FAQs

Government sounds a bit ambivalent about it:

Here's what Chapter 5 of the RHI announcement says

Use of energy crops

As stated in the Waste Framework Directive, Government policy is to specifically deliver an increase in energy from waste through AD. We recognise that, at farm scale, some energy crops may be required in combination with slurries and that such crops can be grown as part of the normal agricultural rotation. Furthermore, there is land available which is not suitable for the production of food crops but which may, therefore, be used to supply energy-crop only AD plants.

It is not our policy, however, to encourage energy crops–based AD, particularly where these are grown to the exclusion of food producing crops. If evidence shows that there is a large scale use of crops in AD and a resulting conversion or change in land used for crops to support AD, then measures will be considered to address this. DECC and Defra will discuss how such a mechanism could work in practice. The Government will, therefore, be investigating possible measures to exclude from RHI support, the large scale use of energy crops in AD.