Energy, Environment and Sustainability Group
This event brought together the committee on which he sits that oversees the development of standards for the sustainability of bioenergy, PTI/20, and the committee for overseeing the development of standards for solid biofuels and solid recovered fuels, PTI/17.
Given that the role of PTI/20 has been diminishing, given the current process of finalisation of the Sustainability of Bioenergy Standards work, it was proposed that it should be combined with PTI/17 into a single committee and that this would be voted on by the respective committee members later.
PTI/17 mirrors CEN (European Committee for Standardisation) and ISO (International Standards Organisation) activity on solid biofuels and solid recovered fuels. Much of the recent activity on solid biofuels has been to transfer the European standards into international standards with little change to the content of the standards. The ongoing activities in the ISO standards include safety and storage.
PTI/20 mirrors CEN and ISO activity on sustainability of bioenergy. The ISO standards working groups for this have all been disbanded and the CEN working groups have all been disbanded apart from that on biodiversity and environmental aspects.
One of the main benefits of merging the PTI/17 and PTI/20 committees would be to cover bioenergy as a whole and the committee members present were in favour of this change.
It was suggested that bio-based products should be included for consideration by the merged committee (alongside bioenergy for heat, electricity generation and transport), as an alternative land use.
It was suggested at the meeting that other competing land uses (such as food and photovoltaics) may also be included in the brief, but the practicality of this was questioned, in that the sheer number of stakeholders with whom it would be necessary to engage would make the process unmanageable, in particular given the strong reliance on voluntary contribution of time.
The ongoing underrepresentation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on the committees was acknowledged at the meeting. It was recognised that NGOs often struggle to support attendance due to lack of resource.
However, it was agreed that engagement with them should be given another push; otherwise more commercially motivated organisations will be likely to have undue influence on the development of standards towards meeting their own objectives.
Find out more about the Energy, Environment and Sustainability Group (EESG).
The views of the writer do not necessarily represent the views of the Institution.