Study casts doubt on farm energy

Environment Secretary Hilary Benn yesterday made a last-ditch attempt to save farm-based power plants running on waste.

Plans to build anaerobic digesters to produce gas on farms and turn it into electricity are being cancelled or shelved all over the country.

Defra whipped up enthusiasm for the digesters as an answer to waste disposal problems and as a promising new direction for rural economies. But everything depended on the feed-in tariff for small-scale electricity generation, which was published in February by the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

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The tariff lays down prices which electricity companies have to pay – and pass on to the customer – for contributions to the national grid.

It is supposed to offer returns on investment of at least 5-8 percent. But it assumes that small on-farm digesters will get their fuel for free.

But manure makes a poor fuel because a lot of the potential methane in it has already been released into the atmosphere. Big digester plants, like those planned at Driffield and Selby, will use food industry waste, which is better and which also earns them "gate money" for taking in waste which might otherwise have gone to landfill.

Farm-based digesters would need some crop such as maize to feed in alongside farm waste and that would bring down profits to the point where no one is interested.

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The York office of national property management advisers Carter Jonas has sent the DECC an analysis that shows a return of only 1.32 percent.

Carter Jonas says: "Clearly this is not an attractive prospect ... we are involved in a number of anaerobic digestion schemes, almost all of which have now been put on hold."

Yesterday, Mr Benn published an action plan headed: Accelerating the Uptake of Anaerobic Digestion in England which sums up existing initiatives, including some funding for demonstration plants and advice, but no new money.

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