The rain has come just at the right time for anyone thinking about planting Miscanthus this spring. With record breaking temperatures in February and over Easter and wall to wall sunshine, farmland was starting to become worryingly dry. Farmers and gardeners across the UK were metaphorically doing rain dances and thankfully the weather has returned to the seasonal norm in the nick of time.
The Sustainable Fuel Register (SFR) came into operation in February 2017. Anyone using non-wood fuels in their RHI accredited boiler prior to this would have had only one option open to them, to demonstrate that their fuel fulfilled the Sustainability Criteria – Self Reporting.
In order for registrants to meet the Land Criteria, we need to be satisfied that the land on which non-wood fuels were grown was not a protected site back in 2008. For individual applicants who are self-supplying fuels such as straw from their own farm, this is reasonably easy to prove. They simply need to send us land records (e.g. Rural Payments documentation) or a relevant Google Earth image of the land where the fuel was produced. See this previous blog for more information.