In the name of renewable energy?

Editorial Department • Published 19 Jan 2012 13:00 0 Comments

Dear Sir, - I note with interest the coverage in your paper regarding renewable energy recently. I work in an associated industry with responsibility for the integration of these new energy forms and wish to share with your readers an exposé of what I'm sure a lot of people will recognise as essentially fraud, all dressed up in the name of renewable energy, and ultimately all of us will be funding it unless government (DETINI) modifies it's current incentives policy on renewables.

Whilst in the whole I'm in total agreement with the development of energy from renewable sources and the government incentives given to producers of it, there is however one apparent source of 'green' energy that I and many others contend will be anything but green when applied to rural areas like Fermanagh and Tyrone.

I talk of anaerobic digestion. It is current government policy to incentivise this energy source with four ROCs - in 'layman terms' basically an additional four times the current rate of payment to producers of this energy form.

Being from a farming background myself I feel pretty qualified to speculate on what I feel the inevitable outcome of this particular incentive will be:

To give the unaware a little background, a typical anaerobic digestor on a farm will mix together cattle slurry and feedstocks such as wheat, maize, and grass to produce biogases that will eventually lead to the creation of electricity.

Take for example a farmer who has been given permission to install a 500kVA anaerobic digestor (the typical size being requested through planning). A Fermanagh/Tyrone farmer might typically cut 50 acres of silage a year or there abouts. If he has a 500kVA anaerobic digester to supply with grass (the general ratio for grass acres to 1 kVA is 1:1) he now finds himself having to cut 500 acres - 10 times his usual crop. This will lead to more intensive use of his land, he will convert all his available fields to grass silage crop. He will no longer keep any livestock because all his grazing fields will have been converted. He will be polluting our waterways and streams with slurry and harmful fertilisers and pesticides to an even greater extent than now trying to increase the grass yield his fields produce. The roads will be smashed to pulp with the greatly increased tonnage and frequency of agricultural machinery (i.e. large tractors and silage trailers) bringing in the crops from the fields.

In addition most farmers will not have enough land to produce 500 acres of grass a year so he in turn will look to rent additional land. If farmers with anaerobic digestors (and there are a lot of them going through planning currently) start competing with each other over land, other farmers with land to rent will be able to charge excessively due to the demand generated - creating an agricultural land bubble…… ladies and gentlemen, aren't we in the midst of the hardship caused by a bubble bursting spectacularly recently??? (Private investors have already started to make a move in this market)

All of which leads me to biggest joke of all - the fossil fuels expended and the carbon pollution created by all the heavy agricultural machinery used to harvest, tend to, and transport the feedstock. There will be a dramatic increased use of fossil fuels used to power this machinery - the stuff I thought government were trying to reduce reliance on!! Agricultural machinery are the most inefficient and polluting vehicles around and harvesting crops is an extremely intensive exercise.

How can you incentivise power created by a renewable energy source if the fossil fuels you use to create it (and associated increased carbon footprint) more than offset its creation in the first place?

There is even chatter that some farmers have explored the possibility of pumping pure gas into the anaerobic digestors chambers - to dispense with the need to produce biogas from manure and grass!!

To summarise current government policy then: we are actually subsidising the farmer handsomely to use even more fossil fuels, increase our carbon footprint, destroy our roads, create an agricultural land value bubble, whilst in the background damaging and changing the face of our countryside - just to meet a paper agreement target of 40% renewables by 2020……..absolute madness!!.

Grass silage is just too inefficient a foodstock to produce the necessary biogases needed by a digestor. Foodstocks such as wheat, crude glycerine, and rape meal have much superior biogas yield efficiencies but we just can't grow that ere.

DETI need a more intelligent approach to anaerobic digestion, by introducing some form of banding within it maybe, to decipher the good from the bad inputs used to feed a digestor, were the most efficient inputs get the most incentives and inefficient less.

You can't actually blame the farmers for going down this route, the incentives are currently just too good - it's government policies that need to change.

I urge the decision makers within DETINI to re-examine the incentives given to anaerobic digestion post-haste for the good of the country and especially for our splendid countryside that could change so dramatically for the worse.

Yours faithfully,

Green fraud whistleblower

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This letter appeared in Impartial Reporter 19 Jan 12

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