A couple of months ago I took a trip to the world’s newest global biodiversity hotspot: the North American Coastal Plain of North Carolina.

And it didn’t disappoint. On a kayaking trip along the Black River and a boat trip along the Roanoke River we watched golden eagles circling above us and huge black and white belted kingfishers peeling out of the bushes to race downriver away from us.

The dogwood trees were just coming into bloom, adorning the sides of the highways with occasional polka dots of white. The wetland and hardwood forests in this part of the world are home to an amazing array of wildlife.

However, in many places along roads and rivers a thin screen, only three or four trees deep, hides a darker, shameful truth: huge clearcuts that are being driven by a new industry that has recently arrived in this part of the world. These clearcuts often lie right next to remaining stands of pristine forests, making the contrast and the impacts all the clearer.

The effects and scale of this industry were at their most stark when we saw the pellet mills with their huge stacks of logs piled up. These are turned into wood pellets and, in most cases, shipped to the UK to be burned in our power stations in response to our own renewable energy policies. Drax power station in Yorkshire, which is converting its boilers from coal to biomass, receives over £1 million per day in renewable energy subsidies for the practice.

Our friends at Dogwood Alliance, a US NGO, have followed trucks carrying whole trees from the clearcuts to the wood pellet mills. In turn, the pellet mills publicly declare that their supply contracts are for power stations in the UK. So the chain of supply is very easy to establish and we can directly link the burning of these trees for power in the UK to the impacts we saw on the ground.

I had a conversation with Adam Macon, the Campaign Director of Dogwood Alliance, which you can listen to here (or in embed, below). We spoke about his love of the forests, the threats they face from the wood pellet industry and the work he does to try to save them.

When we speak of renewable energy in the UK, we think of green, low impact technologies like wind and solar. But in fact, 72% of the electricity we count as ‘renewable’ comes from bioenergy – that is from burning plant matter (biomass) including trees. In 2015 the UK imported 2.7 million oven dried tonnes of wood from North America.

This isn’t just an issue in the UK though. Across the EU as a whole around two thirds of all renewable energy generated comes from bioenergy. In the case of the EU there is a smaller dependence on imports and a greater reliance on the EU’s own forests, although often with similar consequences. The UK’s own use of biomass for power generation has been driven to date by EU renewable energy legislation.

Dirtier than coal

As well as the devastating impact on forests and wildlife, evidence now shows that the use of whole trees such as these could be resulting in increases in emissions relative to the fossil fuels they replace.

Bioenergy is often assumed to be a climate friendly energy source for two reasons. First, there is a public perception that bioenergy is carbon neutral because any emissions released when it is used will be reabsorbed by plant or tree regrowth. But trees grow slowly and in many cases it can take many years, decades or even centuries for the emissions to be recaptured, if ever.

Second, policy makers often assume that bioenergy can be counted as carbon neutral within the energy sector because the emissions will be counted under UN rules for harvesting forests. Unfortunately, problems with these rules mean that this simply isn’t the case making it both incorrect, and highly misleading, to count bioenergy as carbon neutral in the energy sector.

One of the most obvious of these problems is that some countries, like the US, aren’t even signed up to the UN’s Kyoto Protocol, and so don’t account for the emissions from harvesting their forests at all. This means the emissions from biomass imported from the US to the UK are not accounted for anywhere, by anyone, and simply end up in the atmosphere, treated as if they didn’t exist.

But, despite such loopholes, the practice of defining biomass as carbon neutral persists – even receiving subsidies from the UK Government for it role in delivering supposedly low carbon energy. In fact, because wood is less energy dense than fossil fuels, it can often be more polluting.

Energy input can be 96% of energy produced

Despite this policy blind-spot, this situation has been recognised for a number of years in the scientific literature. The European Union’s Joint Research Council concluded in 2011 that the assumption that bioenergy is carbon neutral is wrong. The UK Government’s own science in 2013 showed that the use of whole trees from new harvesting in US forests can be up to four times more polluting than coal even 40 years after it has been burned. In a large number of cases bioenergy is a false solution for reducing emissions.

One specific problem highlighted in the government report is the high energy input that goes into producing the wood pellets – in harvesting, transport, drying (often using natural gas) and manufacturing, which can be as much as 96% of the delivered energy:

“The energy input requirement of biomass electricity generated from North American wood used by the UK in 2020 is likely to be in the range 0.13 to 0.96MWh energy carrier input per MWh delivered energy, significantly greater than other electricity generating technologies, such as coal, natural gas, nuclear and wind.”

Many argue that if the overall size of the forest is growing (as it is in the EU and the US) then taking some trees out and burning them doesn’t matter. But this overlooks the fact that if they hadn’t been burned then the size of the forest would otherwise have been larger and more carbon would have been sequestered and stored.

It also overlooks the fact that in the US’s case, for example, they are also relying on the growth of their forests to offset the emissions from their own economy. So counting bioenergy as carbon beneficial double counts this service that the forests provide by growing.

Using forms of renewable energy that potentially increase emissions rather than reducing them undermines the integrity of efforts to limit global temperature rises. Since the Paris conference the world has set a new goal to limit temperature rises not to 2C but to 1.5C. If we are to achieve this then utilising bioenergy that increases emissions is a mistake we cannot afford to keep making.

The solution: a limited and safe role for biomass

Bioenergy can play an important but limited role in the energy mix of many countries. However, it needs to be based on genuine emissions reductions, rather than false and unscientific claims.

The use of the highest carbon risk feedstocks, such as whole trees, needs to be ruled out almost entirely. A cap is needed on the use of bioenergy in line with available sustainable supply. And the use of bioenergy needs to be in line with the principle of a circular economy and optimum use (i.e. reuse and recycling need to be prioritised over energy uses).

The EU is due to introduce new sustainability criteria for the use of all bioenergy. However, because of the Brexit referendum result these may never apply to the UK. And the UK’s own sustainability criteria fail to adequately protect nature, and treat biomass as if it were carbon neutral: they urgently need improving.

The UK’s forthcoming Emissions Reduction Plan will set out how we will achieve our carbon budgets, the legally binding emissions reductions that the UK is signed up to under its Climate Change Act. Within this plan, bioenergy needs to play a limited role based on genuine emissions reductions.

These policy options will be essential if we are to stop driving the unnecessary destruction of forests such as those I visited in the spring. Only in this way can the great blue herons and pileated woodpeckers of North Carolina continue to thrive and prosper.

Matt Williams is a Policy Officer for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He leads on their bioenergy and fracking policy. He’s also the Associate Director of A Focus on Nature, the UK’s youth nature network. Follow him @mattadamw and mattadamwilliams.co.uk.

More information

• The RSPB has produced scenarios showing how the UK could meet its energy needs and its emissions reductions targets by 2050 in harmony with nature.

• Find out more about the work of Dogwood Alliance.

• The UK Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change has produced its own science showing the carbon impacts of using whole trees.

For people worried about British efforts to tackle climate change, reading the reports of Theresa May’s reorganisation of Whitehall would have sent a shiver down the spine.  On the face of it, losing a dedicated department with ‘climate change’ in its title doesn’t bode well. But despite the great work achieved by DECC, its narrow remit sometimes meant it lost out to more powerful departments such as the Treasury. DECC’s limited scope meant that it perhaps didn’t have the impact required on central Government decisions crucial for turning our climate ambitions into reality.

A more optimistic view is that its replacement may be able to change all that. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has the potential to be a true heavyweight. (Such is its ‘big beast’ status perhaps the shorthand term for it could be BEISt). Combining all the functions of DECC as well some from the former Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), it will have a powerful role in determining the shape of the nation’s economy and infrastructure.  Such will be its importance in leading the economic recovery of Britain, the Spectator has suggested it may even rival the Treasury itself in terms of financial muscle and influence.

Crucially, leading it will be Secretary of State, Greg Clark, one of the most green-minded of all the Conservatives, who spent a number of years as Shadow DECC minister. Born in Middlesbrough, Clark married his wife Helen in a charity hostel for homeless women, for which he is a trustee. He is on record as promoting the benefits of the green economy, has raised concerns about coal burning and bemoaned the fact that British homes are some of the least energy efficient in Europe. In 2009 he witnessed the impacts of climate change first-hand when visiting Bangladesh with Christian Aid (the video can be watched here).

Joining Clark at BEISt will be a number of other ‘green Tories’; junior minister Nick Hurd, the former Co-Chair of the Conservative Environment Network and advocate of African renewable energy in his previous role at DFID, Margot James, who worked to promote the Green Deal energy efficiency scheme and Jesse Norman.

Adding to this cautious optimism is the appointment of Philip Hammond as Chancellor. As Foreign Secretary he set out the grave challenges of climate change as well as the opportunities of greening the UK economy. “Many of the losses caused by climate change could be irreversible, regardless of our resources,” he told the climate sceptic American Enterprise Institute last year. “Unchecked climate change, even under the most likely scenario, could have catastrophic consequences – a rise in global temperatures …leading in turn, to rising sea levels, huge movements of people fuelling conflict and instability, pressure on resources, and a multitude of new risks to global public health.”

The departure of George Osborne as Chancellor has also seen Theresa May dispense with his fiscal targets, to be replaced with a more investment focused approach. Former BIS Secretary Savid Javid has suggested a £100 billion investment fund be used to overhaul and improve the nation’s infrastructure. If such funding is channeled through Greg Clark’s department, there could be a chance for a wave of sustainable infrastructure investment to transform the British economy.  

The potential has already been spotted by some: The climate economist Lord Stern said he was happy with the change and WWF has said the new department could be a “real powerhouse for change” if climate change was “hardwired” into it.

But this potential still needs to be delivered. The loss of DECC’s dedicated climate label has its dangers and it’s vital that the Government doesn’t backslide on its commitments.

Hopefully this week will see the 5^th Carbon Budget agreed. What is needed from this new department, by the end of this year, is a low carbon investment plan which sets out not just the level of ambition but the tangible steps we will take in the UK to reduce emissions in line with these targets.  

Fortunately, hundreds of ‘Speak Up‘ events will be held across the country in the Autumn (October) at which people can ask their MP what progress has been made on the UK’s promised carbon reduction plan – a perfect opportunity to send a message to this new Government. 

For years green groups have called for climate action to be baked into the core of Government policy, rather than operate in a kind of advisory capacity on the fringes. They may finally have their wish.

There is still much to do, but the death of the UK’s climate change ambition may have been greatly exaggerated.

 This Author

Joe Ware is a journalist and ‘New Voices’ writer for The Ecologist. He can be found on twitter at @wareisjoe. To find out more about the Speak Up events visit this link.

A couple of months ago I took a trip to the world’s newest global biodiversity hotspot: the North American Coastal Plain of North Carolina.

And it didn’t disappoint. On a kayaking trip along the Black River and a boat trip along the Roanoke River we watched golden eagles circling above us and huge black and white belted kingfishers peeling out of the bushes to race downriver away from us.

The dogwood trees were just coming into bloom, adorning the sides of the highways with occasional polka dots of white. The wetland and hardwood forests in this part of the world are home to an amazing array of wildlife.

However, in many places along roads and rivers a thin screen, only three or four trees deep, hides a darker, shameful truth: huge clearcuts that are being driven by a new industry that has recently arrived in this part of the world. These clearcuts often lie right next to remaining stands of pristine forests, making the contrast and the impacts all the clearer.

The effects and scale of this industry were at their most stark when we saw the pellet mills with their huge stacks of logs piled up. These are turned into wood pellets and, in most cases, shipped to the UK to be burned in our power stations in response to our own renewable energy policies. Drax power station in Yorkshire, which is converting its boilers from coal to biomass, receives over £1 million per day in renewable energy subsidies for the practice.

Our friends at Dogwood Alliance, a US NGO, have followed trucks carrying whole trees from the clearcuts to the wood pellet mills. In turn, the pellet mills publicly declare that their supply contracts are for power stations in the UK. So the chain of supply is very easy to establish and we can directly link the burning of these trees for power in the UK to the impacts we saw on the ground.

I had a conversation with Adam Macon, the Campaign Director of Dogwood Alliance, which you can listen to here (or in embed, below). We spoke about his love of the forests, the threats they face from the wood pellet industry and the work he does to try to save them.

When we speak of renewable energy in the UK, we think of green, low impact technologies like wind and solar. But in fact, 72% of the electricity we count as ‘renewable’ comes from bioenergy – that is from burning plant matter (biomass) including trees. In 2015 the UK imported 2.7 million oven dried tonnes of wood from North America.

This isn’t just an issue in the UK though. Across the EU as a whole around two thirds of all renewable energy generated comes from bioenergy. In the case of the EU there is a smaller dependence on imports and a greater reliance on the EU’s own forests, although often with similar consequences. The UK’s own use of biomass for power generation has been driven to date by EU renewable energy legislation.

Dirtier than coal

As well as the devastating impact on forests and wildlife, evidence now shows that the use of whole trees such as these could be resulting in increases in emissions relative to the fossil fuels they replace.

Bioenergy is often assumed to be a climate friendly energy source for two reasons. First, there is a public perception that bioenergy is carbon neutral because any emissions released when it is used will be reabsorbed by plant or tree regrowth. But trees grow slowly and in many cases it can take many years, decades or even centuries for the emissions to be recaptured, if ever.

Second, policy makers often assume that bioenergy can be counted as carbon neutral within the energy sector because the emissions will be counted under UN rules for harvesting forests. Unfortunately, problems with these rules mean that this simply isn’t the case making it both incorrect, and highly misleading, to count bioenergy as carbon neutral in the energy sector.

One of the most obvious of these problems is that some countries, like the US, aren’t even signed up to the UN’s Kyoto Protocol, and so don’t account for the emissions from harvesting their forests at all. This means the emissions from biomass imported from the US to the UK are not accounted for anywhere, by anyone, and simply end up in the atmosphere, treated as if they didn’t exist.

But, despite such loopholes, the practice of defining biomass as carbon neutral persists – even receiving subsidies from the UK Government for it role in delivering supposedly low carbon energy. In fact, because wood is less energy dense than fossil fuels, it can often be more polluting.

Energy input can be 96% of energy produced

Despite this policy blind-spot, this situation has been recognised for a number of years in the scientific literature. The European Union’s Joint Research Council concluded in 2011 that the assumption that bioenergy is carbon neutral is wrong. The UK Government’s own science in 2013 showed that the use of whole trees from new harvesting in US forests can be up to four times more polluting than coal even 40 years after it has been burned. In a large number of cases bioenergy is a false solution for reducing emissions.

One specific problem highlighted in the government report is the high energy input that goes into producing the wood pellets – in harvesting, transport, drying (often using natural gas) and manufacturing, which can be as much as 96% of the delivered energy:

“The energy input requirement of biomass electricity generated from North American wood used by the UK in 2020 is likely to be in the range 0.13 to 0.96MWh energy carrier input per MWh delivered energy, significantly greater than other electricity generating technologies, such as coal, natural gas, nuclear and wind.”

Many argue that if the overall size of the forest is growing (as it is in the EU and the US) then taking some trees out and burning them doesn’t matter. But this overlooks the fact that if they hadn’t been burned then the size of the forest would otherwise have been larger and more carbon would have been sequestered and stored.

It also overlooks the fact that in the US’s case, for example, they are also relying on the growth of their forests to offset the emissions from their own economy. So counting bioenergy as carbon beneficial double counts this service that the forests provide by growing.

Using forms of renewable energy that potentially increase emissions rather than reducing them undermines the integrity of efforts to limit global temperature rises. Since the Paris conference the world has set a new goal to limit temperature rises not to 2C but to 1.5C. If we are to achieve this then utilising bioenergy that increases emissions is a mistake we cannot afford to keep making.

The solution: a limited and safe role for biomass

Bioenergy can play an important but limited role in the energy mix of many countries. However, it needs to be based on genuine emissions reductions, rather than false and unscientific claims.

The use of the highest carbon risk feedstocks, such as whole trees, needs to be ruled out almost entirely. A cap is needed on the use of bioenergy in line with available sustainable supply. And the use of bioenergy needs to be in line with the principle of a circular economy and optimum use (i.e. reuse and recycling need to be prioritised over energy uses).

The EU is due to introduce new sustainability criteria for the use of all bioenergy. However, because of the Brexit referendum result these may never apply to the UK. And the UK’s own sustainability criteria fail to adequately protect nature, and treat biomass as if it were carbon neutral: they urgently need improving.

The UK’s forthcoming Emissions Reduction Plan will set out how we will achieve our carbon budgets, the legally binding emissions reductions that the UK is signed up to under its Climate Change Act. Within this plan, bioenergy needs to play a limited role based on genuine emissions reductions.

These policy options will be essential if we are to stop driving the unnecessary destruction of forests such as those I visited in the spring. Only in this way can the great blue herons and pileated woodpeckers of North Carolina continue to thrive and prosper.

Matt Williams is a Policy Officer for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He leads on their bioenergy and fracking policy. He’s also the Associate Director of A Focus on Nature, the UK’s youth nature network. Follow him @mattadamw and mattadamwilliams.co.uk.

More information

• The RSPB has produced scenarios showing how the UK could meet its energy needs and its emissions reductions targets by 2050 in harmony with nature.

• Find out more about the work of Dogwood Alliance.

• The UK Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change has produced its own science showing the carbon impacts of using whole trees.

A couple of months ago I took a trip to the world’s newest global biodiversity hotspot: the North American Coastal Plain of North Carolina.

And it didn’t disappoint. On a kayaking trip along the Black River and a boat trip along the Roanoke River we watched golden eagles circling above us and huge black and white belted kingfishers peeling out of the bushes to race downriver away from us.

The dogwood trees were just coming into bloom, adorning the sides of the highways with occasional polka dots of white. The wetland and hardwood forests in this part of the world are home to an amazing array of wildlife.

However, in many places along roads and rivers a thin screen, only three or four trees deep, hides a darker, shameful truth: huge clearcuts that are being driven by a new industry that has recently arrived in this part of the world. These clearcuts often lie right next to remaining stands of pristine forests, making the contrast and the impacts all the clearer.

The effects and scale of this industry were at their most stark when we saw the pellet mills with their huge stacks of logs piled up. These are turned into wood pellets and, in most cases, shipped to the UK to be burned in our power stations in response to our own renewable energy policies. Drax power station in Yorkshire, which is converting its boilers from coal to biomass, receives over £1 million per day in renewable energy subsidies for the practice.

Our friends at Dogwood Alliance, a US NGO, have followed trucks carrying whole trees from the clearcuts to the wood pellet mills. In turn, the pellet mills publicly declare that their supply contracts are for power stations in the UK. So the chain of supply is very easy to establish and we can directly link the burning of these trees for power in the UK to the impacts we saw on the ground.

I had a conversation with Adam Macon, the Campaign Director of Dogwood Alliance, which you can listen to here (or in embed, below). We spoke about his love of the forests, the threats they face from the wood pellet industry and the work he does to try to save them.

When we speak of renewable energy in the UK, we think of green, low impact technologies like wind and solar. But in fact, 72% of the electricity we count as ‘renewable’ comes from bioenergy – that is from burning plant matter (biomass) including trees. In 2015 the UK imported 2.7 million oven dried tonnes of wood from North America.

This isn’t just an issue in the UK though. Across the EU as a whole around two thirds of all renewable energy generated comes from bioenergy. In the case of the EU there is a smaller dependence on imports and a greater reliance on the EU’s own forests, although often with similar consequences. The UK’s own use of biomass for power generation has been driven to date by EU renewable energy legislation.

Dirtier than coal

As well as the devastating impact on forests and wildlife, evidence now shows that the use of whole trees such as these could be resulting in increases in emissions relative to the fossil fuels they replace.

Bioenergy is often assumed to be a climate friendly energy source for two reasons. First, there is a public perception that bioenergy is carbon neutral because any emissions released when it is used will be reabsorbed by plant or tree regrowth. But trees grow slowly and in many cases it can take many years, decades or even centuries for the emissions to be recaptured, if ever.

Second, policy makers often assume that bioenergy can be counted as carbon neutral within the energy sector because the emissions will be counted under UN rules for harvesting forests. Unfortunately, problems with these rules mean that this simply isn’t the case making it both incorrect, and highly misleading, to count bioenergy as carbon neutral in the energy sector.

One of the most obvious of these problems is that some countries, like the US, aren’t even signed up to the UN’s Kyoto Protocol, and so don’t account for the emissions from harvesting their forests at all. This means the emissions from biomass imported from the US to the UK are not accounted for anywhere, by anyone, and simply end up in the atmosphere, treated as if they didn’t exist.

But, despite such loopholes, the practice of defining biomass as carbon neutral persists – even receiving subsidies from the UK Government for it role in delivering supposedly low carbon energy. In fact, because wood is less energy dense than fossil fuels, it can often be more polluting.

Energy input can be 96% of energy produced

Despite this policy blind-spot, this situation has been recognised for a number of years in the scientific literature. The European Union’s Joint Research Council concluded in 2011 that the assumption that bioenergy is carbon neutral is wrong. The UK Government’s own science in 2013 showed that the use of whole trees from new harvesting in US forests can be up to four times more polluting than coal even 40 years after it has been burned. In a large number of cases bioenergy is a false solution for reducing emissions.

One specific problem highlighted in the government report is the high energy input that goes into producing the wood pellets – in harvesting, transport, drying (often using natural gas) and manufacturing, which can be as much as 96% of the delivered energy:

“The energy input requirement of biomass electricity generated from North American wood used by the UK in 2020 is likely to be in the range 0.13 to 0.96MWh energy carrier input per MWh delivered energy, significantly greater than other electricity generating technologies, such as coal, natural gas, nuclear and wind.”

Many argue that if the overall size of the forest is growing (as it is in the EU and the US) then taking some trees out and burning them doesn’t matter. But this overlooks the fact that if they hadn’t been burned then the size of the forest would otherwise have been larger and more carbon would have been sequestered and stored.

It also overlooks the fact that in the US’s case, for example, they are also relying on the growth of their forests to offset the emissions from their own economy. So counting bioenergy as carbon beneficial double counts this service that the forests provide by growing.

Using forms of renewable energy that potentially increase emissions rather than reducing them undermines the integrity of efforts to limit global temperature rises. Since the Paris conference the world has set a new goal to limit temperature rises not to 2C but to 1.5C. If we are to achieve this then utilising bioenergy that increases emissions is a mistake we cannot afford to keep making.

The solution: a limited and safe role for biomass

Bioenergy can play an important but limited role in the energy mix of many countries. However, it needs to be based on genuine emissions reductions, rather than false and unscientific claims.

The use of the highest carbon risk feedstocks, such as whole trees, needs to be ruled out almost entirely. A cap is needed on the use of bioenergy in line with available sustainable supply. And the use of bioenergy needs to be in line with the principle of a circular economy and optimum use (i.e. reuse and recycling need to be prioritised over energy uses).

The EU is due to introduce new sustainability criteria for the use of all bioenergy. However, because of the Brexit referendum result these may never apply to the UK. And the UK’s own sustainability criteria fail to adequately protect nature, and treat biomass as if it were carbon neutral: they urgently need improving.

The UK’s forthcoming Emissions Reduction Plan will set out how we will achieve our carbon budgets, the legally binding emissions reductions that the UK is signed up to under its Climate Change Act. Within this plan, bioenergy needs to play a limited role based on genuine emissions reductions.

These policy options will be essential if we are to stop driving the unnecessary destruction of forests such as those I visited in the spring. Only in this way can the great blue herons and pileated woodpeckers of North Carolina continue to thrive and prosper.

Matt Williams is a Policy Officer for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He leads on their bioenergy and fracking policy. He’s also the Associate Director of A Focus on Nature, the UK’s youth nature network. Follow him @mattadamw and mattadamwilliams.co.uk.

More information

• The RSPB has produced scenarios showing how the UK could meet its energy needs and its emissions reductions targets by 2050 in harmony with nature.

• Find out more about the work of Dogwood Alliance.

• The UK Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change has produced its own science showing the carbon impacts of using whole trees.

A building boom is underway offshore in Europe. Up to 400 giant wind turbines are due to be built off the northeast coast of the UK in what will be the world’s largest offshore wind development.

Output from the Dogger Bank project will be 1.2 GW (gigawatts) – enough to power more than a million homes.

Next year, a 150-turbine wind farm off the coast of the Netherlands is due to start operating, and other schemes along the Dutch coast are in the works.

Denmark, Sweden and Portugal are major investors in offshore wind, and China has ambitious plans for the sector.

Wind farms – both onshore and offshore – are a key ingredient in renewable energy policy, and an important element in the battle against climate change.

WindEurope, an offshore wind industry group, says that at the present rate of installations it’s likely Europe will be producing about 7% of its electricity from offshore wind by 2030.

Ofshore wind developers benefit from falling costs

By some calculations, all this building work would seem to make little economic sense. Fossil fuel prices are low on the world market, and constructing offshore wind farms several kilometres out at sea, in often treacherous conditions, has traditionally been an expensive business.

Despite this, the offshore wind industry insists it has a bright future: costs are coming down, and supporters say the sector is becoming ever more competitive. Ironically, the slump in the price of oil has been one factor driving down the price of offshore power.

Inactivity in the oil industry and the closure of many drilling projects in the North Sea and elsewhere has led to a big surplus of offshore installation vessels. As a result, costs for transporting turbines out to sea and other support work have dropped substantially.

Building and technical techniques have been refined and standardised over the years. Maintenance expenditure – which can account for up to 40% of the running cost of an offshore installation – has been reduced. The industry now uses larger 6MW turbines, which it says need less servicing, and in future it’s likely a move will be made to 8MW models.

Costs have also dropped due to lower prices on the world market for steel, a major building component in offshore installations. And new methods have been adopted for laying foundations for pylons at sea. The industry says that as projects have grown in size, economies of scale have been achieved.

The cost of cables connecting the wind pylons to power networks onshore has also been reduced. Initially, cables were produced to operate at full capacity at all times, but new cables that are less bulky and less expensive are able to cope with the intermittent power produced.

The cheapest ever offshore wind power – €87 / MWh

Earlier this month, DONG Energy of Denmark, the world’s largest offshore wind company, won a bid to build two wind farms 22 kilometres off the Dutch coast. The company says power will be produced for less than any other offshore scheme to date.

It is estimated that when the scheme is fully operational, electricity will cost €72.70 per megawatt hour (MWh) and €87 / MWh when transmission costs are included. At present, the cheapest offshore power is €103 MWh, generated by a wind farm off the coast of Denmark.

“It has been clear for some time that the costs of offshore wind are falling rapidly”, says Giles Dickson, head of WindEurope. “This tender goes beyond even the most optimistic expectations in the market. The €87 / MWh is significantly lower than anything we’ve previously seen. It now puts offshore wind in the same cost range as conventional power generation.”

The offshore industry does face problems. The majority of big projects in Europe – the main area of offshore wind activity – are backed by considerable government support, with developers receiving prices for power that are often well above wholesale market rates.

But significantly, the price of offshore wind has now fallen substantially below that of new nuclear power. The UK is trying (and so far, failing) to persuade French energy parastatal EDF to build a new nuclear power station at Hinkley C, paying it £92.50 / MWh (in 2012 money) for 35 years.

That’s €122 / MWh in today’s money for a nuclear MWh – about 40% more than Dong’s offshore wind price. Or to turn it round the other way, new offshore wind is almost 30% cheaper than new nuclear. In addition most offshore wind contracts pay out for much less than 35 years – in the case of the UK, for just 15 years.

Political change might result in reductions in state support levels. For example, the UK’s vote to leave the European Union has led to considerable uncertainty about government policy on wind and other renewable energy schemes following big cuts in support last year. The UK government also appears dedicated to a ‘nuclear at any cost’ policy.

Offshore wind also faces competition from onshore power generation, which is considerably cheaper than offshore wind. However many countries favour the offshore option because of its lower visual and auditory impact.

Offshore wind’s greatest renewable competitor is probably solar power, which has seen dramatic cost reductions in recent years. But the two technologies make a harmonious fit – the two together producing a smoother electricity supply curve, and one that more closely matches demand, than either alone.

Kieran Cooke writes for Climate News Network, where this article was originally published.

This article contains some additional reporting by The Ecologist.

According to Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, global subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, both indirect and direct, amounted to $5.3 trillion dollars in 2015. Or to frame it another way, 6.5% of global GDP. Roughly $10m per minute. That’s right you read it correctly- 10 million dollars per minute.

These figures are from the IMF, hardly a hotbed of radical thinking as Anderson points out. This astronomical figure also includes the cost in health terms of air pollution, high coal use in China and India and, “broader externalities from vehicle use like traffic congestion and accidents”, according to the IMF report.

 “Externalities” in mainstream economics meaning: the negative consequence of market transactions which have not been factored into the market price of, in this instance, fossil fuels. The unaccounted for external impact in this case is the ill health, and deaths, of millions.

In plain language, someone else picks up the bill for the actual consequences and impacts of dirty energy emissions.  

Yet set this figure against the $100 billion dollars pledged per annum, and remember only pledged, by rich developing countries at COP 21 towards adaptation and mitigation of climate change in poor countries. To put this in context, 100 billion dollars is 53 times less than is provided through subsidies to the global extractive companies by international governments.

According to a recent report by Oxfam even that paltry amount is nowhere near being adhered to. The report says that up to date only 16% of international climate finance, of the $100 billion committed, has so far been dedicated to adaptation. The contrast in priorities is stark.   

The 2015 figure of $5.3 Trillion dollars is probably not much different in real economic terms than in previous years, or for 2016 for that matter. Tally those figures up since say 2009, the year of the Copenhagen Climate Accord, and at a conservative estimate give or take a few dollars, it amounts to between approximately $25 to £30 Trillion dollars.

What this amounts to is a global welfare programme for the global fossil fuel industry, and a few crumbs from the well-endowed table of neoliberalism for those who’ll be worst affected the coming ravages of global warming.

Note the astonishing irony of all of this: the industries that have primarily caused, are still causing, and will continue to cause climate change, are the recipients of huge subsidies. Whilst the marginalised are promised a paltry and relatively insignificant amount to mitigate and adapt to the consequences of the problem they did little or nothing to bring about.

Amongst those consequences: Arctic sea ice and land-based glaciers are melting; sea-levels are rising threatening coastal regions where most of world’s population lives; and ocean acidification is now critically disrupting aquatic ecosystems. Additionally, global warming increases both extremes of the earth’s water cycle, which will mean two things: one, more heatwaves and droughts because of a warmer atmosphere, and two, a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapour, so more extreme rainfall.

Not a bad government hand-out for the fossil fuel industry, given their primary role in all of the above.

2015, we were told, was to be a defining year for finally getting to grips with the challenges, and implicitly the failures and impacts of global economic development. Last September we had the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in New York, and then in December in Paris, there was a global agreement, of sorts, on tackling climate change, COP 21.

The SDGs, although not without some merit, has its focus on the eradication of extreme poverty by 2030. Yet nowhere in the final text, or in the conceptual thinking underpinning the goals, is there any mention of wealth accumulation and hoarding, and conspicuous overconsumption by us in the rich world, as primary causes of the mass impoverishment of the world’s poor.

In short, the central focus is on eradicating poverty in developing countries. Not on taxing wealth & income equitably, or even cutting back on our consumption levels.

Instead of this “global wish-list”, as a friend of mine who works in the development industry calls it, we should focus on and reveal the structural causes of poverty. By revealing these causes, we will reveal the global architecture that allows it to continue.  Global poverty in the 21^st century, just like climate change, is created and caused by economic and social systems. Neither are “acts of god”.

Take global tax havens for example. While billions are siphoned off into off-shore tax accounts by transnational subsidiaries, SDG 17.1 boldly states  the importance of supporting “… domestic resource mobilization… to improve domestic capacity for tax and other revenue collection.”  

It is actually relatively simple to achieve more revenue collection. If large corporate entities would stop profit shifting billions into off-shore subsidiaries in the world’s tax havens where they pay little or no tax, away from national treasuries in developing countries, at the industrial scale they are currently doing it at, a sizable part of poverty could be addressed.  In turn, poor countries could then spend their tax revenue on health, education, sanitation, and a basic welfare net for the very poor.

This would be one way of shifting the dominant narrative on development, by refocusing at least in part on wealth instead of focusing on poverty ad nauseam as somehow a “natural” part of human existence, to be eradicated as if it was somehow an infectious disease.

In Ireland where I live we should also refocus our development priorities, away from current practices. Take the three following examples.

In a recent study commissioned by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, it was reported that in 2012 US multinationals “profit shifted” $100 billion in income to Ireland as a means of lowering their tax bills. All mostly legal, although obviously not ethical.  Yet even a small percentage of this figure if taxed adequately, through a global financial transaction tax for instance, could build thousands of schools in poor countries.

Secondly, in 2014 at the UN, Ireland voted against the establishment of a set of principles which are designed to work towards a multilateral legal framework for sovereign debt restructuring processes. Given what we know about odious debt inflicted upon developing countries-for example, the World Bank & IMF structural adjustment policies and the onerous conditionality clauses attached to them, the removal of price controls on staple foods for instance, was it really in the best interests of the world’s poor for Ireland to oppose such a potentially progressive move? 

Is it also in their best interests for Ireland to act and behave as a tax haven?    

And thirdly, on the domestic front, we now have a new government ministry called the department of Communications, Climate Change and Natural Resources.

This now means that the ministry tasked to hold Ireland to its COP 21 obligations of lowering emissions is also responsible for granting offshore exploration licences for oil and gas in the seas off Ireland’s coast. The companies involved in the latest round of licensing options include ExxonMobil & British Petroleum, companies at the forefront of billions upon billions of gigatonnes of carbon emissions in recent decades.

This surely doesn’t bode well for Ireland’s commitment to “embrace the transition to a low carbon and climate resilient future”. In a recent government  paper on energy policy, it was posited that Ireland’s low-carbon energy future, “means that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the energy sector will be reduced by between 80% and 95%, compared to 1990 levels, by 2050, and will fall to zero or below by 2100.” 95% in 34 years? If this target doesn’t seem feasible, on the face of it, it is because it isn’t.

In fact, if we don’t reduce carbon energy demand and production very soon, Kevin Anderson and others are arguing that we are heading towards 3C or 4C global warming by the end of the century. If so, and it is looking likely, the repercussions will be profound. The 2c figure was always a political compromise anyhow, as is the notion of squaring the idea of sustainable growth with our current economic and industrial orthodoxy. 

Anderson is critically questioning, as any good scientist should be, of the popular narrative on climate change and he is unequivocal on the implications of his findings. Essentially he is saying there is a widening gulf between “the soaring political rhetoric” and the frightening realities of rapidly escalating greenhouse gas emissions. He is flatly contradicting much of the received analyses and conclusions, and the “magical thinking” around climate change. Essentially he is saying rapid reductions in fossil fuel emissions are needed right away if we are to avoid a future few of us can really imagine.

Instead in the Paris Agreement (COP 21) we have: an “aspiration” to limit global warming to 1.5C, but with no plan to achieve it; INDCs (intended nationally determined contributions) are voluntary and “non-punitive” and aren’t even sufficient to curb a 2C rise much less a 1.5C rise; extraordinarily, aviation and shipping emissions are exempt; and perhaps most importantly of all no concrete date has been set for peak carbon emissions, never mind even zero emissions. And, in the whole 32 page text, there is not one mention of fossil fuels.

The dominant development narrative is at best piecemeal and only incrementally effective, if we are to seriously face climate change-with all its terrifying tipping points and feedback loops-and global poverty, then we must urgently rewrite the narrative, and more importantly, the processes and drivers underpinning this narrative.

The Author:

Mark Kernan is a writer, commentator and part-time lecturer at University College Cork, Ireland on issues relating to globalisation, development and human rights. He has a Masters in International Human Rights and is one of the Ecologist New Voices contributors

Slowly and steadily a growing band of farmers and environmental activists across the UK are turning back the clock, and rather than fattening their cattle in feedlots, keeping their chickens in overcrowded sheds, and transporting sheep in cramped trailers, they’re letting them roam free. They are taking back the countryside. They are letting them eat grass.

One man is leading this momentum-gathering revolution to “get back the food we deserve”. Known foremost for his behind the scenes work on Radio 4’s long-running farming series The Archers, as both scriptwriter and agricultural advisor, Graham Harvey is now taking centre stage to shout about the benefits of grass-fed animals.

Leading a new movement entitled “Wild and Beautiful,” Graham hopes to educate and inform in a fun and engaging way, bringing the message of naturally-reared, grass-fed and pasture-raised to a wider audience.

Graham advocates eating less, but more healthy meat. In his latest book Grass-Fed Nation: Getting Back The Food We Deserve, he reiterates what we already know – that modern methods of farming are damaging to both our own health and that of the planet. The over-use of chemicals and pesticides has degraded our soils, and growing high yielding, starchy crops has wiped out whole eco-systems of diverse plants and grasses across swathes of countryside.  Graham claims it’s also led to an increase in “modern diseases” – including Alzheimer’s, diabetes, depression and some cancers.

The Grass-Fed Nation movement asserts that grazing animals solely on grass will give our planet its best chance at a healthier future. Graham explains: “Grazing animals play a key role in regulating the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere through the use of soil as a carbon sink. It’s a natural process that has been going on for millions of years. Yet unaccountably we have decided livestock should be imprisoned in sheds and yards, while we ruin the life of our soils to feed them.”

In Britain only a small percentage of farmers follow this grazing method. America is quite literally leading the field, and coined the term “grass-fed”. With its vast open plains, many American farmers understand the benefits of mob grazing, where cattle are moved daily onto fresh pasture. One of the best known advocates of this grass-fed process is Virginia-based Joel Salatin. His farm, Polyface, is described as “America’s premier non-industrial food production oasis” with an aim to “develop emotionally, economically, environmentally enhancing agricultural enterprises and facilitate their duplication throughout the world.”

Seeking to become Britain’s next Joel Salatin, and joining forces with Graham to promote grass-fed and support Wild and Beautiful, is Somerset-based farmer and Nuffield scholar Oliver White. Founder of Farm2Fork, Oliver’s farm near Ilminster produces 100% grass-fed meat and pasture-raised poultry. His cattle and sheep follow a mob-grazing method. This gives the soil a chance to recover, and ensures the animals get the very freshest grass. The mission here is also to take grass-fed mainstream.

Oliver says: “Ruminants evolved to eat grass and little else. This is a beautifully simple way to produce meat, and when done well this method of production has far reaching benefits. It’s not only been shown to produce a healthier meat from a happier animal, but it benefits the natural environment too, building soil life, soil organic matter, and increasing whole farm biodiversity.

“Science shows that meat from ruminants fed a pasture-only diet is healthier, with lower​levels ​of saturated fats, a healthier balance of omega 3 to 6 and higher levels of vitamins A, E​, and ​C​onjugated Li​noleic ​A​cid (CLA) known ​for its cancer-fighting properties.”

Currently you’d be hard pushed to find 100% grass-fed products in the supermarkets, so producers tend to use direct selling. Labelling is confusing and as consumers we are often tricked with false promises. If livestock spends just 51% of its time eating grass then it can be sold as “grass-fed”. The only guarantee that you are buying 100% grass-fed products is to look for the certified “Pasture for Life” mark, provided by the Pasture-Fed Livestock Association (PFLA).

There is a huge difference between meat that is exclusively grass-fed, and that which is finished on grain, explains PFLA director Sara Gregson: “Once animals come inside and are fed grain, all that goodness disappears in a matter of weeks. Most farmers that say their animals are grass-fed are actually finished on grain, so all those benefits are gone. Ruminants were never meant to eat grain. They actually get ill from it; they get a disease called rumen acidosis.”

Graham and Oliver hope that by spreading the grass-fed message wide, we will choose to return to a sustainable, healthy way of farming.

Oliver says: “In my eyes the future can only be grass-fed. The world’s population​ is​forecast to grow to 10 billion by 2050​, and with the pressure this puts on food production, we’ll no longer have the luxury of being able to continue to inefficiently feed grains to ruminants which could otherwise be fed to humans.  

“​Feeding ruminants pasture and pasture alone is the only truly sustainable way to produce meat and milk, and with much of the world’s surface capable of growing pasture and little else – what better way to use it?

“It must be accepted that a grass-fed only production system will not likely be able to meet the world’s current and growing demand for meat and milk, so we also need to start to eat and drink far less – perhaps just what we need.”

The ball is rolling; the PFLA is just one of 84 organisations including Compassion in World Farming and Food Matters to sign a letter to new UK Prime Minister Teresa May stating that Brexit Britain needs to invest in common sense policies that are good for farming, the environment and public health.

Graham’s Wild and Beautiful movement is gaining momentum and we may start to see cows grazing in our British fields once more. He says: “Without wishing to sound like a dangerous revolutionary, it’s about giving power back to people; that most basic power, the power to reclaim the foods evolution prepared us for. At its heart it’s all about democracy.”

Laura Briggs is an Ecologist news reporter

A week ago Northumberland council gave planning permission to a new open-cast coal mine at Druridge on the coastline just north of Newcastle.

About 3 million tonnes of coal will be extracted over a five to seven year period from an area of around 350 hectares, including storage space. (350 hectares is about 1.4 square miles)

The environmental objections to the plan are striking. For example, the owners predict about 170 HGV movements a day along local roads during the whole lifetime of the project. The landscape impact is also severe although the developers say they will ensure that the local sandy beaches are unaffected.

But what about the benefits of the energy produced? How do they compare to using the land to generate electricity from PV? The answer is surprising.

Burnt in a coal-fired power station, the coal extracted from the mine will deliver only about twice as much electricity as would solar panels installed on the same site over their lives. The UK could get the same energy from the sun on only twice as much land as the coal mine, with very low emissions and limited environmental impact.

Comparison of energy production: the coal mine

1. The total output of the mine is going to be at least 3 million tonnes of coal. Higher figures are sometimes quoted but these seem to relate to the original mine, now with planning permission, plus several extensions that are not in the current plan.

2. Coal of the type produced at the mine will yield about 8,000 kWh per tonne. (This number is approximate).

3. So the total energy value of the development will be about 24,000 million kWh, or about 24 terawatt hours. (A terawatt hour is a thousand million kWh).

4. Burnt in Drax power station in Yorkshire, the energy value of the coal will be converted to electricity at an efficiency of just less than 40%. The total coal output of the open-cast mine will therefore produce between 9 and 10 terawatt hours of power, or about 3% of one year’s UK electricity output. Let’s call this 10 TWh.

5. The operation of the mine and the shipment of the coal by heavy good vehicle and rail will subtract from the net energy value of the coal produced. But the percentage impact will be quite small – perhaps no more than 5% – so I have ignored it.

A PV farm on the same site

6. The open cast site consists of an area of about 250 hectares of mined land and approximately 100 further hectares that will be used for storage and shipment. The total is about 350 hectares.

7, A tightly packed solar farm of around 170 megawatts capacity could be accommodated on this area. It would last about 35 years. Future improvements in panel efficiency would increase the amount of power available per unit area. I have not included this.

8. A solar array of one kilowatt facing due south in the Newcastle area will typically produce just over 900 kWh per year. Allowing for losses in the system, the figure may fall to around 850 kWh per year.

9. The total annual output of a huge solar farm on the open-cast site would be about 0.144 terawatt hours a year. Over the estimated 35-year life of the farm, just under 5 terawatt hours would be produced, assuming a slow rate of degradation of panel performance.

The coal from the site will therefore produce about twice the energy from PV on the same area. Put another way, the same amount of electrical energy would be produced on a 700 hectare solar farm as from the 350 hectare mine.

Editor’s note: Of course the lifetime of the solar farm is not strictly limited to 35 years, even if the performance of the solar panels will have degraded by then. Given the ever-falling cost and improving efficiency of solar PV, the panels would very likely be renewed at that point or sooner while retaining other infrastructure elements, and the lifetime of the solar farm extended at modest cost to 70 years or more.

Other considerations

a) Vehicle movements

10, The vehicle movements at the coal mine will be about 170 HGV lorries a day over the five to seven years of active mining. The total number of deliveries of PV panels will be 2,000 lorries, or less than 2 weeks of coal movements. For the remainder of the 35 year life, a PV farm would need virtually no large lorries. At the coal mine, there will be one vehicle movement every four minutes for seven years during a 12 hour working day.

Costs

11. A 170 MW solar farm would cost about £140m today. The total projected local expenditure by the mine owner is said to be £70m. This figure includes permanent employees and the chain of local suppliers. But the costs involved in converting the coal to electricity are not covered. These missing numbers include the money needed to run the power station at which the coal is burnt. This would probably add at least another £30m (or circa £10 a tonne of coal produced).

12. Electricity suppliers have to pay a tax on their output. The carbon support price imposes a £18 levy per tonne of CO₂ emitted when power is produced. This tax is meant to penalise the fossil fuel producers to compensate for the damage CO₂ is doing to the global environment, although it is widely regarded as being substantially lower than the true cost of coal. Burning a tonne of standard coal produces about 2.3 tonnes of CO₂. The damage caused by the mine in terms of global warming is therefore judged by the UK government to be over £120m (3 million tonnes of coal times 2.3 CO₂ multiplier times £18).

13. The total cost to generate the 10 TWh of electricity from the coal will therefore be around £220m. A solar farm on the same site would cost £140m to generate half as much power or £280m to equal the coal power output.

14. Solar power is therefore currently just over a quarter more expensive than the coal from Druridge mine. Druridge has good quality coal close to the surface and near to railway connections. It is therefore perhaps the cheapest fossil fuel available in the UK.

If instead of using land in northern England, the country invested in an equivalently sized solar farm on the south coast where yields might be 25% higher in the very best locations, solar power in the UK would now offer electricity at the same cost as cheap coal.

Chris Goodall is an expert on energy, environment and climate change, and a frequent contributor to The Ecologist. He blogs at Carbon Commentary.

This article was first published on Carbon Commentary. His new book on the global rise of solar PV and energy storage, The Switch, was published last month by Profile Books.

Home to the continent’s largest remaining area of old growth forest, Romania has, for 25 years now, been great news for any European who wants to see bears and wolves and lynxes and would rather not fly.

But those forests were never just for eco-tourism: they were good news for Romanian cabinet-makers, too, until about 10 years ago.

Since then, Romanian exports of timber have more than doubled, while Romanian government figures show that the country’s exports of wooden furniture have undergone a mysterious decline.

The explanation is an Austrian company and self-styled ‘green leader’ Holzindustrie Schweighofer, which began operations in Romania in 2003. Its gigantic sawmills and factories now have the capacity to process all the softwood harvested in the country. (And senior management figures at the company have been filmed stating that their ambition is to do exactly that).

As well as timber, its facilities also supply ‘bio-energy’, in the form of briquettes and pellets, to well-meaning customers across Europe.

Hijacking the ‘restitution’ process

But there is a longer story to tell about this. From East Germany to Czechoslovakia, from Hungary to Bulgaria, environmentalists played a crucial role in the undermining of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe.

It’s a story we ought to know much better than we do. Communist Romania’s Ceauşescu regime was so severe that such activism was not possible until its fall. Since then, Romanian civil society has had everything to learn.

Schweighofer understood this only too well. It could rely from the start on the collusion of politicians eager to welcome investors on almost any terms. The Austrian company was able to both dictate the price it paid for timber and hijack the ‘restitution’ process, which was supposed to return property confiscated by the communists to its former owners or their descendants.

Legal owners vs corporates

By 2010, however, more land was being requested for restitution than had ever been confiscated: according to a report by the Washington-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), which has conducted a three-year study in Romania, Schweighofer’s proxies have been directly connected to many fraudulent claims.

Previous owners with genuine rights to their former land, meanwhile, are still mired in legal disputes. A new law, further weakening control of this process, was passed in 2013, signed into effect by Viorel Hrebenciuc, a politician indicted in one of the largest restitution scandals of the last 25 years.

The Romanian parliament has sought to restrain the company and rebuild its furniture-making industry through a new forest law, passed last year, though not without lobbying by the Austrian embassy, and threats by Schweighofer – not, thus far, realised – to disinvest. Even so, for many Romanians this new law is too lenient.

The lucrative business of managing national parks

No account of this can ignore the bizarre hybrid that is Romsilva. Both a government agency and a private company, Romsilva oversees the auctions at which permits to cut trees are sold and administers the country’s forests, 28 national parks included. It also negotiated the terms of Schweighofer’s entry to Romania’s timber market.

Potential conflict of interest? Romsilva doesn’t do things by halves. Its profits multiplied by five between 2008 and 2014. And it earns five times more from timber extraction inside parks and other protected areas than it spends on managing them.

Schweighofer publicly decries corruption. It has conceded that “irregularities” may have occurred, which in some cases it has claimed were due to “typing errors”. The company’s website “guarantees” that it “never knowingly” buys illegal wood. Yet when EIA investigators with concealed cameras posed as timber merchants offering to cut more than was allowed, Schweighofer managers responded that there was “no problem”.

The company has since argued that these remarks were taken out of context.

Tracking illegal shipments

Environmentalists have estimated that somewhere between 30% and 50% of the wood harvested in Romania is now done so illegally.

The Romanian journalist Gabriel Paun – also a leading environmentalist – followed a shipment of wood from inside a nature reserve to the gates of a Schweighofer mill. He explained the origin of the wood to the guards, and was pepper-sprayed for his pains.

When I asked Romanian forestry officials about this, it was darkly hinted that Paun had been “pushing his luck”. Other journalists investigating the country’s timber industry have also been threatened.

There would be plenty of darkness to dwell on here if it were not for the response of countless concerned Romanians. Thousands of people occupied the ancient beech forest of Retezat to defend it from loggers. Protesters have turned out in their hundreds of thousands in cities across the country.

Directia Nationala Anticoruptie, the anti-corruption agency, has uncovered a thriving trade in faked logging permits, signed in each case by the local Romsilva bureau. Some 27,000 phone calls were made when a number was set up at the Romanian ministry of environment to enable members of the public to ask about the status of any shipment of wood seen on the road. A quarter of shipments reported were illegal.

A ‘woodtracker’ app will allow the same online. NGOs have organised press conferences in Vienna calling on Schweighofer and the Austrian government to respect European timber regulations.

Taking action of all fronts

Schweighofer, in turn, claims that its Romanian forests are all sustainably managed. This is both quite true and breathtakingly cynical. The company sources just 2% of its wood from forests it owns, which are FSC-certified. But 98% of its wood is sourced from forests it does not own, via roughly 1,000 suppliers, many of which are under investigation.

When a team of scientists surveyed one of the company’s “sustainable” forests, at Campusel, they found, even there, clear-cutting, poaching, a new road 32 metres across and large drums of chemicals lying about. Their findings were published in the Romanian Academy Journal. It has been requested that FSC certification be withdrawn. WWF-Germany has lodged its own complaint against Schweighofer with the FSC.

The effort, then, is on all fronts. Evenimentul Zilei journalist Vlad Stoicescu’s 2015 essay The World of the Woodcutters was awarded a national prize. Stoicescu travelled over 1,000 miles, talking to foresters and timber merchants, many of them “not proud of what they do”. One of the most striking passages in his essay is about the fear, the blackmail, the threats of violence. But he reports also on the inspections of their factories, under the new law, by government officials.

From the street and YouTube to literary magazines, science departments and the national parliament: Romania has had a lot of learning to do on the environment. It has, by now, something to teach us, too.

Horatio Morpurgo writes on European environmental and literary topics.

This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, July/August 2016. A version of this article, with links to reports on Romanian Forestry, can be read on the Resurgence website.

As you’ll realise every time your phone runs out of juice, batteries have become fundamental to how we communicate.

When Elon Musk launched Tesla’s home battery system one year ago, he promised “a fundamental transformation in how energy is delivered across the Earth”.

He is now building a ‘gigafactory’ in the desert with an ambition to manufacture more batteries by 2020 every year than the whole world produced in 2013.

Musk isn’t alone. Big names from Gates to Dyson are now competing in a billion dollar race to discover the next lucrative breakthrough that could revolutionise the energy system.

The technology is changing fast. The cost of lithium-ion batteries – the most common type – plunged by 53% between 2012 and 2015 and are predicted to half again by 2019, according to energy analysts IHS. It’s estimated that storage could help to bring about a saving of £8bn to British consumers, secure energy supply for a generation and meet carbon targets.

But what would this ‘fundamental transformation’ look like? We put the question to some self-confessed battery geeks.

We could run our own mini power stations – and sell electricity to our neighbours

“This is the future”, claimed Welsh householder Mark Kerr as he proudly unveiled his Tesla home battery system in February this year – the first of its kind to be installed in the country – which allows him to use the energy from his solar panels when the sun isn’t shining.

By enabling householders to use their own supply 24 hours a day, cheap energy storage could be “the final piece in the global energy transition puzzle”, to use the words of top financial ratings agency Standard and Poor’s.

The public could then become not just energy consumers, but energy producers, like Kerr, with each home effectively running their own individual power stations.

Widespread take-up of batteries could even see neighbours trading electricity between themselves, says Dr Jill Cainey, director of the Electricity Storage Network, which brings together organisations that deploy, design and research storage:

“I’m not suggesting that you would be sitting there on your front lawn selling electricity. You’d do it all through smart technology. You would set the price you’re willing to buy at and sell at and there would be a local agent who would look after that for you.”

This could save money for consumers and carbon emissions because the 7-10% of electricity wasted in transmission through long centralised lines that connect them to the grid would be saved.

In fact, individual consumers are already starting to trade with each other via sonnencommunities – an online network in Germany that enables those with battery systems to trade energy with each other – but as users are not based in the same physical locality they don’t stand to benefit in this way.

It could bankrupt the National Grid and lead to rising inequality

Battery geeks call it ‘the death spiral’. As more and more people go off grid, spurred on by the potential of storage to provide them with electricity day and night, the National Grid faces a rising problem – who will pay the costs of their system? At the moment these costs are incorporated into our energy bills.

“We could become lots of isolated units looking after ourselves and the burden of the wires and transformers will fall on those less able to invest so the costs will be spread over fewer and fewer people”, says Cainey.

The prospect of the death spiral could upturn the way we pay for our energy. Instead of paying a flat rate on the energy you consume, in the future we could instead pay a one-time ‘insurance fee’ to connect to the grid for the times when our personal energy systems experience a blackout, if plans being mooted by energy regulator Ofgem become reality. And spell big trouble for the Big Six.

“They can’t continue to operate on the business model they currently have”, says Cainey. As more and more people start to produce their own energy, she adds, large-scale generators are losing custom to individuals and communities who are going off-grid.

This is already causing them problems. In Germany, where community energy projects are more common, energy prices went negative during a particularly sunny and windy May day and firms had to pay consumers to use electricity.

“You could think of big six as being the dinosaurs of the electricity industry. They’ve either got to evolve very rapidly or they will become extinct. The real driver is that we can now generate electricity ourselves and the role of batteries is to maximise the amount of our generation we can use”, adds Cainey.

It could also fight fuel poverty

It might seem that those with less money have far less to gain from the great future battery revolution. But if somebody can be found to purchase the infrastructure, it could help poorer people to save significant amounts on their energy bills.

In the former coal-mining town of Stanley in County Durham, this somebody has arrived in the form of a partnership between the local authority and a start-up called North Star Solar, which has the former CEO of RWE Npower at its helm.

In the first project of its kind, last month the town’s 35,000 residents became the first to be offered solar panels and a home battery system, free of charge. Combined with the effect of replacement LED lightbulbs, the systems are expected to cut residents’ energy bills by a fifth.

Renewable installations have long been an attractive proposition for social housing providers, who are to commit to longer contracts and have the incentive to tackle fuel poverty. There are around 45,000 solar panel installations in the UK, according to estimates by the Solar Trade Association.

“The current market for batteries is people more like me – white, middle-class, middle-aged energy geeks”, says Arnout Andrews, managing director at Adecoe, which supports energy projects in the social housing sector.

“Now social housing is starting to catch onto the idea. For these people it means delivering affordable warmth. They struggle with their energy bills. They just haven’t got that money.”

But there might not be enough materials to go around

There is always a catch and, in this case, it’s not an environmentally friendly one. Lithium is the best known material used for batteries today, but the substance has also been linked to the use of child labour in conflict zones and poses a significant risk to natural areas such as Bolivia’s salt flats.

And if we start to use it on a much wider scale, one day we might run out, says Dr Jacqueline Edge from the Energy Futures Lab at Imperial College:

“Lithium is not a very abundant element on the earth’s crust so a lot of research is being done into other chemistries to see if we can replace lithium with sodium, which is very abundant and cheap. If lithium starts to run out the price would go up considerably but if we could switch to another material we might not have that problem.”

Sodium isn’t the only other option for battery storage, especially when you look beyond the level of the individual consumer. Other technologies are vying for attention, from pumped hydroelectricity, which is already commonplace, to compressing air in underground caverns.

Another promising technology is to use surplus renewable electricity from wind and solar to produce hydrogen, a valuable fuel and feedstock. Cars that run on hydrogen – the world’s most abundant element – which are now starting to enter the mass market.

The hydrogen can also be converted in ammonia (the energy dense raw material for nitrate fertiliser, currently made from coal or gas) and methane (the main constituent of natural gas) for long term storage, to be burnt as a renewable fuel in homes, factories, vehicles and power stations.

“We need to consider the system as a whole”, says Edge.