Scotland’s green lobby hit out last night after the country’s largest combined heat and power biomass plant was given the go-ahead by the Scottish Government.
Planning consent was granted for the £465million development, which is expected to produce enough electricity to continuously heat the equivalent of 1,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.
It will be built on a 45-acre site at Grangemouth, using wood fuel shipped in from abroad.
Green MSP Alison Johnstone, a member of Holyrood’s economy energy and tourism committee, said the government had made a poor decision.
She added: “Chopping down swathes of foreign forest to burn in Scotland is plain daft. The Scottish Government . . . should instead be supporting genuinely sustainable heat and power at a local level.”
The wood-fuelled plant is being developed by Forth Energy, a joint venture between utility SSE and port operator Forth Ports, after a public inquiry.
Opponents included environmental campaign groups Friends of the Earth (FoE) and Biofuelwatch, which issued a joint statement yesterday.
FoE director Richard Dixon said: “This decision reveals major confusion within the Scottish Government.
“It claims to have a policy favouring use of biomass in small-scale plants, off the gas grid and using primarily local sources of supply.
“Now it approves a massive power station importing over a million tonnes of trees a year to burn for electricity, with no guarantee that Forth Energy will find customers for the heat it produces.”
Biofuelwatch campaigner Emilia Hannah added: “These plans will only cause harm to communities, forests and the climate.”
FoE and Biofuelwatch said the power plant would be supported by nearly £80million a year in subsidies and require 1million tonnes of imported wood annually, which could come from highly-destructive eucalyptus plantations in Brazil.
The facility is forecast to generate up to 120 megawatts of electricity, said to be enough to meet the needs of 92% of the Falkirk Council area.
In north-east terms, that is nearly 65% of the population of the Aberdeen City Council area.
Construction will begin after a year of design and engineering work. It could start generating heat and electricity by 2017.
The project is expected to create up to 500 jobs during construction and a further 70 on completion.
When operational it will supply electricity to the national grid and heat to industrial users, helping reduce their carbon emissions.
Energy Minister Fergus Ewing said: “I have put in place a series of conditions to protect local residents from inconvenience, safeguard the appearance of the area and protect the environment and air quality.
“The conditions to the consent also ensure that the fuel used in the biomass is from sustainable and responsible sources.”
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