Forestry
February 7, 2008 1:24 PM
By Jim Hume MSP
By Jim Hume MSP
Thank you Presiding Officer. Forestry is of course a major player in Scotland's economy, especially in the South West where the Local Enterprise Company, soon to be demised, has specialised in Forestry innovation. We have seen there the new E-On plant, producing electricity from locally grown willow. Something I'll come back to later.
The forestry industry, like all others, is living in a dynamic world. And therefore needs do change and the key to any industries advancement is innovation. Now that can simply be finding new markets for old products, which you'll have to compete on the World market for. Or better still is new products for emerging markets.
And renewable energy is an emerging market -Something I have studied on the Continent - about ten Years ago I visited East Tirol to see their Community Heating Plants using local forestry waste products to produce hot water. "Warm Baths from Brash". The first plant I saw was in a rural location, which fed 300 disparate houses off a mains supply of hot water. That main at worst loses 1C in an area where I have seen snow in August. The fuel was simply brashings and bark, chipped to a regular size and naturally dried. If you went into that plant with a cigarette the alarm for smoke would go off, so clean is the emissions as carbon residue was all filtered out before it escaped into the atmosphere.
Better than having 300 different boilers running at different levels of effectiveness. Or Oil and Gas being transported in from who knows where to warm those homes and the profits of that heat going, not just out of the community, but also out of the country.
The other Plant I saw on that and subsequent visits was in Lienz, the Stadwarme Plant. Lienz at the bottom of 3 valleys had problems with pollution lying on it and addressed this by their cogeneration plant, feeding warm water for up to 5000 houses and producing around 22 Mw of electricity from Biomass in its two combined plants, hoping to get that up to 75MW soon. All from local wood products with little processing involved.
{Austria, a country of 8.5 million, had at last count by myself over 700 Community District Heating Plants, Scotland can do this too. We should do this too. Its not rocket science, the technology is there already and is there to be improved.} I want to see Scotland at the forefront for Biomass. Not only is it good for the environment, with our Carbon Footprint, its also therefore good for the health of our people and importantly good for the local economy - Money spent on energy is spent locally, therefore not going out of the economy. This also helps people understand where there power comes from if the whole energy process is locally grown.
That's why I put my amendment forward today to strengthen Mr Russell's Motion.
{Mr Russell's Motion mentions the expansion of forestry, I hope this Chamber agrees with me that this is done so as not to exclude others - and done in a way that includes all. I have mentioned before in this chamber the importance of integrating existing land users with any expansion of forestry and I hope the Minister agrees that that is essential? You only have to look at the valley of Eskdalemuir in Dumfriesshire to see the lack of local people working in that now forested Glen.}
We have already seen the early growth of the renewables market in Scotland and this is of no surprise to me. Liberal Democrats made significant progress on Biomass initiatives in the last administration with its £22.5m investment in the Aberdeen Renewable Energy Group for example and with its Biomass Action Plan - when just back in March of last year Nicol Stephen announced an extra £3m for this initiative, taking the grant scheme up to £10.5M. Therefore I call on this government to put effort into progressing the Biomass industry in Scotland and build on the previous administration's Action Plan, Which would help meet their manifesto commitments of decentralising local heat and power grids, for communities.
Presiding Officer I am happy to conclude that I move my amendment in the name of the Liberal Democrats, and look for support across the Chamber for further support from this Parliament for Combined Community Central Heating Plants fuelled by local forestry derived Biomass products, and a continuation of the good work done by the previous administration in promoting Biomass.
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