www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/07/world/europe/eu-loggi…
When the bloc began subsidizing wood burning over a decade ago, it was seen as a quick boost for renewable fuel and an incentive to move homes and power plants away from coal and gas. Chips and pellets were marketed as a way to turn sawdust waste into green power. Those subsidies gave rise to a booming market, to the point that wood is now Europe’s largest renewable energy source, far ahead of wind and solar. But today, as demand surges amid a Russian energy crunch, whole trees are being harvested for power…
Forests in Finland and Estonia, for example, once seen as key assets for reducing carbon from the air, are now the source of so much logging that government scientists consider them carbon emitters. In Hungary, the government waived conservation rules last month to allow increased logging in old-growth forests…
The industry has become so big that researchers cannot keep track of it. E.U. official research could not identify the source of 120 million metric tons of wood used across the continent last year — a gap bigger than the size of Finland’s entire timber industry.
Estonia has its own fossil fuel for heating and power:
Estonia is the only country in the world that uses oil shale as its primary energy source. In 2018, oil shale accounted for 72% of Estonia’s total domestic energy production and supplied 73% of Estonia’s total primary energy. About 7,300 people (over 1% of the total workforce in Estonia) were employed in the oil shale industry. The state revenue from oil shale production was about €122 million.
But today, as demand surges amid a Russian energy crunch, whole trees are being harvested for power…
On a related note…
http://www.euronews.com/green/2022/06/07/this-european-count…
With vast ‘snow’ forests spanning 75% of the country, Finland has great natural advantages to help it on its way. Protecting these forests is key. New figures from Statistics Finland show that they turned from being overall carbon stores to emitters for the first time last year. This means they are releasing more CO2 through deforestation than the remaining trees could absorb.
These countries are probably well suited to tree farming. Ie, ok as long as trees are replanted and given time to grow.
Biomass generally may be best alternative to fossil fuels in generating electricity. The goal should be to optimize solar yield for each plot given soil, rainfall, temperature range, etc.
Charcoal briquettes are made by gluing together powdered charcoal with starch. The same technique can make pellets out of any dry plant material including sawdust, grass trimmings, and maybe waste paper.
When the bloc began subsidizing wood burning over a decade ago, it was seen as a quick boost for renewable fuel and an incentive to move homes and power plants away from coal and gas.
EU limits subsidies for burning trees under renewable energy directive www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/14/eu-limits-subsid…
Voting on an amendment to the EU’s renewable energy directive, MEPs called to “phase down” the share of trees counted as renewable energy in EU targets. But they swerved setting any dates to reduce the burning of “primary wood”. They rejected calls for a complete phaseout of a form of energy generation that scientists have warned releases more carbon into the atmosphere than burning gas or coal.