Internal Moy Park emails suggest one benefit of RHI could have been worth as much as £100m to it

In a detailed email to senior colleagues in June 2014, Moy Park manager David Mark discussed a proposal for incinerating poultry litter on farms.

However, he said that “due to current legislation on RHI it would in no circumstances be economic” because “NI has different large scale RHI allowances”, in comparison to GB.

Mr Mark said that the firm marketing the poultry litter system had been “very open and helpful” in explaining the savings from moving to a hot water heating system – and he stressed that the “significant saving due to improved bird performance” applied regardless of whether the system was fuelled by litter or biomass.

He went on: “These numbers were very impressive and reassuring and reflect some of the savings we are seeing and some of the savings we hope to achieve...this saving indicated a £0.02 saving per kilo live weight produced.”

Based on Moy Park’s output every year, that would equate to an annual saving of about £5 million just as a result of birds’ performance improvement – and that does not appear to take into account the fact, as revealed in yesterday’s News Letter, that Moy Park then cut the amount which it paid its farmers for the heat they needed, something which made yet more money for the company.

Over the 20-year life of the scheme, that would have equated to about £100 million.

Mr Mark also made clear that Moy park was analysing RHI closely, saying that it was “pressing ahead with biomass....with 99kw boilers (RHI max size to optimise payback) – this has robust economic justification”. Among those to whom the email was sent was Tony O’Neill, who was both a senior Moy Park Executive and the chairman of Stormont’s Agri-Food Strategy Board.

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