Assessing the sustainability of bioelectricity supply chains

Large scale biomass power plants can make substantial contributions to the carbon savings needed to address the challenges of climate change. However, it is important to ensure that they also perform well across a broad range of sustainability issues. The rapidly evolving political and legislative agenda has resulted in a number of different sustainability reporting frameworks being developed for different bioenergy systems in different counties. Most of these give general consensus on the ecological principles applied, but there are some differences in approach and scope. Whilst many aspects of sustainability can be effectively managed using existing assessment methods and certification schemes, the differences in reporting frameworks can make it difficult for developers to objectively assess every sustainability aspect of all the links in their supply chains. This paper identifies the key challenges in assessing sustainability within that context. RES has carried out such an assessment of some theoretical but plausible supply chains, using the Cramer framework and this paper gives indications of some of the key considerations that arise from that assessment