Spotlight ’09 is a dazzling Performing Arts Festival to be held on Friday 27^th November to celebrate our diverse cultures and bring the community together. With an expected audience of 500, it is the first time that the festival is being produced on this scale.

Barnsley Council reported yesterday (17 November) that Rocpower Limited had withdrawn their application to build a biofuel power station in Barnsley.

Food Not Fuel would like to thank over 300 people who wrote to the council about this application.

Rocpower may re-submit their application, and if this also includes the large scale burning of virgin vegetable oil, we are again likely to oppose it.

The dates of the planning committee decisions (or boards as they are known in Yorkshire) have been postponed for the proposed Bristol, Barnsley and Sheffield Agrofuel Power Stations. 

 

Rocpower’s Barnsley application will be decided on by the planning board on Tuesday 15^th December.

 

Preliminary dates for the Sheffield’s Rocpower Power Station decision (also to be decided by the planning board) are Tuesday 1^st or Tuesday 22^nd September.

 

The deadline for objections for the resubmitted application for W4B’s Portland, Dorset Power Station is 20^th November.  No decision date has yet been set.

 

W4B’s application for an agrofuel power station in Avonmouth, Bristol will now not go before the planning committee until January 2010.

 

Michael Andrews from Bristol said: “I think our pressure on Barbara Lewis C., Chair of the NW Bristol planning Committee, got [the planning application] placed with the full committee  (previously it was to be considered under 'delegated powers' by officers only).”

Maryla Hart of Food Not Fuel said : “I find it scandalous  that the Bristol 50mw Power Station Application, that would require over 22,000 hectares of oil palm plantations to grow the fuel would have been decided upon by just one or two unelected officers had objections not been put forward.”

 

W4B Renewable Energy had their original application for a biofuel power station in Portland, Dorset rejected by Weymouth & Portland Council on 16th September. In addition to concerns over air pollution and public health in nearby areas. the planning committee were concerned about the impact of biofuels in general and palm oil in particular on the climate, on forests and other ecosystems and on communities in the global South.  This was one of three similar planning applications recently rejected by local authorities in England and Wales.

W4B has now re-submitted plans for the Portland biofuel power station. They have not made material changes to the way the power station will operate. The re-submission simply presents more information to try to justify their original proposals.

W4B still intend to use palm oil as a fuel. More than 10,000 hectares of oil palm plantations would be required to supply this one power station, and even more land if other feedstock was used. W4B have mentioned jatropha as well as palm oil, yet jatropha is not yet commercially available, many plantings are failing, yet thousands of people have already lost their land and livelihood for jatropha plantations to feed Europe’s biofuel market. Peat expert Professor Siegert of Munich University has said about palm oil power stations in Germany: “We were able to prove that the making of these plantations and the burning of the rainforests and peat areas emits many thousands of times as much CO2 as we then are able to prevent by using palm oil. And that is a disastrous balance for the climate.” (tinyurl.com/y9xel3g) Ever more communities in countries like Colombia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Ecuador are losing their land to palm oil companies, with plantation expansion to a large extent driven by Europe’s biofuel policies.

Local residents will be affected by increased levels of nitrogen oxide and small particulates which are linked to respiratory and cardiac disease.

To object to this application please go to http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/w4bnov2009.php

Why growing virgin vegetable oil to burn is crazy  The chief executive of Blue-NG implies he's greener than the Greens – but the argument for his grotesque trade falls flat.  The article contains lots of links to sources.  To read the article click here.

PUBLIC MEETING :Monday, 2nd November, 6.30 pm at the Quaker Meeting House,10 St James St, S1 2EW (near Cathedral tram stop).

Entry is free but we request £2 donation for cost of room. The discussion will be about a  biofuel power station application by the company Rocpower.

Almuth Ernsting from Biofuelwatch will attend the meeting to discuss the implications of Rocpower's plans to build six agrofuel power stations in Yorkshire.  She will also share experience of campaigns against different biofuel power station applications.

Background:

Hargreaves Services, through their subsidiary Rocpower, are planning to build six agrofuel  power stations with a total capacity of 60 MW across Yorkshire. One of them is planned in Ecclesfield, Sheffield.  The planning committee will make a decision during November or December.

Their Wakefield Power Station has already been approved and they are also planning to build one in Baraugh Green in Barnsley.

The company appear to intend to burn virgin (ie not recycled) vegetable oil.  Their Sheffield application does not mention any particular type of vegetable oil, however another similar application of theirs which has been approved in Wakefield clearly states that they intend to burn palm oil.  Given that all the fuel will be supplied through another Hargreaves subsidiary, it seems likely that palm oil will be at
least part of the mix in Sheffield, too.  Three other vegetable oil power station applications have recently been refused by local authorities (Ealing, Newport, Portland), amidst concerns about the impacts on the climate, on forests and peatlands, on communities including indigenous peoples, and on food security.  Air pollution and public health impacts played a role in those three decisions.

A new Food Not Fuel group which is based in Yorkshire will hold their first meeting on Thursday 29th October at 7.30pm.  The meeting will be held at The Common Place, Wharf Street, Leeds.  For a map click here

For more info contact Tim on 07896 592392.
 

Monday 12th October, 6.30 pm
At DECC (Dept of Energy and Climate Change), 3 Whitehall Place, London

Photo-op at 12.30 – 1.30 pm

Called by Campaign against Climate Change, Biofuelwatch and Food not Fuel



This was a lively demonstration with a great atmosphere! Good speeches from Kenneth Richter from Friends of the Earth, Rupert Read from the Green Party, Maryla Hart from ‘Food not Fuel’, Phil Thornhill from the ‘Campaign against Climate Change’, Amancay Colque from Coordinadora Latinoamericana. and also John Stewart from HACAN who chipped in with a few words about agrofuels as the 'long game' of the aviation industry. Also great music from, Pete, Mark, Chris et al!

Half way through there was a great moment when the Latin American contingent from Coordinadora Latinoamericana arrived on the last stop of their long day of actions in solidarity with indigenous people on this 'Day of Protecting Mother Earth'.

More photos from the evening are here. Earlier in the day there was a photo-op at the same place, the photos from the shoot are here.
 
So what was the demo about ? Well........

The government is using renewable energy subsidies (Renewable Obligations Certificates – or ROCs) to fund power stations that use agrofuels.
While the UK’s only significant wind turbine factory has just been closed up to twice as much subsidy is going to producing power from agrofuels than from onshore wind.

Agrofuels - biofuels procuced using intensive agriculture - are a a major driver of deforestation, in turn, a major cause of climate change. Agrofuels from palm oil in particular are accelerating the burning of Indonesian forests and underlying peat bogs with truly astronomical emissions as a result.

In Italy and Germany there are already large numbers of agrofuel power plants and almost all of them use palm oil because it is by far the cheapest feedstock. It is pretty certain that agrofuel power plants in the UK will follow the same economic logic.

Burning palm oil is probably the most environmentally damaging and climate negative way to produce power and yet this seems to be what the government wants to subsidise!

This is a story about the maddest energy scheme the world has seen since Ferdinand Marcos built a nuclear power station on a geological faultline. As I write, councillors in Newport, south Wales, are sitting down to decide whether or not to approve a new power station that burns vegetable oil. It's one of several being considered in the UK. These plans owe their existence solely to government policy.

When I say vegetable oil, I mean mostly palm and soya oil. The developer of the Newport plant, Vogen Energy, has admitted that these oils will form at least part of the mix. So has W4BRE Limited, the company hoping to receive planning permission for a similar plant at Portland in Dorset in the next few weeks. This isn't surprising, as they are the cheapest sources of vegetable oil.

They are also the most destructive. The world's soya frontier is the Brazilian Amazon, where great tracts of rainforest are being trashed to produce oil and meal for western markets. Palm oil plantations now threaten to destroy almost all the remaining rainforest in Malaysia and Indonesia – even reserves such as the famous Tanjung Puting national park in Kalimantan, which is currently being wrecked by planters. Oil palm threatens the extinction of the orang-utan, Sumatran rhino and at least one sub-species of tiger. It is driving tens of thousands of indigenous people from their homes. But, maddest of all, it produces far greater greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels.

A report for Wetlands International shows that every tonne of palm oil results in up to 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, or 10 times as much as petroleum produces.

A paper published in Science suggests that when tropical forest growing on peaty soils is cleared to plant palm oil, it would take around 840 years for any carbon savings from burning this oil to catch up with the emissions caused by planting it.

After these plants were challenged by the small but very effective campaign group Biofuelwatch, the two companies started backtracking, suggesting that they might use other oils, not just palm oil and soya oil. But if they receive planning permission, there would be no means of enforcing this – no means, in other words, of preventing them from using the cheapest feedstocks to supply their power stations. And even if, out of the goodness of their hearts, they decided not to use either of these sources, it's doubtful that this would make any difference. As Carl Bek-Nielsen, vice-chairman of Malaysia's United Plantations Bhd, remarked: "Even if it is another oil that goes into biodiesel, that other oil then needs to be replaced. Either way, there's going to be a vacuum and palm oil can fill that vacuum."

The fact is that all these plants would be burning food to produce power. Even if the Newport scheme were to use rapeseed oil (which still produces more greenhouse gases than fossil fuel, though it's not nearly as bad as palm or soya), Biofuelwatch calculates that the land required to grow it could otherwise have fed 35,000 people. As the government's environment department, Defra, now says that food security is one of the major issues the UK faces, this is madness squared. Last year the World Bank calculated that biofuels were responsible for 75% of the inflation in the price of food.

But already the UK's first vegetable oil power station – Blue NG's plant in Beckton, east London – has been approved. Blue-NG doesn't use palm or soya oil, it says it uses UK sourced rapeseed oil. Thanks to a powerful campaign by local people and the group Food Not Fuel, Blue NG's attempt to build a similar one in Southall, west London, was thrown out last week by the council, though the Greater London Authority could reverse that. There are several more in the pipeline.

So why is it happening? For one reason: the government awards double renewable obligation certificates for power stations burning vegetable oil. In other words, you harvest twice as much taxpayers' money this way as you would for generating the same amount of electricity with a wind turbine. None of it would be happening if it weren't for this perverse incentive, which the government justifies by defining sustainability so narrowly that it excludes the greenhouse gases caused by clearing land to grow the oil. Ed Miliband's department is responsible for this. Over the next few weeks I hope to discover how the hell he justifies it.