What Tangled WebsI strongly encourage anyone participating in the biomass power or wood pellet sector to read Erin Voegele’s news story from yesterday, “EU to investigate U.K. support of the Lynemouth biomass conversion”. 

In it, Voegele reports that the European Commission wants to dig into the particulars of the Lynemouth conversion to biomass power to make sure that the amount of subsidy is “just right”.

The story is well written and, in what is becoming a hallmark of Voegele’s stories, contains a large handful of links to our ongoing coverage of this issue. I’ll warn you right now, the story and its included links can suck you in. 

In my mind, the question ultimately being asked here is ‘how badly do we want to transition away from a fossil fuel based energy system?’. The variety of responses and the complexities surrounding the reason for them are mind numbing.Renewable energy is a feel good story right up until you get to the chapter on economic efficiency. Electric power from coal is hard to compete with on a cost per unit of power basis. Hydroelectric fares pretty well but it requires moving water. Nuclear is close, but it brings along a host of dangers and troublesome waste streams. 

Right about now many of our readers, many of them friends and colleagues are pulling out their hair and wondering when I’ll get to the “externalities”. I’ll put that in quotation marks simply because I want to imbue the word with extra emphasis. Proponents of renewables, myself included, ultimately come back to the same place when arguing for the greater use of renewables. They (we) argue that when you consider the full cost of fossil fuels, including externalities (things like negative environmental consequences including global warming) fossil fuels don’t look so good. 

Our ongoing challenge as an industry is large swaths of the voting populace wants to throw out that argument altogether. In fact, a surprising percentage of elected officials even challenge the notion that these externalities our industry points to even exist.

Generally speaking, however, Europeans and their policy makers tend to accept the value proposition of renewables more readily than our own law makers. What Voegele’s story articulates though, is that when the costs for the solutions start to become clear, the brakes get tapped. 

“Whoa! How much?”

The transition will cost money. Billions. The challenge moving for our industry is make plain that when compared to other renewables biomass derived power is the hands down winner from an economic efficiency standpoint. Most curious to me is that the European Commission already approved the U.K.’s state aid of nearly 10 billion pounds of five offshore wind projects deciding that they promote the common EU objectives and don’t distort the market.

Really? The 10 billion dropped into the offshore wind technology market isn’t distorting that market to any degree? Also, wind power is intermittent.

At any rate, this is a story we all need to keep our eye on. I expect the comment period will generate activity.