>It isn't just the UK government who were hoodwinked. The pellet plant itself is the same scam. It originally told the Canadian government it would convert waste from nearby mills into pellets. "At least 95%" of the pellets would be from sawmill waste, free money for the Canadian economy. Except oops, turns out that wasn't quite true. Almost immediately they needed to import waste from further afield, and then they found a much cheaper option, instead of paying to haul waste from other mills just buy whole trees. Soon the majority of the "waste" for the pellet plant was perfectly good logs.
Citation please.
There are more economically fruitful things to do with "perfectly good" logs than sell them to the nearby chip plant let alone the one far away.
The Canadian company ("Pinnacle Pellets") which was set up to do this no longer exists. Guess which company bought them... Did you guess their main customer, Drax? Because that's correct.
What's left, at least on my first attempts is one lonely page of Drax's site:
> There are more economically fruitful things to do with "perfectly good" logs than sell them to the nearby chip plant let alone the one far away.
No need to "sell them" at all. Drax owns the logging outfit, the pellet company and the converted coal plant in the UK to burn the pellets. It is converting Canadian forests into cash in the UK, any "prices" which exist internally are notional and don't represent actual money anybody actually paid for anything.
Now, that UK plant gets paid market prices for electricity, which is currently a very reasonable (by recent standards) £115 per MWh, which is equivalent to if you were charged about 12¢ per kWh before anybody pays their overheads or makes a profit. But earlier today it was £439 per MWh. But, on top of those prices, it also get a green subsidy because it persuaded the British government that this is just waste you see, it's not chopping down perfectly good trees, they're waste and so this is carbon neutral, see ?
Somehow Drax was profitable when prices were about £45 per MWh. So, now their income from burning the same amount of wood is more than double, sometimes closer to ten times what it was, and yet you think there's no incentive for them to do the thing the documentary showed they are doing ? Why?
Edited to add: Here's a news release from the acquisition
> There are more economically fruitful things to do with "perfectly good"
at current energy prices in Europe? not necessarily.
but it should be easy enough for Canada and/or the UK & EU to get to the bottom of this. after all they have some customs enforcement, so they know what goes out and comes in on the ships.
Citation please.
There are more economically fruitful things to do with "perfectly good" logs than sell them to the nearby chip plant let alone the one far away.