Backing biomass

Grant aid plus task force to stimulate production and use More government funding is going into the UK biomass industry - in the shape of a new £3.5 million Bio-Energy Infrastructure Scheme. The grants this will provide are intended mainly to help farmers find - and fill - opportunities in the renewable energy market for crops like coppiced willow and miscanthus grass. And the issues holding back this potentially booming industry will come under the scrutiny of a new special task force headed by former National Farmers’ Union president Ben Gill. Gill recognises that raising the status of biomass as a renewable energy source is a three-way opportunity - to help combat climate change, create jobs in rural areas, and encourage diversification into energy crops. But he is all too aware that the industry hasn’t yet caught fire in the UK. “Biomass struggles to make progress. This study is about finding solutions and that’s what we intend to deliver.” Getting the infrastructure support scheme up and running was one of the key recommendations made in last May’s report on biomass [GF47, briefings 'How to be biomassive'] by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP), whose chairman, Sir Tom Blundell, was bluntly critical of “fractured and misdirected government policies” at that time. But there’s no sign yet of a ‘renewable heat obligation’ being placed on fuel suppliers, as the RCEP report also suggested - nor of making it mandatory to include biomass-fired combined heat and power schemes in all new-build projects.

10 November 2004