ORGANISERS OF last night’s Producers’ Forum in Mold should have checked their diaries before proceeding with the event: for goodness sake, didn’t they realise a Champions’ League semi-final was being played?
No matter. Duty called and, as it transpired, the meeting was thoroughly constructive. Five speakers were lined up and, with apologies to the others, I was particularly struck by the final address - even if Chris Morris did go on a bit when everyone was eyeing up the buffet.
He’s one of four partners at Farm Renewable Environmental Energy (FREE), a start-up company which was hoping to build an anaerobic digestion (AD) plant at Richard Tomlinson’s dairy farm at Holt, Wrexham.
The plans have been scuppered, thanks to one of the “three Ps” that every putative AD developer dreads - politicians, planners and power companies.
In this case it was Wrexham’s planners, who took a dim view of plans to import food waste from the industrial estate (including, bizarrely, 25 tonnes of unwanted mayonnaise each month).
Instead it looks as if the plant will have to be sited on the industrial estate, despite the extra carbon this will generate. The plans go before councillors in the next few days.
I’ll spare you the science, but Chris convincingly expounded AD’s merits - especially when compared with energy producing alternatives such as wind power. Yet it was apparent that the three Ps have yet to catch up with the technology.
For example, Mid Wales AD pioneer Clive Pugh has just installed a second AD plant at Bank Farm, east of Newtown (the first was put in place 17 years ago – long before most people had heard of global warming).
All he needed to do was connect his digesters to the national grid so he could sell surplus electricity.
For this he had to install new three-way cabling through under-ground pipes. Easy, thought Mr Pugh, I’ll pull them through with my tractor.
Not so fast, said his power company. We'll do it with our special Bobcat.
The Bobcat duly arrived on a trailer (a month late) and got stuck in a field. So Mr Pugh attached his tractor and dragged the Bobcat which dragged the cables.
Mr Pugh was billed £36,000 for the work.
