h/t Breitbart – The Times reports that a badly designed British biomass subsidy has led to a gold rush of people cashing in, by heating empty buildings.
Taxpayers face £1bn bill over green energy subsidy scandal
A botched green energy scheme that has ignited a political crisis is on course to cost taxpayers more than £1 billion.
The Treasury faces the bill after a massive overspend on subsidies encouraging farmers and businesses in Northern Ireland to run eco-friendly power schemes. The Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) was supposed to cost £25 million in its first five years but the bill is likely to reach £1.15 billion over 20 years.
The Treasury can claw back £490 million from the block grant to Northern Ireland, leaving £660 million to be financed by taxpayers in England, Scotland and Wales. The scandal threatens the future of Northern Ireland’s first minister Arlene Foster, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). She was the minister responsible when the scheme was set up in 2012. It was intended to boost renewable energy, but critics say Mrs Foster and her officials did not cap costs.
Businesses that signed up could receive £160 from the government for every £100 they spent on fuels, such as wood pellets, burnt in biomass boilers. As people spotted the gains to be made, there was a surge in applications and costs spiralled.
Flaws in the scheme were exposed by a whistleblower who said businesses were buying biomass boilers solely to collect the subsidy. The whistleblower alleged that one farmer expected to make £1 million over 20 years for using a biomass boiler to heat an empty shed, while heating a number of empty factories would net their owner £1.5 million.
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Read more (Requires Free Registration): http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/61055f62-d132-11e6-b721-fbd88801f92d
To me this farce illustrates the utter chaos of British green energy politics.
Clean air laws passed in the 1950s discouraged use of biomass and coal for heating. The laws were widely ignored when I lived in Britain, pretty much everyone on my street had a coal burner, to try to escape skyrocketing gas and electricity costs. But the laws are nevertheless still on the statute books, and I have heard they are rigorously enforced in really high density urban areas.
Now thanks to this botched subsidy, businesses in Northern Ireland are being paid so much to burn smoky biomass fuel, mostly imported from the USA (Britain doesn’t have enough forests to keep up supply), that it is worth their while to heat empty buildings, just to collect the subsidy.
You couldn’t make it up.
Credit where credit is due it was the BBC Northern Ireland that first highlighted the problem. Stephen Nolan did a piece before Christmas on the whole sorry story of politicians who didn’t understand what they were doing being taken in by green zealots and subsidy junkies. If memory serves correctly at one point in the programme someone says the only people who didn’t see the problem were the politicians and civil servants running the scheme.
It was only broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland late in the evening and fortuitously I happened to see it whilst scrolling round looking for some news.
Available on the iPlayer for a few days for those with access
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b088p3l6/a-nolan-show-investigation
Eric Worral says: “The laws were widely ignored when I lived in Britain, pretty much everyone on my street had a coal burner,”
Is that supposed to be some sort of evidence-based conclusion? Some people in the one street had a coal burner so he can draw the conclusion that the law was ‘widely ignored’? Amazing! As someone who has lived in more than ten different places in the UK over the past 70 years I can say that Mr Worrall’s conclusion is way off mark. And what’s a ‘coal burner’, anyway? People used to have coal fires in their houses. Nowadays houses are built without chimneys and have been for some time. Mr Worrall should have a look at some old photographs of towns (where most people in the UK live) in the days before the Clean Air Act and compare them with photographs taken after the Act was passed.
He probably means coal bunker along with an open fire with a back boiler. I know many of the older houses I lived in in the UK had one, heck I even remember having to fill and use a coal scuttle! As you say, new homes do not have open fireplaces and chimneys any more and rely on gas fired central heating or electrically powered heating (Night storage etc).
My parents home had a coal bunker.
It was an outside building about a metre high by about 1.75 metres wide and 1 metre deep. The coal men delivered the coal pouring it in through an opening at the top. There was a door on the facing side which was probably about 30 by 30cm out of which my Dad (or I) would shovel coal into a bucket to bring into the house.
My grandparents had a cellar. One part of the cellar was devoted to storing coal. The coal man would pour the coal through an opening at the side of a path that led around the house. This opening allowed the coal to be dropped into the cellar, where a small mound of coal would be formed. My Grandparents then had to go down into the cellar each day to fill a bucket (well several since they had coal fires in all rooms apart from the kitchen) to bring it upstairs to feed the fire(s).
I think that this statement is probably not correct, and is based upon a misunderstanding of the market place.
Of course many people had coal fires, but the coal that was being sold and used changed when the Clean Air Act came into force (and it is even possible that the Act was phased in, in different areas at different times, such as city metropolitan areas compared to rural counties). Smokeless coal was introduced, and was the only variety that an ordinary purchaser/householder could reasonably obtain. This was cleaner to handle (being more like round brickets), but never worked as well as the ‘real’ thing.
Of course, if people had stock piles of the old traditional coal, no doubt they used that up before buying the new smokeless variety that was being sold.
As I understand it, the “coal” emissions were burnt out of the coal to make “smokeless coal”, like charcoal? Just not done in cities. But yes I agree, the clean air acts of that time did improve air quality.
I guess the UK is a big place. At least 3 out of 4 houses on my street burned wood and coal, or more precisely briquettes. Coal was good for overnight, kept burning longer.
Agreed, long burning coal over night heated water for the morning and the house. Was borderline in the 70’s in my recollection, it was cold all the time, ice on windows etc.
The UK is about as big a Victoria, Australia. New South Wales is just over 3 times that, and bigger than Texas, US. And like with most Australian conurbations, we huddle the coast.
You could not make this up if you tried.
Biomass creates far more CO2 than burning coal! So not only is this costing a ridiculous amount of money, it is adding far more CO2 than would be the case if energy was being produced by coal (let alone gas which produced even less CO2 than coal).
Thus the Government has produced a policy that has resulted in increasing CO2 emissions. Well done! Do these guys never think? Wasn’t this result obvious and entirely foreseeable. heads should roll, and every MP who approved the legislation and scheme should be made to repay the tax payer.
It is about time that there was real accountability in Public Office.
Wood pellets are renewable, thereby within the mantra of the Idiocracy. Never mind the CO2 they produce, renewalbility is all that matters.
Are they shipped to the UK with ships burning wood pellets?
>>Are they shipped to the UK with ships burning wood pellets?
Aye, Lad. She is called the Titanic II, with 24 double-ended boilers all fed with wood pellets. And we expect she will have a long and illustrious career on the high seas. Oh, wait a minute….
R
Not only that. Doomsday prophets are protecting Earth by burning its lungs.
Nevermind photosynthesis. Children will not know what a tree is.
Children won’t know what oxygen is……
This reminds me of when some Spanish solar panel owners found that they could make money by running diesel generators to run electric lights to shine on their solar panels at night. Spain lost billions and it’s solar power industry has collapsed because it was nothing more than a stupid, misguided prayer from the beginning. Industry and employment have suffered. Massive transfers of money flowed from the lower and middle classes to rich people and system gamers. And idiots like Griff say things like “HELL YES, give us more of THAT!”.
Greenie policy has elements of the Theater of the Absurd. Pretending to “save the planet”, which itself is a ruse, they do way more harm than even the “good” they pretend to do. As usual, the winners are those able and willing to game the system, profiting off the backs of everyone else who wind up paying higher taxes, higher energy bills, and higher costs of everything they buy. It is a perfect storm of idiocy, lust for power, corruption, and greed. In another time, Greenies would be tarred and feathered, and rode out of town on a rail.
Good sales Managers know, be careful what you compensate for, smart people will optimize their payout.
I live here in Northern Ireland and the brown stuff has really hit the fan over this disgrace. Nobody wants to take responsibility for it and it’s a real farce. Something our children will have to pay for.
And with calls for Arlene Foster to resign over the ridiculous mess, she cries ‘misogynists!!’.
Typical.
v’