Concern has been shown over a consultation published by DECC setting out plans to reduce financial support for biomethane from AD facilities. The proposed changes would render biomethane projects injecting over 850KWe to the gas grid each year unviable for RHI tariff support.

The cut-off for this support is the cause of the concern as the all biomethane projects currently in development have projected outputs larger than 850KWe which is deemed roughly half the size of a typical plant.

With biomethane injection projected to generate 15% of total renewable hear deployment under RHI by 2015/16, DECC has suggested plants with more than 2MW capacity will be overcompensated.

Whilst it is accepted that this issue needs looking into, making the tariff available only for very small plants is thought unlikely to maximise the value of biomethane feedstocks by incentivising the construction of facilities with large enough capacity to build the UK supply as well as previously thought.