Renewable Energy: Europe is burning US forests for “renewable” energy. Wait, what? - by Ben Adler

If you’re driving through the South and you see a denuded field filled with stubby new plantings where lush forest once stood, the blame might lie with an unlikely culprit: the European Union and its well-intentioned clean energy rules.

In March 2007, the E.U. adopted climate and energy goals for 2010 to 2020. The 27 member countries set a goal of reducing carbon emissions 20 percent by 2020 and increasing renewables to 20 percent of their energy portfolio. Unfortunately, they underestimated the carbon intensity of burning wood (a.k.a. “biomass”) for electricity, and they categorized wood as a renewable fuel.

The result: E.U. countries with smaller renewable sectors turned to wood to replace coal. Governments provided incentives for energy utilities to make that switch. Now, with a bunch of new European wood-burning power plants having come online, Europeans need wood to feed the beast. But most European countries don’t have a lot of available forest left to cut down. So they’re importing our forests, especially from the South.


Of course, wood is in some sense renewable: Trees can be regrown. But in other ways it’s more like fossil fuels than it is like solar and wind. After all, the whole obsession with renewables isn’t just because we fear running out of fossil fuels. It’s because burning fossil fuels produces CO2 that causes global warming. The same is true of burning wood, unlike wind or solar.

Wood accounts for a majority of renewable energy generation in Poland and Finland, and nearly 40 percent in Germany. It is especially appealing to British energy utilities, because the British government offers generous subsidies for renewable energy and its solar industry is not nearly as advanced as Germany’s.
Drax, a major British utility, announced last year that they will convert three coal-burning plants to wood. This transition will bring the company up to 550 million British pounds per year ($912 million) in government subsidies for renewables.

The Economist calls this policy “environmental lunacy,” observing dryly: “After years in which European governments have boasted about their high-tech, low-carbon energy revolution, the main beneficiary seems to be the favored fuel of pre-industrial societies.”

Read more: Europe is burning our forests for “renewable” energy. Wait, what? | Grist