Tom Greatrex – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Energy and Climate Change

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Tom Greatrex on 2014-04-02.

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what estimate he has made of the quantity of biomass consumed by the one per cent of biomass plant that was below 1MW in capacity.

Michael Fallon

We have not made a recent estimate of the quantity of biomass consumed by biomass plant below 1MW in capacity.

However, based on modelling published in the Impact Assessment to the Renewables Obligation Banding Review 2012, we can estimate the theoretical quantity of biomass that would be consumed by 1% of total generating capacity. Assuming all the planned plants were built, this would give a theoretical maximum equivalent to around 150,000 oven dried tonnes per annum in 2016/17. This figure excludes potential capacity changes to plants below 1 MW as a result of the introduction of the 400MW cap for new build dedicated biomass.