The yard is piled high with stacks of wood. A local company collects it from the surrounding forests and brings it to the 2-MW gassification biomass power plant at Gussing in Burgenland in Austria.
Biomass supplies Gussing with not only all of its own energy needs, but also allows it to feed surplus energy into the national grid – using only about a quarter of the amount of wood that regrows each year in the local forests.
“We wouldn’t be able to use all the new wood there is out there,” said Christian Keglovits from the European Center for Renewable Energy in Gussing.
About 47 percent of the land in Austria is covered in forest, and it is by tapping its rich timber resources that the country now plans to ramp up the proportion of renewables in its energy mix to meet an ambitious European Union goal, which was set in 2008.
All the European Union countries are required to increase their use of renewable energies by an average of about 11 percent to boost the EU’s share of renewables in the energy mix from about 8.5% today to 20% by 2020.
They’ve also been asked to increase energy efficiency by 20 percent compared to a business-as-usual scenario.
In line with this, Austria has been given a national target of generating 34 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, up from the 23.3 percent today.
To meet the EU targets by 2020, Austria’s final energy consumption should be 1,406 PJ. Of that, about one-fifth, or around 280 PJ, is expected to come from biomass by 2020. In fact, biomass will be supplying more than half of the 519 PJ set to be generated by renewables in Austria, jumping ahead of the traditional hydropower resource.
“If you look at all the countries in the top of the EU table when it comes to producing renewable energy, they all make use of bioenergy. Austria, Sweden, Latvia and Finland all have abundant forests. Bioenergy around the globe has a huge potential,” Kasimir Nemestothy, Austrian Chamber of Agriculture, told RenewableEnergyWorld.com.
Nemestothy recently helped author a policy paper for the magazine Science (March 13th) arguing that America could apply some of the lessons from Austria’s biomass industry to tap its own gigantic bioenergy resources.
Austria’s biomass sector has indeed been growing fast and furious out of the spotlight. In 2005, biomass contributed 176 PJ to Austria’s final energy consumption compared to 131 PJ in 2000.
“Biomass could contribute much more than 280 PJ to Austria’s final energy consumption,” said Gregor Grill from Austria’s Biomass Association, a biomass industry umbrella organization.
Sweden recently floated a plan to increase the country’s share of renewables to 50 percent by 2020, largely by using its biomass resources.
The key to using bioenergy successfully is efficiency, says Grill. First, there has to be logistical and organizational efficiency when it comes to collecting wood, waste and straw and getting it to the biomass plant.
Second, there has to be technological efficiency in converting the wood or straw or waste to energy. To improve the logistics of collecting wood economically, Austria is promoting a decentralized network of small-scale biomass plants rather than large-scale ones.
“The key to bioenergy efficiency is integration and multipurpose use so we can get heat and electricity at the same time,” said Grill.
Austria already has 120 combined heat and power (CHP) plants producing 320 MW of electricity. Grill said some of these CHP plants have a conversion rate of 60 to 70 percent.
More than just a reliable resource, biomass is also flexible.