Sustainable Fuel Register (SFR) co-founders, Kevin Lindegaard of Crops for Energy and Jon Swain of FEC Energy, attended the inaugural meeting of the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) Industry Forum last week. This is a new initiative, coordinated by Ofgem, enabling industry bodies to provide feedback on procedures and documents associated with the delivery of the Domestic and Non-Domestic RHI schemes. This will help ensure that documents are designed with the needs of applicants and participants in mind.
Do you have a biomass boiler? Are you receiving payments from the Renewable Heat Incentive?
If so, you are probably using wood chip or wood pellets as the fuel. However, the potential of using cheaper, alternative non-wood fuels such as straw, miscanthus, waste coffee grain pellets, sunflower husk pellets to name just a few is growing. Many of these fuels are being registered on the Sustainable Fuel Register (SFR), which may make them eligible for RHI payments as long as they meet the emissions criteria for your boiler.
If you own a wood pellet boiler, you are likely to have run into problems finding an adequate supply of wood pellets at a decent price this winter. The reason for this is that the unseasonably warm winter across Europe has restricted timber harvesting. This has had a knock-on effect, causing the residues produced by sawmills (e.g. sawdust, slab wood and offcuts), which are typically used to produce pellets, to be in short supply. As a result, European wood fibre prices have risen and so has the price of imported pellets.