AEB remains biomass from Spain, municipality can do nothing | Amsterdam
NewsAEB’s biomass power station will continue to burn Spanish wood for the time being. The city council has come to the conclusion that Amsterdam cannot resist this.
When deciding to build the biomass power station, AEB had promised the municipality that only ‘prunings’ would be burned from no more than 150 kilometers outside of Amsterdam. That was the agreement that AEB made in 2018 with the city, which is one hundred percent owner of the AEB shares.
That appointment was not without reason. Biomass from the forests of the Baltic States and the southern United States is been planning for years that this leads to deforestation. There was therefore great indignation when it turned out in February that AEB had supplied wood from Spain after all†
AEB was mainly forced to switch to Spanish wood because little good quality biomass was available in the Netherlands due to the high gas price, and because less construction was done due to corona. Of the two suppliers that AEB prunes until the autumn, they were even forced to stop.
The city council ‘disgruntled’. AEB apologizes because Amsterdam was not involved in the decision and offered to ‘reconsider’ the use of the Spanish wood. But the outcome of this is that AEB sees no other solution. AEB has even started burning the Spanish wood, 2200 tons.
Municipality on the sidelines
That is a decision that the waste company — no longer a municipal service since 2014, but has become independent as a company owned by the municipality — is allowed to take itself, AEB believes. That was also the conclusion of the legal advice that the city council has obtained about this, the aldermen Simone Kukenheim (Participation) and Marieke van Doorninck (Sustainability) wrote in a letter to the city council on Friday.
Besides the fact that Amsterdam has only been the shareholder of the waste company since 2014, the fact that the city AEB wants to sell to the Chinese-Rotterdam AVR† For the sale, it is only a matter of waiting for permission from the competition authority ACM.
Additional research
The aldermen regret that AEB still burns biomass from more than 150 kilometers outside Amsterdam. AEB has offered to continue to search for local biomass and only wants to order new biomass abroad if the supply in the Netherlands is insufficient. The announcements about earlier in The Parool that they not see the biomass market calm down any time soon†
The municipality has commissioned additional research into the biomass supply by consultancy Royal HaskoningDHV. This also raises the question of how much CO2emissions are now actually prevented by burning biomass and what the effect is if it is supplied from afar.
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