Sweet electricity

It looks like people in New South Wales will have electricity produced by burning sugarcane pretty soon, according to this ABC report.

Traditionally farmers will burn their crop before harvest anyway(to get rid of dried leaves and obviously sugarcane itself is not affected by the burning), which created irritating smoke. Starting this season all the sugarcane residue will be burned at power plants newly installed at the State's sugar mills.

Electricity produced by the burning costs twice as much but "of course you have then the benefit of no greenhouse emissions."

This is in fact a misleading statement. It should have been "...the benefit of zero NET greenhouse emissions." No matter where the sugarcane is burned it still emits CO2 (but this new method will capture the burning energy), the CO2 will be absorbed by next year's crop though.