A retro idea in the UK is already in the US, I’d say it is a better method than some traditional power plant operations, but only works if you have an unlimited supply of trees nearby.
From the University of Manchester: How heating our homes could help reduce climate change
A radical new heating system where homes would be heated by district centres rather than in individual households could dramatically cut the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.
In a series of reports to be presented at a major conference this week, scientists at The University of Manchester claim using sustainable wood and other biofuels could hold the key to lowering harmful greenhouse gases.
Building district heating schemes which would provide heat and hot water for a neighbourhood or community would not only drastically reduce greenhouse gases but would also be highly cost effective, the authors claim.
Focus groups to test the UK public’s eagerness for such schemes have already been held and have resulted in the majority of people being in favour of the localised centres.
The plans would only provide cost savings if the heat demand is very steady. Otherwise large scale dedicated electricity plants become the most cost effective way to save greenhouse gases with biomass, with costs per unit of carbon saved around half that of a smaller facility.
The reports state that using wood in UK power stations gave greenhouse gas reductions of over 84% and even higher savings of 94% were possible for heating schemes.
Prepared by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research to highlight the effectiveness of using sustainable fuels rather than rely on fossil fuels, the series of reports will be presented this week at the UK’s first bio conference – BioTen – which begins in Birmingham today (Tuesday 21st).
Author Dr Patricia Thornley suggests using a number of supply chains, including imported forest residues and local grown energy crops, would reduce emissions and save on fossil fuels.
The key is that biomass must be grown sustainably, taking into account potential for damage to the environment or undesirable socio-economic impacts.
Previous work by University of Manchester researchers took this into account in concluding that sustainable biomass could supply at least 4.9% of the UK’s total energy demand.
Realising that potential could result in savings of 18 Mt of carbon dioxide every year, which is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions associated with around 2.7 million households.
Dr Patricia Thornley, from the School of Mechanical Aerospace and Civil Engineering at The University of Manchester, said: “Bioenergy could play a very important part in helping the UK meet greenhouse gas reduction targets that will help to reduce the impact of climate change.
“Heating homes with wood reduces greenhouse gas emissions because plants and trees absorb carbon dioxide when they are growing and then re-release it when they are burnt for heating – so the only increase in greenhouse gas emissions are those involved in things like harvesting and processing the fuel.
“This work has taken a detailed look at all those emissions and established that even when we take them into account, there are still huge greenhouse gas savings to be made.
“If we can combine the low-carbon wood with really efficient heating systems, that offers an efficient and cost-effective route to reducing the greenhouse gas emissions.
“The challenge for the industry now is to concentrate on developing new efficient and cost-effective technologies for biofuel production and to concentrate on getting the heating technologies deployed in the right environment.”
Notes for editors
Dr Thornley is available for interview on request.
The papers, Assessing the sustainability of bioelectricity supply chains and Cost-effective carbon reductions in the Bioenegy sector are available from the Press Office.
The Tyndall Centre, created in 2000, is a distributed national centre for research into climate change mitigation and adaptation, with Manchester leading on decarbonisation of energy systems and long-term coastal processes.
For media enquiries contact
Daniel Cochlin
Media Relations
The University of Manchester
Tel: 0161 275 8387
email: daniel.cochlin@manchester.ac.uk
“A radical new heating system where homes would be heated by district centres rather than in individual households could dramatically cut the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.”
Socialized heating?
In the UK, willow has been promoted as a viable bio-fuel for over 30 years. As many readers have noted success of new schemes depends upon Corporations. I wonder why?
Now we have “centralised” heating schemes.
In reality it matters not the source but can Corporations benefit and still maintain both control and power.
Ignoring all the mumbo jumbo, if you make your own power, you are free. There is not “cost”
They hate that
Do wind turbines burn?
“How would that be transmitted, steam, hot water, or hot air ?
Lotta plumbing .”
By concentrating people into prisons,…oops I mean energy efficient/earth friendly commie blocks.
http://timspictures.co.uk/2006-11-23-Bratislava_Vienna/IMG_3034_large.JPG
Sandy says: “They seem not to be considering agricultural biomass?
For every ton of grain harvested there are many more tons of plant left to rot.”
Untrue. About a ton of straw is produced for every ton of grain, not “many more tons”, as you allege. As far as rotting, straw has many agricultural usages, including roughage as part of cattle diets. Some straw is plowed back into the soil. Yes, they can burn the stuff, but that is wasteful. You been hanging out at RealClimate, Sandy?
I would worry about the particulate emissions (and subsequent global freezing). Works in cogen plants here in BC where you have a captive supply of waste wood and need the waste heatfor your primary process (usually pulp and paper). Using bug killed pine, of which we have vast supplies here in BC, doesn’t pass the economic sniff test as the supply of economically available wood would run out before investors got their capital back.
Collectivist HVAC systems??
100 steps backwards to Stalinesque times!
Also, probably it is now forgotten that, after the Met forecast a mild winter of 2009 – 2010 no one was prepared, and it affected the poorest the worst.
Pensioners having to burn books to keep warm:
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/807821-pensioners-burn-books-for-warmth
And they want togo back to this primitive method of heating? What about all the trees?
This is just another nail in the coffin in the nonsensical world of that has declared CO2 bad.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Burning a tonne of wood will generate approximately (depending on the quality of wood) one mega-watt hour.
Darlington nuclear station produces 3600 MW, with over a 90 percent capacity factor. This means it would require a 60 tonne trucke every minute to supply the equivalent power. The result would be, to replace this one nuclear station, which produces 15 percent of Ontario’s electric power, would require comforably more than the total amount of wood products produced in Ontario each year. Imagine the line of trucks going down the highway to the station. Imagine the smoke coming from the chimnies at the station.
I don’t see wood as much of a competitor for my industry.
andyscrase says:
September 24, 2010 at 7:09 pm
Do wind turbines burn?
=====================
Yeah, they do. But that smoke don’t look too healthy, LOL.
I can smell the burning plastic from here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKkTUY2slYQ
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
I am itching for a personal testimony. I enjoy yacht racing and our boat is carbon, kevlar, mylar, dacron, fibers and epoxy resins not poly resins. We still use a clothes line and used cotton diapers on the kids at home. We take dryer lint also, place it in paper egg cartons, pour old melted crayon pieces into the 12 little cells and have a recycled fire starter for campfires on the beach.
We can always find driftwood. Such virtue. Wood is not workable for housing heat until it has turned into oil or coal and we harvest the natural gas from the stuff. Firewood is high in moisture content.
I’ve heard about schemes like this. They require something of the order of 50,000 acres of high density woodland (Probably Birch or Willow) for a 500MW plant. That’s over 78 Square miles, or an area 13 miles by 6 in a constant 20 year rotation coppice / dry / replant cycle. Each area of fuel being cut or coppiced and / or replanted every 20 years, then drying the wood before burning requiring at least six months in drying stacks before it is ready for burning to produce power.
If the plant is situated close to an urban area for a district heating project, then that means significant trucking costs, not to mention emissions, to get the fuel where it is needed. Sounds to me a little like losing on the carbon roundabout exactly what you gain on the swings.
Biomass is great for those in the wood and trucking businesses. It’s far less energy dense, so you need a lot of it. Truckload after truckload, day and night. People tend not to like that very much, so it’s best they not know ahead.
Even if there are local sources, they tend to dry up, and you end up trucking greater and greater distances, which becomes expensive fast.
The Green Industry is quite the scam. It’s the ratepayers who get screwed, of course.
This, “Radical New Heating Method,” statement is amazing to me. Welcome back to the 19th Century. This method of steam production was common as dirt back when people were smart enough to make use of what they had, i.e. coal, oil and wood waste. My grandfather was a foreman at a large sawmill for many decades. This plant dated from the mid-1880’s. The means of production was the same until the plant was forced to close in the 1970’s.
What they did was take the sawdust that was produced during the cutting process and then burned it to make steam which then ran the power plant for the whole mill. It was totally self contained. They produced all the electricity they needed to run the machines and light the place. But I guess we are now so much more advanced than our forefathers we threw out everything they had already figured out and then take credit in rediscovering this amazing process all over again. Modern people who constantly attempt invalidate the accomplishments of the past sometimes really crack me up.
In Iceland, they use the waste heat from geo-thermal power generation to heat their homes. Now that efficient.
All they need to do now is for their communities to take control, so that its their power.
Notice that in all these brilliant schemes, it is the poor that suffer.
The UK does have an unlimited supply of trees nearby. It’s called Canada. It’s “nearby” due to scale. They can load up the barges in Northern Canada, or like the old days and tie the trunks into massive rafts, then haul them on the short route across the ice-free Arctic Ocean on the way to Jolly Old England. No problems.
There’s a trash to energy plant a couple miles from me, they had an open house a few years ago, interesting place. The local high school put in a wood burning central heating system that is so clean it puts out less smoke than a single residential wood stove.
The PSNH Schiller Station on the seacoast was converted from coal to wood, it’s likely the one in the diagram above. They’ve looked into and are probably burning waste cacao shells from the Lindt chocolate factory nearby. The plant certainly counts as the equivalent of a coal fired plant closing, but the replacement isn’t as “green” (supposedly) as wind et al which haven’t been able to replace a coal fired station yet.
NH is some 84% forest, second only to Maine at 90%. So yeah, we have lots of trees and wood waste. The rate of wood heat in the winter varies with fuel cost, the last couple of years has more people burning wood.
http://www.psnh.com/Energy/Renewables/CleanEnergy/advancerenewables.asp has more, including some of the wind stuff that they don’t put any numbers on.
Its a very cunning plan isnt it? More cunning than a fox planning a chicken heist and using the most cunning tricks known to foxhood.
There is a tiny problem with this very cunning plan though, carbon dioxide is a harmless trace gas and a most beneficial gas to the planet’s life forms. More CO2=more life and when you subtract the ridiculous assertion the CO2 is a harmful and dangerous pollutant then what is left?
Apart from that tiny flaw the plan is flawless and perfect.
Re: William
But the reverse can be true. Look at windmills. Superceded by more reliable, higher energy power sources but we’re ignoring that history. And we can’t even convert the new ones into quaint character homes, unless being a stylite comes back into fashion.
NY’s steam system is probably a neat example of how this has worked, but it’s only really practical for new builds given the infrastructure needed to pipe steam or hot water. Unless there’s some incentive or customer demand, that’s not going to happen given the extra costs. On the right density new development, combination of domestic waste incineration and topped up with wood might work, but nationally it doesn’t scale. Friday’s UK peak demand was 41,1165MW, so at 1tonne/hr, that’s an awful lot of wood needed to make a dent in demand.
2 things, how can they know that all the co2 from the burning of the wood will be absorbed the next growing season. Also didn’t the worst of the killer London fogs
happen when they were burning wood so they changed to coal and reduced the amount other byproducts of burning carbon?
“Realising that potential could result in savings of 18 Mt of carbon dioxide every year, which is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions associated with around 2.7 million households.”
To save 18 Mt of co2 you would have to burn enough wood to create 18 Mt of co2. I hate when thy don’t including some common pertinent data that makes any real sense. Let’s see, how many average trees does it take to make 18 million tonnes of co2? And I don’t recall how much an average tree weighs or how many trees in an average forest. Humph… ☺
But, from that you could tell how many forests England would have to cut down, burn, and plant each year. Is this really about immigration?
One of the reasons I like coming here is because the skeptics tend to shoot first and ask questions later. Makes for lively discussions, thats for sure. Having said that, well, this is one time that the skeptics just might be wrong. I volunteer on our local economic development board and we have been spending a fair amount of time and effort aimed at developing a local biomass supply chain. Our intent is to use a local shorthaul railroad to deliver a variety of biomass materials to the district heating plant in St. Paul MN. Their website is here: http://www.districtenergy.com/
Minnesota has lots of wood products and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul have extensive urban forests that constantly need trimming and a place to use the wood. Even with all that biomass available there is still need for more. We are working on collecting and shipping farm products such as corncobs. Ag products offer a renewable source of energy, and its true that people actually get jobs driving trucks, running chippers and generally making a living off of energy plants like this. The truth is that biomass can be competitive with most forms of energy in the right place, and yeah, its local, so what? Who wrote the book that said only coal, nuclear or hydro is the only viable source of energy that could be used on a large scale? Nobody up here in the Northland would listen to them anyway.
As part of our investigations a group traveled to Sweden to see some state of the art woodburners. When the Swedes came here to see if they could sell some of their smokeless woodburners we were surprised to find that Sweden needs to import wood pellets to meet their heating needs. Gee, guess which countries export wood pellets to Sweden? The Canadians lead the way but the US wasn’t far behind.
The fact that the folks in the UK want to try what is a widely used system really shouldn’t be a surprise, because this is what communities do. Take care of themselves, innovate and use local resources to generally make life better. Its too bad they have to use the global warming scam to justify it, but if they figure out a system that works for them, who are we to judge?
@wayne September 24, 2010 at 6:58 pm:
My first reaction was my memory that when I lived in Denver in the mid-1970s in the winter there was always a “brown smog” hanging over the entire area, that you could see very clearly from elevated locations as a film about 1000 feet above the ground. While I was there it was announced that they had finally figured out what caused the brown smog. What was it? All the tens of thousands of romantic, back-to-the-earth wood-burning stoves.
@Dan Evens September 24, 2010 at 7:41 pm:
That eliminates the traffic of all those trucks. An average truck would be about 20-30 tonnes. A 60-tonne truck? Wow, they would be replacing the road surface every year. So, multiply the truck count by 2 or 3. That is one truck every 20-30 seconds. They couldn’t even get them in position to dump them that fast. The logistics of this are horrible, all told. Do they feed entire tree trunk logs? If not, count all the energy to cut them into burnable-sized chunks. They’d need the equivalent of a massive lumber mill just to do that.
If they wanted any transporting efficiencies at all, trucks would drop their load in the outskirts. They would then use a tunnel with a huge conveyor, reaching from WAY out to the plant, literally feeding the wood off the conveyor into the burners. The tunnel wouldn’t be cheap to build, but moving 20 tonne trucks in and out of the city is VERY inefficient and wasteful. Conveyors for mass movement are MUCH more energy-efficient.
Bruce Cobb September 24, 2010 at 7:45 pm:
See the previous reply in this comment.
We were taught that that is what did in Rome, that they used up all the available trees. That, along with the lead pipes and the coup d’etat by Julius Caesar which turned the Republic into an empire. (But we are on our way down Rome’s road, so why not go whole hog?)
How many trees does it take to heat Europe or the U.S.? Not to mention the other 3 billion people who need heating?
To the people who worry about emissions from stacks, I 100% guarantee there will be oxidizers on the stacks. I used to design just such equipment. But to be efficient, they need to burn hotter than wood will get, meaning natural gas to clean up the emissions. THAT heat can be recovered to a decent degree, BTW.
And one comment on the communal heat distribution: All those ducts/pipes are going to lose heat, no matter how well insulated. I’d figure an average of 35% losses from plant to each home. AND THEY ARE UGLY. They either have to be off the ground (more infrastructure costs), or in the ground (WAY more infrastructure costs) competing with sewers and cables and gas lines. WHAT A NIGHTMARE.
This doesn’t get my vote, even though it can be made to work in SOME places. But wood is NOT an efficient heat source – too low of energy density. Does the UK want to see clear-cutting of these timber areas? And where will they be located?
So many holes in this plan. TYPICAL IVORY TOWER THINKING – throw out a basic principle, without taking into account all the problem areas. . . solve one problem by creating 5 more.
@Wayne –
Also, dude, the trees behind Boulder, CO are all softwood trees – pine and fir. They are NOT good for energy density. Hardwood trees are what is needed. I think that is the biggest fallacy in this whole plan. Hardwoods grow slowly. Softwoods grow quickly, but they burn too fast, so you end up using WAY more wood. So, whatever numbers anyone churns on this, they need to consider what KIND of trees.
And ravaging the Rocky mountains? Fat chance!
This plan has ZERO chance. Look at that diagram. It leaves out the process of turning the trees into chips. THAT plant – where is it? How much energy does IT use? And then trucking the chips? What idiot would do that? You CONVEY the chips on conveyors.
But what is magical about this? Moving the mass of trees costs energy and money. Moving ANY weight from point A to points B, C and D is, technically, doing WORK (in the physics sense), and all work uses energy. If they’ve run the numbers on this, I’d love a look at them.
This is a retread of old ideas. Not that being a retread is bad, what can I say, I have been one for years now. (My consulting company, Retread Resources Ltd. was founded in 1992) It was not followed up on in the 70’s when it was last popular and probably won’t go very far this time either. Alberta has an abundance of very low sulfur coal. We will gladly sell it. Wood is much better used for making paper and building houses. Waste wood products can easily be combined with coal in a cost effective and rational way, unless you have a glut of cheep natural gas. (Alberta sells that too)
Oh the irony! The UK chopped down most of their oak trees many decades ago to build sailing ships to fight the French. Now France provides the UK with most of its electricity from their nuclear generators. 🙂