By\u00a0Phil MacDonald, Head of Comms at\u00a0Sandbag<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n With a just a sprinkling of biomass, companies across Europe have been greenwashing their coal burning.<\/p>\n By adding sometimes small amounts of biomass to furnaces full of coal, lignite or peat, and harvesting the \u2018renewables\u2019 subsidies this earns them, it looks suspiciously like dirty old power plants have been kept open long past their time.<\/p>\n To reach the \u201cbelow 2 degrees\u201d goal agreed at Paris, the IEA\u2019s modelling shows that unabated coal in Europe must fall to zero by 2030. Any biomass cross-subsidy must be stopped if Europe is to rapidly phase out coal and play its part in avoiding climate breakdown.<\/p>\n Sandbag has investigated the extent of this hidden funding for coal, the full details are published in our report: \u201cSomething Nasty In The Woodshed<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n It is not a small problem: 23% of solid biomass used for electricity generation was co-fired in coal plants in 2015 (the most recent year for which data is available). This is most prevalent in Poland, Finland, Hungary, Denmark and the Czech Republic. Further subsidies are available for old, inefficient coal plants to convert to burn purely biomass, if you include these, the figure rises to 40%.<\/p>\n