The Federal Government and the Greens have announced that the carbon price package prevents native forest woodchips being counted as a renewable energy fuel.

 

The end of native forest biomass comes after Parliament debated the Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI) legislation. The CFI allowed the woodchip industry to burn chips from native forests for the production of electricity and count this as renewable energy, and native biomass generators would have been able to gain a financial subsidy in the form of Renewable Energy Certificates.

 

The future of a proposed biomass power plant generating renewable energy certificates from burning woodchips at Eden, on the NSW south coast, is now uncertain.

 

The plant's operator, South-East Forest Exports, said it had received no hint of the decision before the plan was made public.

 

The Wilderness Society said the amendment of the renewable energy target was a recognition that logging should not be justified as a source of fuel for power stations.

 

''For us, this is an anomaly that has been sitting in the system now for about eight years,'' the society's national campaign director, Lyndon Schneiders, said.

 

Native forest biomass companies will be able to sell large-scale generation certificates (LGCs) under the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act.