Australian Forests & Timber News, February 2011 – 29
BIOFUELS & CHIPPING
Renewable energy from forestry and timber industries in Austria A model for Australia?
By Andrew Lang
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HE EUROPEAN Pellet Conference and World Energy Days is one of the world‘s largest and longest running renewable energy conferences and trade shows. This combined conference attracts up to 1000 participants from over 60 countries, and the parallel expo brings more than 100 manufacturers and service providers together and has up to 100,000 visitors. It has taken place for over 12 years in the state of Upper Austria, and is managed by the Energy Agency of Upper Austria - now one of Europe’s largest energy advice and information providers. The nature of this conference – a combining of energy-efficient building design and pellet heating – ref lects the focus and real achievements of the region. Upper Austria is an industrialised region with 1.4 million people with Linz as its capital. It has demonstrated how a coherent and practical renewable energy policy (which started in 1991) can bring significant economic, social and environmental benefits. With over 30% of energy coming from renewable sources by 2008 the state has the ambitious target of getting 100% of its space heating and electricity from renewable sources by 2030. It is a European leader in use of pellet heating, passive-solar new buildings, small and largescale hydroelectricity, and of steadily retrofitting hundreds of older buildings to improve their energy-efficiency. Upper Austria’s development of biomass-to-energy is based on sustainably managed mixedspecies native forest and a vigorous timber processing industry, entrepreneurial farmer cooperatives, and supportive Federal and State Government policies. It is in the context of small familyowned land and forest holdings, often difficult terrain, slow forest growth rates and strong international competition. One outcome of Upper Austria’s focus on turning forestry residues into chip and pellets for space and water heating is that seven of Europe’s leading pellet heater manufacturers are now based in the state. By 2008 in the region there were already 28,000 small wood pellet and woodchip domestic heating installations, 250 larger biomass-fuelled municipal or town heating plants, 75 biogas plants and 12 new biomass-fuelled power plants. Overall these were supplying about 1700 megawatts (MW) of heat and electricity (heat energy is valued as it makes up about
half the total energy useage in the region). Most of the organisations and businesses involved are the 150 green energy companies in the state’s Oekoenergie-Cluster (www.oec.esv.or.at). For information on Upper Austria‘s energy www. energiesparverband.at and for the conference www.wsed.at. Nearly half of Austria’s 82,730 km2 (about the area of Tasmania) is forested, and about 65% of the forest is family-owned and sustainably managed. Austria has ambitious targets for expanding renewable energy – almost entirely based on hydroelectricity, biomass residues from forestry thinning and harvest, and by-products and residues from Austria’s extensive timber processing and pulp and paper industries. At present 72% of Austria’s energy is from imported fossil fuels, with renewable energy making up just over 21%. As one of the countries in the EU that has opted against nuclear energy it will reduce the fossil share of its energy by improving energy efficiency, encouraging passive solar building design, and by expanding its main renewable energy sources of hydro and biomass. Energy from biomass (mainly from forestry) already provides over half of Austria’s renewable energy - mostly as heat energy. Austria aims to increase energy from biomass by about 60% by 2020, with an increasing fraction being as baseload electricity
from combined heat and power stations. Adoption of pellet heating has been stimulated by generous rebates on conversion from fossil-fuelled to pelletfuelled heating and a reduced consumption tax on pellets. Compared with 2004, use of pellet-fuelled heating across Austria had almost tripled ( by 280%) by 2010 and the target is a more than six-fold increase (to 640%) by 2020. Andrew Lang will be speaking at this conference on Policies, potential and problems in development of bioenergy in Australia and New Zealand, in his capacity as the board member of the World Bioenergy Association
representing this region. At the expo he will collect information on small to mid-sized pellet and briquette presses and biomass handling and processing equipment, and on development of biomass and biofuels supply cooperatives and businesses. A summary of information from the conference and expo relevant to Australia will be in Australian Forests & Timber News and also posted on the new Wood Energy Group website www.woodenergy. net.au. A softwood sawdust dump destined for pelleting at a Neova plant in southern Sweden.
The forest, energy wood pile and chip piles at the Varnamo wood gasifier to biofuels research centre (and also the district heating plant) in southern Sweden.
The Cutting Edge in Biomass Technology 0 0 ter The new AHWI BMH600 Biomass Harvester is the result of years of intense testing, research and development.
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400 per EC1ass Chip
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Contact your local AHWI representative now for more details.
www.ahwi.com.au
Enquiries WA, SA, NT AHWI Australia Pty Ltd Telephone: (08) 9258 9333 • Mobile: 0418 927 491
Enquiries NSW, QLD, VIC, TAS Ivan Lauri Tel: 0418 976 438
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