You are here: Home | Company information

Biomess

Calor's response to "Biomess" enquiries

Calor supports the Government's objective of increasing the efficiency of energy usage and reducing the amount of Green House Gas that the UK emits. However, the objective of a lower-carbon economy will only be achieved through a range of solutions.

Properly insulated buildings, more efficient heating systems such as condensing boilers, new technologies such as combined heat and power (CHP) & heat pumps and, of course, renewables such as solar, wind and biomass all form part of that mix.

Climate change is a clear threat, and it is always tempting to jump to quick solutions but defining all wood as zero carbon, no matter where it came from, is misguided and an ineffective solution. Biomass certainly has a role to play in reducing carbon emissions (using waste wood from UK sources for instance), but reaching for an arbitrary and unscientific definition of what constitutes zero carbon and then imposing the consequences of that definition on just one part of the UK population - the rural community - is not a policy that Calor can support.

Calor issued its “Biomess” paper because it does not believe its market in the UK should be unfairly prejudiced by the Government's plans to tax rural fuels to subsidise a significantly more expensive and polluting fuel - which by the Government’s own admission most biomass is. The Government's proposed biomass strategy runs the risk of repeating the mistakes of Europe's biofuel strategy.