Britain has doubled its usage of biomass to generate electricity in the space of a year – despite repeated warnings that the “renewable energy source” generates even more CO2 than traditional fossil fuels.
New statistics from the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) show that plant biomass usage increased from 2.2 TWh in the first quarter of 2014 to 4.3 TWh in the first quarter of 2015.
This is the highest increase for any renewable energy source and means that it now makes up over five per cent of UK energy generation.
Although the British government fully supports plant biomass as a form of “green” energy, there is evidence that it generates ever more CO2 than traditional fossil fuels.
Last year, Breitbart London reported that a group of US scientists had written to Britain’s then Energy Secretary Ed Davey to protest American forests being cut down to supply the UK with biomass wood pellets.
The scientists blamed the soaring demand for the pellets for contributing to the rapid deforestation along with US Atlantic and Gulf coasts and pleaded with Davy to rethink the government’s support for the energy source before large swaths of habitat in the United States were destroyed.
The government’s latest figures attribute the rise to a new generating unit at the Drax power station in Yorkshire. The station has previously been revealed to ship in more than a million tonnes of pellets from America each year, which produces more than three percent more carbon dioxide than coal, and twice as much as natural gas.
The added carbon footprint of shipping the fuel over in the first place means that biomass can generate up to 20 per cent more CO2 than coal.
Despite this, the EU maintains that biomass is a “carbon neutral” fuel, while the UK government – which is committed by law to generate 30 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020 – uses it as a convenient way to meet its targets.
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