalfield area. The local authority there used coal for the district heating in its blocks of flats. I will always remember the description of the terrible mess that the coal dust made everywhere; the women who lived in the flats hated it because they always got coal dust in their curtains. The story is that they changed over to local biomass, which was interesting biomass because it was entirely what they gleaned from trimming and pruning trees and shrubs in the local area. Enough was produced, so it did not have to travel a long way but was enough to replace the coal in these blocks of flats, and the ladies with their curtains were delighted because they did not get soot any more. That has stayed in my mind.

When people first started looking at biomass, that is the sort of thing that they were thinking about. However, when you start to go into some of the ideas about bringing all sorts of things from America—we have just heard that they do not certify their wood either—then it is a completely different issue that we need to look at more carefully. Still, I thought the Barnsley system was pretty good.

[Lord Grantchester]

Like the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, we agree that biomass could make a significant and important contribution to the UK’s renewable energy thorough the use of sustainable feed stocks from waste. Again like the noble Lord, we agree that biomass should be sustainable.

The current plans would result in a rapid expansion of large-scale biomass electricity generation, principally through the full or part-conversion of existing coal-fired power stations. The EPS establishes a maximum level of emissions for electricity generated by a power station over a year. However, the only emissions that it recognises are those from fossil fuels, while biomass emissions are counted as zero.

As other noble Lords have argued, emissions from biomass can be interpreted as being quite substantial, as they should include emissions associated with the planting, growing, harvesting, processing and transport of biomass. This is in addition to the increase in emissions as a result of carbon debt—that is, the time it takes for tree regrowth and recovery of carbon stocks. Indeed, the sources of the stocks are also to be taken into account in sustainability requirements.

Many coal-powered plants are planned to be converted partially or entirely to biomass to extend their operating lifetimes and to benefit from the substantial subsidies available under the renewable obligations. A conversion to biomass under these amendments would trigger the EPS to cover the whole power station, including the life-cycle emissions from biomass. The amendments would complement the Government’s own proposals for sustainability standards for biomass generators, which include a life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions standard for emissions from harvesting and processing. We entirely support the intention that the EPS is triggered should any generation from biomass take place. If that is not to be the case, there is a danger that a plant close to breaching its limit might convert to a small amount of biomass in an attempt to remain under the threshold.