The NFU has reacted with disappointment to the launch yesterday of Defra's plan to boost biogas production from anaerobic digestion.
Accelerating the Uptake of Anaerobic Digestion in England: an Implementation Plan sets out government measures to encourage businesses, local authorities, farmers and food producers to adopt AD technology.
The NFU's Chief Adviser on Renewable Energy and Climate Change, Jonathan Scurlock said: "This plan offers little in the way of new government actions, and is a disappointing end to a prolonged dialogue that Defra has held with us and many other stakeholders about the potential multiple benefits of AD to the agricultural sector.
"The government has yet to establish the right economic and regulatory framework to realise the full potential of AD."
He added: "We have already said that the inadequate Feed-in Tariffs represent a missed opportunity to encourage uptake at the small-to-medium scale, and it is far from clear that compliance with the proposed standard environmental permits will be either cheap or easy. Defra wants to maximise the utilisation of manures and slurries, but this plan will incentivise only the larger AD plants using mostly food waste or silage crops."
The NFU notes that one of the main recommendations of the AD Task Force - to ensure that economic incentives reflected the relative cost of different scales of AD plant - is conspicuous by its absence from the implementation plan. The NFU's own ambition of 1000 on-farm AD plants by 2020 - a key part of last year's "Shared Goals" vision document - seems also to have been quietly dropped from the government's own plans.
No comments have been made.