Source: BBC Radio 4: Today Programme
URL: N/A
Date: 10/03/2011
Event: Roger Harrabin discusses new cash incentives for renewable heat
People:
James Naughtie: Now the Government's planning to offer cash incentives for people, or indeed for institutions, who generate electricity by burning wood and crop waste instead of fossil fuel, because they are carbon neutral, um, these processes. Roger Harrabin is our environment analyst. So cash incentives, if you use wood-burning stoves and all the rest of it, Roger...
Roger Harrabin: Yes, Jim, and this is particularly for using wood-burning stoves for generating heat. Now you mentioned electricity, and the Government has put huge effort in - according to ministers - into making more electricity renewable. What they haven't done is done anything about heat. And heat, actually, causes more carbon emissions in the UK than electricity does. So this is, some would say, a rather belated attempt to try to get us to have more heat from renewable sources, and they're offering ongoing support over the next four years, for people who put in large-scale boilers that will heat their homes and heat their water. Some will go to private homes, but I think probably the majority will go to things like old people's homes or swimming pools or community centres...
James Naughtie: Because they can benefit from economies of scale...
Roger Harrabin: Yes, and indeed - these things are damn big, as well; you need a lot of space for them, so rural areas will be favoured in particular, I think.
James Naughtie: So, in practice, if you put - let's say you're running a home for older people, for example, and if you put in something that will produce heat from crop waste, wood, and so on, you will get a grant. It's as simple as that...
Roger Harrabin: Yeah, you will have ongoing support for the next four years. Um, I mean, the questions that will be raised by this, by environmentalists, is how sustainable is it, because the Government and the EU tried to get fuel for cars from plant matter, and you saw what that ended in, with all the whole palm-oil fiasco, where we found out we were knocking down rain forests to burn in cars in the UK, which is incredibly controversial. Now the Government's put rules in place, that it says will apply to this scheme, so we're not taking out virgin land. But there's something I noticed from the very start of this debate, which is: there tends to be multiple counting of the amount of land we have. So you speak to the people who want land for forests to burn for heating, and they say: oh, there's X amount of land. You speak to the people who want it for road fuel, and they say: there's X amount of land. And other...
James Naughtie: It's the same land.
Roger Harrabin: ... it's the same land. So we're going to see a lot more debate about this in future, I think - exactly how much land is there. We've got a peak oil debate already, we are moving into a "peak land" debate, I think.