GOVERNMENT RESISTANCE TO BIOGAS REMAINS A MYSTERY
Randy Mott
Vice President, Polish Biogas Association
There is hardly
anything unkind ever said about biogas by the Polish Government. It remains a
major part of the national plan for 2020 renewable energy goals. It helps solve
many of the environmental issues surrounding organic waste and has been
highlighted by the Secretary of State for the Ministry of Environment when the
new auction law was introduced in November. Biogas has a flat-line, stable
electrical output and can actually be built to match the 24-hour electricity
demand curve.
But somehow none of the biogas industry’s
concerns about the new law ever get addressed. We are ignored almost
entirely. This treatment is puzzling to say the least, since the Polish
Government expects biogas developers to invest billions of PLN in new biogas
plants.
The fixation of
the Government remains the small farm-based biogas plant which has many merits,
but is hardly the only biogas approach worth promoting. The facts show
that most existing Polish biogas plants and those in planning are over 1 MW in
size and do not fit into the niche that the Ministry of Agriculture wants for
everyone in the sector. This is because
of the hard economics of biogas that dictate the best financial results in the
1-2 MW size (a size precluded from being built at all by the proposed law which
will place these plants into competition with wind farms and co-firing solely
on a cost per MWhr basis). This larger
size is also essential to support the additional equipment and procedures for
safe environmental and health operations with many wastes.
Due to the fact
that Poland cannot afford to provide the very high support payments that
Germany used to develop its farm biogas sector (30-40 Euro cents/kWhr), it is
imperative that a more reasonable approach be used to get the biogas output to
somewhere near the Government’s target. That requires that Poland allow all of
the substrates which the European Commission Joint Research Center determined
last year were technically appropriate for biogas, especially the organic waste
substrates (which can improve the economics without higher government support).
The biogas industry has been making this argument for over two years and no one
is listening. This includes household
and restaurant food wastes, green cuttings, enzymes and additives up to 2%, as
well as incidental amounts of sewage sludge (which can be safely treated in
thermophilic biogas plants as done in other countries). If the Ministry of
Agriculture does not want these wastes in farm-based plants, then the law should
add a “co-digestion plant” category regulated by the Ministry of Environment to
get the job done. The substrates
need to be defined in the law itself and they need to be as broad as
technically feasible.
Instead of a
dialogue on these subjects, there is no discussion of the issues at all. These issues are all accepted by the
biogas sector, local government organizations, NGOs and agricultural
associations. The only “hold-out” is the national government (for reasons
that remain unarticulated). Time is running out and the Polish Biogas
Association has submitted a detailed set of amendments to the language of the
November draft as well as a fully-referenced justification for the changes.
Unless someone in government picks up the issues, the biogas sector will never
achieve anything like the government’s targets and will remain acutely
under-developed in Poland for years to come. In years to come, when many local
residents get higher bills for sewage sludge disposal and organic waste
management there will be a readily-identified culprit. These issues will be featured in the next
local elections.
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