Ed Miliband seemed to be quivering with pleasure as he concluded his introductory address to the Future of Energy Security conference in London on Thursday. He brandished a letter from Buckingham Palace. “I want to end with the following message from His Majesty the King that he has asked me to read out to you all: ‘Events over recent years have shown that, when well managed, the transition to more sustainable energy sources can itself lead to more resilient and secure energy systems.’”
I wonder if the secretary of state for energy security and net zero actually needed to look at the letter to recall its message: it will have been composed in the closest collaboration with Miliband’s own office. To quote Patrick Maguire of The Times in January: “Not for nothing did the King recently tell another Labour politician that he loved the energy secretary’s work.”
Lower down the pecking order, Sir Keir Starmer delivered his own message to the international audience, from Azerbaijan to Zambia: “Homegrown clean energy is the only way to take back control of our energy system, deliver energy security and bring down bills for the long term.”
All this guff was swept away the next day by a report from the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on the billions of pounds in subsidies lavished on Drax, the world’s biggest publicly listed “biomass” company, which burns the equivalent of 27 million trees a year in its Yorkshire plant.
At the chimney, the wood emits about 20 per cent more CO2 per unit of energy than the coal Drax used to burn; but under the accounting system that is such a delight for its shareholders and for the government’s “carbon budget”, the emissions are attributed to the geographical source of the energy — in this case, overwhelmingly, the forests of Canada and Louisiana.
The colossal subsidies we give to biomass burning — £22 billion to date — should have excluded “old growth” forests (as opposed to plantations). But in 2022 Panorama revealed that Drax had being using trees from ancient forests in Canada and far from all of its feedstock was, as it had claimed, “waste wood”. This scandal seemed of little concern to the invigilating body known as the Climate Change Committee: one of its members for many years was Rebecca Heaton, who served simultaneously as “head of climate change” … at Drax. The regulator, Ofgem, also seemed to have been dozing, and even after investigating the matter decided that Drax’s burning of trees from “non-sustainable” sources was not a deliberate deception: it fined the company just £25 million — trivial in the light of the £6.5 billion Drax has received in subsidies.
Anyway, on Friday the PAC — nine of whose 16 members are Labour MPs — delivered a report on this whole matter that, for once, justifies that overused term: devastating.
It found the biomass companies had been “marking their own homework” in terms of compliance, that no regulatory body knew whether the wood was actually sustainable, that while the government had promised tougher rules, “neither DESNZ [the energy department] nor Ofgem has a plan for how Ofgem will enforce these more stringent regulations”, that “loopholes that allow Drax to game the system” would persist and that it was unconvinced the extension to the subsidies proposed by DESNZ “is good value for money for consumers” since they were “far more than will be paid to … other renewable generators”.
As the chairman of the committee, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, summarised it: “Billions upon billions of government support has been provided to the biomass sector over the past two decades. Rather than taking it on faith that the woody biomass burnt for energy is a sustainably sourced low-carbon alternative fuel, it is long past time a true assay was made of what taxpayers are getting for their money.”
Who was the architect of this highly extractive business model? Yup, Ed Miliband — whose constituency of Doncaster North abuts the one containing Drax’s plant. When secretary of state for energy in 2008, and author of the seminal Climate Change Act, he pledged to “ramp up” the burning of wood in our power stations, which he said would come from “sustainably managed forests”. No one has done more to funnel public money to fund the dividends paid to Drax’s shareholders, not even the company’s chief executive, Will Gardiner, for all his sumptuous bonuses.
Gardiner was also swanning about at that energy security conference. He, too, is quite pally with the monarch: when Queen Elizabeth died and Charles became King, Gardiner marked the moment by issuing a press release reminding us that “His Majesty … invited me to join the Carbon Capture, Use and Storage task force”. This is all to do with the premise on which the latest extension to Drax’s subsidies is based: that it will make its wood-burning “carbon negative” by burying emissions under the North Sea in abandoned oil and gas fields, and will make this “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage” operational by 2030.
Yet as the PAC also observed: “The deployment of BECCS has been repeatedly delayed, even though it remains a key part of the government’s plans.” Recently, C-Capture, the company in which Drax had invested to develop this process, made almost all its staff redundant; yet this is the technology the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has described as “game-changing” for reaching “net zero”.
When defending his mission improbable in broadcast interviews on Thursday, Miliband argued that by moving away from fossil fuels and relying on “renewable homegrown energy”, the British people would enjoy “greater energy security” as well as “lower prices”. Yet he has recently agreed a 13 per cent increase in what Drax can charge for its tree-burning, and a complete embargo on new oil and gas exploration within the UK’s territory. So we will import the energy source that, in the real world, generates about 60 per cent more CO2 per unit of energy than (British) gas and 45 per cent more than North Sea oil.
Actually, Drax has Miliband over a barrel: because of the government’s hubristic plans to make the electricity grid fossil-fuel-free by 2030, the system on which our existence depends will be far more exposed to intermittent energy (depending on whether the sun is shining and the wind is blowing). And since nuclear has been scandalously neglected by successive governments, Drax will become ever more crucial in avoiding catastrophic grid failure and keeping the lights on in our homes, hospitals and businesses.
So the great subsidised tree-burning boondoggle will continue. It makes a mockery of that phrase in King Charles’s message: “well managed”. There are other terms for it, few of them printable.
