How Polish Biogas Policy Will Not Help Farmers
The impetus for Polish policy supporting biogas has been almost entirely from the stand-point of agriculture (narrowly defined). The Ministry of Agriculture has been the only Ministry taking biogas seriously (the Ministry of Environment seems to forget that biogas has a critical organic waste management role). The vision of the Ministry of Agriculture (until recently anyway) was for small farm-based biogas plants averaging 250 kW in capacity. Ironically, while sacrificing every other biogas application to this vision, the current proposed law does little to help farmers get into the biogas business. Every serious discussion of biogas policy needs to start with how much it actually cost. The Institute for Renewable Energy documented the cost of biogas last July in their report to the Ministry of Economy using multiple sources. Their data were realistic and no one has seriously questioned their conclusions: biogas requires substantially more support than the fl...