Mr. Charles Shier:

We have been talking to Teagasc on the research it has been doing at Oak Park in Carlow on a range of different crops that could perhaps have multiple products and markets. Part of it would come into a biomass direction. One of the problems is that woody materials are suitable for the power plants from a chemistry point of view. For example, a lot of people planted miscanthus in the past, even before the scheme got going here. We ended up burning some in the early days to help out people who were stuck because there was no market. However, miscanthus is a grass and the chemistry of grass does not suit boilers and tends to corrode them. We have to be careful how far we go from woody material in considering grass or other types of material because the chemistry is simply wrong and does not match.