“Wind has less than 1/10th the energy density of wood, wood half the density of coal and coal half the density of octane.”*
The largest coal generation plant in the UK is transforming itself by converting half of its coal burning generation units into biomass (wood pellets) by 2016.
By that time Drax Group PLC will have three of their six, 660 MW units, converted to biomass and will require 7 million tons of wood pellets annually for fuel. To put a context around the latter number, the information available through research on the Internet indicates it takes approximately 2 ½ tons of forest to produce one ton of wood pellets. One acre of mature forest contains approximately 4 tons of wood, meaning to produce 7 million tons would require about 4,375,000 acres or 6,800 square miles of forest. That amount is equal to clear cutting mature forests 10 times the size of Toronto each year.
h/t James Mac.
Why don’t they burn wind then? At least it’s free.
Yes, and the cellulose of each tree sequesters years of CO2 which is why trees were recognized as ‘carbon sinks’ under the Kyoto Protocol.
So now they’re going to set all that CO2 free by burning wood pellets.
If the Left had a mind, it would reel at this reversal!
“Hugo Drax” was the villain in Ian Fleming’s Moonraker, one of the James Bond novels. Was Fleming a prophet? And I recollect that the action was set in the same region of England, too.
No problems. Turns out they have felled 5 million trees in Scotland to build wind farms and continue to clear cut to appease Gaia by building even more wind farms.
Just cut a deal with the Scots.
Political wisdom?
A source of energy, where the energy cost to manufacture and install the equipment, is not recovered in the life time of the equipment.
But it is free…
When the capital cost is never recovered, except thro subsidy (Theft in other words).
Small wonder that private money does not build many of these white elephants.
Alternative energy and sustainability are progressive speak, for directly robbing the private citizen via their electricity bill.
For rewarding their “special friends” with your money.
Too bad they can’t figure out a way to harness stupidity so intense it burns.
Maybe a couple of tree huggers will take one for the team and dive into the wood chipper. If it saves just one tree…
My, oh my, how far those tree-huggers have come.
The environmental movement has never been about the environment. Exhibit A: this story.
They’re not green, they’re red. Always have been, and always will be. Those who work for them who don’t “get” it, have a well-documented name…
I beg your pardon but one acre, which is a square with sides almost 210ft long has a lot more than 4 tons of trees on it. One centuries old maple weighs at least two tons, I’ve split and stacked enough wood on the farm to know that. A good yield for corn is 4 tons per acre, and that is just the kernels. Perhaps the author means that trees gain mass at 4 tons per acre every year?
I have friends who drive logging trucks for a living. I do not believe for one second it takes 10 acres of forest to load one truck…which with five axles (and those are the small ones) are rated for 40 tons. Why do we engage our outrage before our minds?
Don’t be so smug, a bunch of Ontario’s mothballed coal units are being converted to burn wood pellets.
Canada,
give us all your trees..
We need wood pellets and paper to print money.
What Matt said.
I can’t comment on the available energy density per area of forest but it would be interesting to see an analysis of the optimal sustainable output.
The sheer genius of consultants and marketing. A totally new idea! Burning Wood in a power plant!
Except that the folks at the US DOE have already funded projects to do this, and they all failed. Big, small, conversions, new built They all have failed. Wood is just a nasty fuel to burn in a high efficiency boiler. It can be done, but not at a high efficiency.
There are reasons steam locomotives switched to coal from wood. But “Forward to the 19th Century!”
Good catch on the tonnage per acre issue. Burning wood waste to make electric power makes sense, where you have an abundant supply of wood waste on hand. Whitecourt, Alberta, for one.
But harvesting trees in North and South America, drying and pelletizing the wood, and shipping it across the ocean to be burned in lieu of locally-available coal, is beyond stupid.
To grow a pound of wood, a tree uses 1.47 pounds of carbon dioxide and gives off 1.07 pounds of oxygen. An acre of trees grows about 4,000 pounds of wood in a year, using 5,880 pounds of carbon dioxide and giving off 4,280 pounds of oxygen in the process.
Are European/British forests as dense/thickly-wooded as ours?
any when you burn it you get the same back except you use the oxygen .
the area of the entire oilsands mines are less than the city of Toronto.
in the case of an oil or gas accumulation as in a coal mine you get to use the accumulated energy of a few million years instead of 50 years. concentrated by biomechanical processes.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Fossil fuels saved the rain forest, saved all the other forests, and saved the whales. What thanks do they get?
“Wind has less than 1/10th the energy density of wood, wood half the density of coal and coal half the density of octane.”
… and octane about 1 millionth the density of Uranium.
In order to burn wood waste you first have to create it. With today’s modern logging and sawmilling methods, very little waste is created. Wood pellets don’t just majically appear out of thin air. Tens of thousand of litres of diesel will be burned to create this wonderfully environmentally sound fuel. Sounds like the boreal forests are going to catch Hell. Time to go logging again.
They will continue to make as many mistakes as necessary to avoid admitting that every decision in the past decade has been wrong. The green gods must be appeased and common sense is to be avoided at all cost. Show me the politician with the guts to say “we were wrong, we made a mistake and it’s destroying our economy”.
An alternative title: The world is being run by crazy people…
90% of the biomass for the UK plants will come from the U.S.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22630815
Weapons grade idiocy….
What Matt said.
This all about imposing Marxism.
N of 60…If you are going to quote silviculture biodynamics statistics to the hundredth of a pound it might be useful to share your sources and provide a reference lest people think you are a paid troll. If you are savvy enough to quote with such specificity you didn’t just fall off the turnip truck and should know better. I call bull sh*t on your stats.
Golf Foxtrot Yankee — I don’t care what you think about me, your validation isn’t important in my life.
learn how to use Google, I’m not your research assistant.
try “boreal forest tons per acre” for starters
then go learn the concept of ‘significant figures’, you can Google that too.
I would have given the link if you had been reasonably polite and non-confrontational.
You’ll get back what you give out.
Al
Since they are talking about wood pellets which are made from sawdust, I suspect the 4 tonnes per acre is the sawdust yield on an acre of clearcut timber sawn for lumber. I don’t know if this is any more credible.
Woodporter
Using a fuel that has half the density of coal and several times
that of solar and wind power reminds me of something.
As an air compressor mechanic, Millwright, maintenance mechanic
and electrician, I have noticed that once a substance has been
banned, the replacement has never been as good.
PCB’s were replaced originally with oils that would on occasion,
catch fire.
The new CFC formulations did not eliminate CFC’s, but used less
of them, making them less efficient.
Although some businesses still have caustic hot tanks and steam
cleaners, chemicals like carburetor cleaner, TCE based brake and
electric clean are long gone as are the good old fashioned safety
solvent tanks.
They have been replaced by a piss weak hot water / soap solution.
If you need to cut oil and grease, you might as well whip it out
and piss on it for all the good it will do!
A crap load of time is now required to clean parts in with these
“Environmentally correct” replacements.
4 tons of wood/acre seems very low to me – perhaps this is at a very northern latitude where one can only harvest the trees every few hundred years.
Where wood makes sense is where there’s lots of waste wood like in central BC. Beetle kill wood is there for the taking and all one needs is a chainsaw and a truck. Better that it be put to use for heating than to burn in a huge forest fire. There are huge numbers of people who live in the country around here that heat exclusively with wood, but they don’t have wood powered generators. Sawdust can be converted to wood pellets, but this is a rather limited market and I’m sure that the people who have such a dim view of people burning wood in cities for heat would be equally down on pellet stoves; however they seem to love the idea of fueling power plants with wood pellets.
Britain has perfectly functional nuclear reactors. They’re great for producing electricity with virtually zero pollution. One can’t get more in tune with the environment than with nuclear power. Presumably they’re building many more of them at this time in order to minimize their carbon footprint (there may be an incorrect assumption that politicians are familiar with the use of logic in the last sentence).
Peter, Do not feel too bad, the guy who lives under the bridge climbed down my throat and demanded I provide facts and figures
with my every assertion, down to the color of crap.
He is a notorious warming robot, so it comes as no surprise that
his first link was to a warmist site:
http://www.forestecologynetwork.org/climate_change/sequestration_facts.html
As to his second citation, he went to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
Consider yourself blessed, he never cites sources, only demands
them of others.
When challenged, he has even been known to claim he is a climate
change denier who is acting like a Devil’s advocate. This is
what he did in my case.
It is best to ignore the dilettantes on this site!
An acre of trees grows about 4,000 pounds of wood in a year, approximately two cords of spruce and pine.
I heat my house/office with beetle killed wood, at a fraction of the cost of using petroleum fuel. A gallon of chainsaw gas cuts many cords of wood.
CANDUs are even better. They get about 30 per cent more energy per unit mass of uranium because of the better neutron efficiency of heavy water reactors.
It helps to scale these numbers. A typical 1 kg of coal produces about 3 kWh of electricity from a coal-fired plant. Assuming it’s optimized for the fuel, that means a typical wood-fired plant would produce about 1.5 kWh per kg of wood.
Now, Ontaro’s electricity consumption annually is about 130 TWh (that’s 130 billion kWh) So, producing the 130 TWh from wood would mean the burning of 86 million metric tonnes of wood annually. Now, assume that the average truck moves 20 tonnes in a load. That means that simply moving the wood requires 4.35 million truckloads annually or approximately 12,000 truckloads of wood shipped daily.
This is claimed to be a green, no-carbon solution. 12,000 daily truckloads has a huge carbon footprint. The existing infrastructure won’t permit more than at most 5-10 per cent of that.
By contrast, all of that energy in the form of uranium requires just 2600 tonnes of fuel (1 kg U = 50,000 kWh or 50 MWh) or approximately 130 truckloads annually, or about one truck every five days.
So which of these two options does less damage to the environment that the Greens claim they want to protect, clearcutting 86 million tonnes of wood or mining 2600 tonnes of uranium? Not even close, is it?
I’m rooting for collateral damage.
Here is why: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElJFYwRtrH4
So, in a world where meat is murder, cows and trees are people etc., our intellectual superiors will inevitably return to the realization that they should be burning people. Let us hope that the mouth breathing CO2 spewing methane perfused ultra dense radical left will gleefully dispose of itself for the sake of my electric blanket and leave the arboreal forests intact for the genteel manufacturers of Quilted Northern, (indisputably the finest toilet paper on the planet). And when there is the secondary realization that they too are endangered, I hope this time that it really is too late; and the dense liberal will go the way of the Dodo. That would be fitting indeed.
North of -60
I heat one of my places(of 4) with wood. The summer place off the grid with the R20walls and R40ceiling
Too much work compared to the nat.gas in two and the electric in the other
Imagine the smog in GT with 2million wood burners
One must not judge with 10 ft field of vision
Here in BC there are lots of woodpellet plants in operation, utilizing logging waste and even logging stands of beetle killed pine for their raw materials. Pellets burn clean as natural gas and are just fine for a fuel. We have so much waste wood that we could never use it all up and the European market is huge. A great resource industry for BC.
Problem is, it isn’t cost effective. If (when) European governments quit subsidizing it, the pellet plants will go broke.
Oh, and one acre of mature forest contains a LOT more than 4 tons of wood. That would be about 8 (green) trees in the interior forest.
I didn’t imply that wood was a solution for everyone, so why was that inferred? Wood heat only makes sense if you live in a forest like I do.
I don’t need four houses, one is adequate. “One must not judge with 10 ft field of vision”
How much of the available energy in a wood pellet was required to produce the wood pellet and ship it across the ocean to the power plant?
It’s been a long time since I was in the forestry business, but if memory serves me correctly, a cubic foot of BC spruce weighed about 40 – 50 pounds.Some of the spruce bark beetle killed wood weighed less, we weighed one “red” tree, completely dried, at 35 pounds per cu/ft.
Timber was measured in “cunits” which comprised 100 cubic feet of wood. The tree size in the Prince George area was about 2 to 3 trees per cunit, roughly 300 trees per acre.
So, if you had an acre of PG white or Engelman spruce, you’d have about 400,000 pounds of wood per acre.
Logging trucks carried 12-16 cunits per load. The trucks on Vancouver Island and the Coast were way bigger, but I don’t know what their load capacity was.
It’s been a long time, I left that business in 1985, but my figures are probably “ballpark’ correct.
I wonder why the powers-that-be don’t calculate energy costs before forcing the populace to live without adequate energy or no energy at all.
Quite frankly, I don’t know why we don’t riot over this stuff.
Canadians riot? …not very likely; mainstream urban Canada is social compliance personified. The Canadians who riot are usually spoiled kids with no stake in the game, opposed to everything that sustains their cushy comfortable lives.
I have noticed that once a substance has been
banned, the replacement has never been as good.
I wouldn’t agree in the case of unleaded gasoline, or lead free paint.
This is what fries me.
One has to wonder how much of the electricity produced by burning wood will be used to heat houses that are prohibited to burn wood to heat their houses.
5 million acres burn up naturally on average each year in Canada through naturally occurring forest fires. Elevated levels of tree plant food known as Carbon Dioxide, put there through anthropogenic processes, greatly increases the speed that trees grow.
Replace wood pellets with socialists because they are more dense.
If the trees are being replanted as per the concept it might be relatively carbon neutral. (to coal or gas) I doubt it’s very cost effective or any good for air quality but in terms of carbon my guess would be it’s not on the level of ethanol as sublimely numb.
I agree. And the willingness to resist in our rural populations is a damned scarce commodity too.
Another “solution” brought to you by your environmentalist NGO. We are always here to help.
When Greenpeace show up and say they are here to help – run in the other direction. They are not the government – they are worse. Just ask millions of families in Africa who lost loved ones to malaria. “But DDT kills birds”
only the summer house is redundant
people live in year round in my others. with a thermostat