Canada: Flip-flop on cogeneration policy entrenches a problem for greenhouses
The problem that needed solving was that, while B.C.’s greenhouse industry is large, it’s also fragile and faces intense competition. Plants need tonnes of CO2, which means burning tonnes of fossil fuel to create it, and a carbon tax bill would not only out-weigh income tax savings for growers with slim margins, it might also force many of them under.
The trouble with this particular solution — a blanket exemption — is it provides no incentive to pursue alternatives. It is not an option for greenhouses, as it is for most greenhouse gas emitters, to find ways to simply burn less fuel because they need the CO2, the very thing that triggers the tax. But it seems to me that well-designed incentives could and should encourage creative alternatives such as partnerships with (and probably pipelines from) industries that create CO2 as an unwanted byproduct.
So it is a credit to the province’s greenhouse industry that, even without tax policy incentives, it is pursuing at least one common-sense way to, if not reduce its fuel consumption, then at least generate more value from it. Many growers want to replace the burners they have now — which produce only CO2 plus the heat they use to keep their greenhouses warm and/or take the chill off water used for irrigation — with ones that also produce electricity.
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