Balcas demand distorting firewood prices?

[difflock]

http://energy.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/2252910/?UserKey=#ixzz1NRZeXSDH

Perhaps this has already been posted?

Cheers

M

[Alycidon]

Seems you have to register to access the page.

 

Balcas are the major suppleir of wood pellets into the UK market, pellet prices have risen from £130 to over £200 a ton since late 2008.

 

A

[difflock]

Erm,

I dont think I am "registered", an it opened for very non computer literate:blushing: me

PS

I got the link from the Greenbuildingforum

[davetaz]

I managed to open it easily

 

Quite scarey really. May be small scale operations like mine won't be able to afford to buy in timber and sell it with a profit at all - in which case not worth doing - and all my customers will have to burn something else in their new log-burners!

I guess also that wood pellets may take over from logs, in which case these companies will have a complete monopoly and charge a fortune for their product.

At this rate wood fuel will more expensive than any other fuel - and that is what most consumers are really concerned about - costs. At the moment woodfuel is slightly cheaper than gas/oil/electricity and happens to more "green" which helps it sell. Customers can feel good about burning logs - so long as it is affordable!

Once it reaches a certain price the "green credentials" of burning logs won't matter to most domestic consumers

[firewood]

I have been told that price pressure from the invergordon plant has indirectly caused the closure (next october) of the kinnoir sawmill not 2 miles from me.

 

by way of illustration that money talks....

 

a small privately owned wood had 2600t extracted less than a mile away from Kinnoir mill. where did the wood go? to invergordon approx 90 miles away.

 

so even with all that haulage it was still more worthwhile to ship it there. crazy.

 

 

what i want to know is why balcas get a subsidy to run wood for miles and miles, burn it to turn it into electricity then sell the electricity to power domestic heaters when i can cut out most of the inbetween stages by selling firewood directly into the customers grate! worst of all they are charging me for the priviledge via my electricity bill.

 

Governments north and south of the border pay lip service to small business but the reality is that they love getting into bed with big corporate enterprises. I may be wrong but i think the invergordon plant is part owned by the local council.

 

I have yet to notice any affect on hardwood prices locally but softwood prices are definitely trending upwards.

[firewood]

where is all the pellet going?

 

is it power generation or large scale heating?

 

I know a stove retailer near me and he says he hasn't sold a pellet system in ages....to expensive compared to an ordinary log burner in capital cost and ongoing fuel costs. so i suspect that it is not domestic demand

[firewood]

difflock

 

where are you based?

[difflock]

North Co Antrim,

near the source of the best Whiskey in the world:001_tt2:

One reason I posted was that back when the grants were on here in N Ireland for to install wood fired heating systems.

Balcas , or their agents/subcontractors, appeared to "fiddle" the grants in that the consumer who was meant to pay 50% up to a preset limit, got it for 0.0%

Cos if one installed a pellet burner & undertook to buy Balcas pellets for 5? years, it was a completely free installation.

It may however have been completely kosher in that Balcas stumped up the consumers 50% up front.

Wonder how that is going down with consumers locked into a contract to purchase, and inflating prices?

Hmmmm

I fitted a log burner, I paid my 50%

Edited June 1, 2011 by difflock

[Big J]

The difficulty is that the UK needs a pellet processing plant, but not at the expense of other timber producers.

 

The UK is a good way behind the remainder of Europe in terms of full utilisation of timber for a building's primary heat source. My uncle in Germany has a fully automated pellet fired central heating system in his house near Trier, and has done for the past 8 years. It's a fantastic system - the hopper is refilled once a year, piped in from the truck parked in the street. There is little maintenance and the efficiency is much higher than that of any other form of timber combustion. Additionally, transport costs are reduced, as are handling costs and so on.

 

As a country, we just have a marvellous ability to screw the integration of almost anything new or novel, even if it's been successfully demonstrated to work elsewhere!

 

Jonathan

[difflock]

Again it was my "understanding" that the Balcas pellets would be delivered by a truck the identical same as the ones that deliver the bulk animal feed.

This may even have happened at first, except the early Balcas pellets were not well enough "baled" ( as is my understanding)and therefore absorbed atmospheric moisture and turned into mush thus bridging in the hopper.

It may be our stinking wet North Atlantic climate had a bearing on this.

They are now , as far as I am aware , delivered in wee sealed 20 kg plastic bags, real enviro-friendly:lol: