Extracts from the Sept-October 2001 edition of Renew
These extracts only represent about 25% of it

9. Waste returns - but not in UK

During the Select Committee hearings on Wave and Tidal Power, Peter Hain, then Energy Minister, indicated his support for waste combustion - possibly prefiguring its readmittance to the Renewables Obligation. ‘I am as enthusiastic a ministerial advocate as you are likely to find of clean energy and green energy renewables. However, I do not think we can afford to avoid taking advantage of the capacity for generation from waste. After all, what else do you do with it? Just fill up the ground and produce, in time, a lot of environmentally contaminated problems as a result and a leakage of methane gas completely wasted. I have had quite a lot of briefing and seen some of the companies that are developing various uses of waste once all the maximum amount of recycling has taken place, which has the potential for producing - and can actually in present conditions produce - very clean gas with either no emissions or limited emissions’.

However, as noted earlier, in the event, the DTI decided not to include waste incineration in the RO.

Meanwhile, the EC and EU Parliament have also been arguing over whether to include waste incineration in the final version of the new EU renewables directive. The compromise offered by the EC was to allow it ‘as long as the waste hierarchy is respected’, and that seems to have won the day. The Directive has now been passed: details in Renew 134. At least so far no one has been talking about allowing nuclear power to be included in the Renewables Obligation or the Directive!