Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

That is the point where someone bring up photos from almost 100 years ago and make comparison photo of today and notice the obvious: there is a lot more trees in the old photos.

Most of your points are verifiable _facts_, so there is no discussion to be had there. However, the _why_ is an important point that you didn't mention.

If these 'bio-mass' operations are so obviously illogical and unstainable why are they pushed so hard?

The large portion of these operations are old coal plants and incinerators. These are effectively wood chip burning furnaces that managed to reposition themselves through lobbying and marketing in order to ride the 'green' wave and be labelled as 'renewable' on paper, enabling them to collect massive amounts of tax payer "green" funding to pay for operational costs that could never be profitable otherwise.

This is a case where you have old polluting businesses trying to avoid bankruptcy by grabbing "green" funding.

PS: Things I've read in the past from astroturfers on this topic:

- It's "renewable" because we plant trees that capture carbon (not at the rate that you need to burn it to break even).

- It's reclaimed wood (marginal volume compared to forest wood).

- We also burn organic waste (doesn't burn as hot as wood chips).

- It's wood from responsibly sourced forestry (which you transported across oceans from Canada, Malaysia and Brazil).

- It's not sustainable now because we haven't started replacing local forest with fast growing trees (this would absolutely kill local woodland bio-diversity).

Every time there's a thread on the topic, I like to share this fantastic realtime map of the carbon intensity of electricity production in various countries :

https://www.electricitymap.org/map

As I write this, the UK's intensity is 326 gCO₂eq/kWh, which is nothing to write home about.

This is better than the worst European offender (coal-loving Poland : 652g) as well as Baltic countries, the Netherlands and Germany (373).

But it's far from the best in class : Nordic countries (around 20-30, thanks to hydro) or for a more comparable country, France (around 60, thanks to nuclear)

Germany is interesting because it consistently has one of the worst carbon intensity figures of all developed countries, in spite of a record-setting share of renewables that its green activists like to boast about, and hundreds of billions of € in subsidies poured into them in the past 20 years.

That's of course the consequence of its decision to phase out nuclear power in the early 2000s. Wind/solar are intermittent and there's no way around that (battery storage isn't nearly mature enough).

That leaves 4 options for handling the base load : nuclear, hydro, gas or coal. Only 2 of those are low-carbon. And if you don't have the geography for hydro (like the Nordics do) but still decide to go nuclear-free for political reasons, guess what you're left with ?

IIRC, German coal power plants have 7 spots in the top 10 worst air pollution emitters across the EU. Coal-related air pollution causes an estimated 10.000 extra deaths each year across the continent. Radiation caused one direct death in Fukushima. Thanks, Die Grüne.

To be fair much of Scotland used to be covered in forestry and has been denuded. There are some interesting projects showing what happens if the land is simply protected from over grazing (particularly by deer).

As for grid scale storage, the Tesla battery in Australia is 185Mwh, or roughly a 10th of the amount of power the UK receives from France in an hour as a result of their overproduction of nuclear power. It's a drop in the ocean compared to what would be needed to get us though a stormy night when the offshore wind shuts down in high winds.

Pumped hydro is great but is hugely dependant on topology. There are some interesting developments like liquid metal batteries that might one day answer the storage problem but none which have demonstrated the scale required to go completely free of carbon emissions.

I think load shaping will probably play a larger part than most people give it credit for. There are some interesting developments, including solid state circuit breakers, which could be switched on and off over a network to reduce the load or to take advantage of over capacity of renewables.

(note, not defending Biomass)

While Biomass should not be treated as 'renewable', the key difference between burning biomass versus coal is that the inherent carbon in biomass could be treated as a cycling of carbon that already exists in the carbon cycle (assuming where it is harvested is then replanted with trees, which many of them are) - versus the burning of coal (or any other fossil fuel) which takes 'stored carbon in the ground' that has NOT been part of the carbon cycle for millions of years and increases the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere & the overall 'natural carbon cycle'.

So - 'in the fullness of time' (decades) it is 'carbon neutral'.

But the tragedy in Biomass is not just the destruction of forests as you mention (sometimes old growth) or the loss of an active carbon sink - the carbon dioxide is still released and will be sitting around when we least need it to - it will still warm the planet.

Hopefully, the EU and other countries will abandon the Biomass retrofits and jump ahead to accelerated Solar, Wind and Energy Storage deployments.