UK: Energy hunt turns to straw, woodchips

Energy companies are turning to waste products including wood chips, sawdust and straw to produce light and heat, as soaring oil prices and new climate policies penalize fossil fuels and favor renewables.

Some alternative sources of energy have had a bad press recently, especially as biofuels, meant to replace gasoline, have helped stoke food prices because they are derived from agricultural crops like corn.
Those 500 million pound ($976.9 million) plants would burn one quarter of Britain’s surplus straw, currently ploughed into the ground, and depend on proposed changes to government support, currently under legislative debate, to raise by half again their quota of tradeable renewable obligation certificates (ROCs).

That would almost double revenues per unit of such electricity compared to conventional power and lift annual return on investment in British biomass plants to about 15 percent from 6 percent now, said Williams.

Reuters