Vattenfall power plants blocked: actions against biomass | Financial

In the Netherlands, activists are standing at the Vattenfall power station in Diemen, where the bridge to the complex is blocked.

Sixteen organizations demand in a letter to board chairman Anna Borg, in the run-up to the shareholders’ meeting of Vattenfall Group on Thursday, that biomass be phased out ‘in the shortest possible term’. Wood residues are burned in the power plants, but this releases stored carbon, according to the action groups.

Wood should be limited for construction, such as in fiberboard, which retains carbon for a long time.

No subsidy

The Swedish company Vattenfall has previously indicated that it does not want to continue with biomass if there is no support among customers and users. It is still investigating all the possibilities for the power station in Diemen.

The organizations that are taking action today are demanding a halt to all plans to build new biomass combustion plants. In the Netherlands, Vattenfall will receive a €392 million subsidy for the biomass plant that could become the largest in Europe.

The Dutch cabinet has ‘immediately’ stopped providing new subsidies to biomass plants, Minister Jetten (Climate and Energy) and Vivianne Heijnen, State Secretary for Infrastructure and Water Management reported last week. Until then, the plan was to stop subsidies between 2025 and 2030.

In concrete terms, this concerns low-temperature heat from woody bio-raw materials for energy networks, heat sources and greenhouses, and a stop to investments and expansion of heat networks.

deforestation

Jetten says that he is responding to the advice of the Social and Economic Council (SER) and the concerns in the political and environmental movement that the Dutch millions of subsidies contribute to deforestation worldwide.

“But the subsidy cut concerns new installations, while there is no restriction on firing woody biomass in Vattenfall’s current installations such as in Diemen,” said spokeswoman Fenna Swart on behalf of the Clean Air Netherlands Committee.

Until now, the campaigners demanded that subsidies for co-firing imported biomass in Dutch coal-fired power stations should also be stopped. That would be 3.5 million tons of imported wood pellets annually.

Swart: “It involves a lot of tax money with which forests are sacrificed. The combustion of biomass also leads to the emission of ultrafine particles, which is very bad for air quality and people’s health.”

The Dutch Association of Sustainable Energy warned on behalf of entrepreneurs that all forms of sustainable biomass are still necessary. This is the only way to reduce ‘dependence on fossil energy as quickly as possible’. Not using biomass makes achieving climate targets ‘a lot more difficult and more expensive’.

‘Lower emissions’

Vattenfall has fifteen power stations that work with biomass, such as in Lelystad. It states that by using biomass instead of fossil fuels to generate heat in the central area, CO2 emissions are ‘considerably’ reduced.

The use of biomass will be of a ‘temporary nature’, according to the group. “It is possible in the long term to move away from biomass as soon as sufficient other green heat sources have been added to the grid.”

The Clean Air Netherlands Committee has lodged an appeal against the nature and environmental permit issued by the Provincial Executive of North Holland for the power station in Diemen. In April last year, the court ruled that the permits for the construction of the biomass power station in Diemen had been correctly granted.

According to the court in Haarlem, the plans for the biomass plant do not exceed the legal standard for the emission of harmful substances.

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