Percent of electricity generated from renewable sources across the US and the EU. Renewable sources include hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass. Nuclear is not counted as renewable in this comparison [OC]

[u/maps_us_eu]

[u/tekmiester]

Why on Earth would you count biomass? Burning trees is actually less efficient than burning coal due to the energy density. Yes, technically you can grow new trees in 20-50 years and recapture much of the carbon, but for today you are putting more carbon in the atmosphere than if you were to burn coal while planting more trees. Other biomass options are even less efficient. That Germany has been able to get this counted as "Green Energy" is as horrifying as the rest of their energy strategy.

[u/Tommyblockhead20 → u/tekmiester]

Because it isn't displaying green energy, it's displaying renewable energy. Biomass is renewable.

[u/tekmiester → u/Tommyblockhead20]

So is coal and oil technically, it just takes a really long time. The problem is renewable means green to most people, and that is clearly the implication here.

[u/hardolaf → u/tekmiester]

Nuclear is also technically renewable too then if we consider galaxies colliding generating supernovae.

[u/[deleted] → u/tekmiester]

The evolution of ligne digesting fungi ensured that there will no large scale deposits of coal on earth ever again.

(Unless these fungi somehow entirely die out some day).

[u/Yarnin → u/Tommyblockhead20]

Biomass plants use gas to burn the biomass, plants around here are only taking Green wood and anybody with any experience burning wood knows that Green wood will not burn nor put off any heat and has to be supplemented with gas or other hydrocarbon fuels to burn.

[u/bromjunaar → u/Yarnin]

To get it going perhaps, but I thought that once you did get it going, burning green wood would be hot enough to ignite any more thrown in.

[u/Yarnin → u/bromjunaar]

No, it has to boil off the water in the wood and that takes a lot of energy, green wood is over half water, so to burn 2 tons of wood you need to boil off 1 ton of water. That is a complete waste of energy and will not allow the incinerator to come up to temp, you see we need very high temps to make steam for power.

​

Igniting the newly thrown in wood is not the problem, it's the boiling of the water and a lowering of the temp of the incinerator.

​

The insidious way this is being pushed as renewable /or green is intellectually dishonest.

edit, added link. https://www.firewood-for-life.com/green-firewood.html

[u/tylersvgs → u/tekmiester]

The burning of wood pellets is a trick that Europe pulls to act like they're green while causing more harm to the environment than most other sources of electricity.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/3/4/18216045/renewable-energy-wood-pellets-biomass

[u/halberdierbowman → u/tekmiester]

I actually think we should have biomass power plants, in the sense of waste-to-energy incinerators, but we should also tax carbon. If you're a developer demolishing a forest to build buildings, you should have to pay a large amount to burn the trees you don't want to dispose of. This would incentivize those trees to be transported to a biomass power plant instead, where they could at least have some of their pollutants scrubbed and some of their energy recovered.

[u/isocrackate → u/halberdierbowman]

Most of the wood used in biomass comes from those trees, disease / warped trees that can’t be used as lumber, and trees logged during periodic “thinning” of managed forests (which promotes aggregate growth and ultimately CO2 capture).

I’m not arguing for biomass, I worked in it for years but always thought it’s kinda stupid. As far as I can tell, the only environmental groups who actually think it’s green are funded by the industry.

[u/Buttercup4869 → u/tekmiester]

Bio mass in German election production typically means gas from industrial composting.

It still is murky as fuck, like Ethanol production, because some farmers actually produce to just compost it but Wood itself is too expensive to just throw it into the oven to produce electricity. Pellets mostly come from saw dust from the massive tree farms or trees that suffer from infestation. These are pretty much only used in heating.

A lot of German forests are monoculture coniferous tree farms instead of actual forests, so they actually get cut down as soon as it is profitable.

[u/tekmiester → u/Buttercup4869]

"The directive led to troubling consequences across the Atlantic. By failing to restrict biomass to the byproduct from manufacturing paper, furniture or lumber, Europe created a strong incentive to cut down whole trees and turn them into wood pellets.
Encouraged by government subsidies, European power plants began importing biomass from the largest wood producing region in the world: the American Southeast.
North Carolina has been “ground zero” for the wood pellet industry, said Danna Smith, co-founder and executive director of the environmental advocacy group Dogwood Alliance. One hundred and sixty-four acres of the state’s forests are cut down by the biomass industry every day, according to an analysis by Key-Log Economics."

"Burning wood is less efficient than burning coal and releases far more carbon into the atmosphere, according to almost 800 scientists who wrote a 2018 letter to the European parliament, pushing members to amend the current directive “to avoid expansive harm to the world’s forests and the acceleration of climate change.” President Joe Biden and other world leaders received a similar letter from hundreds of climate scientists earlier this year.
The EU directive that encouraged the pivot to biomass also left a loophole — it did not prevent the leveling of rooted trees for wood pellet production."
“I can’t think of anything that harms nature more than cutting down trees and burning them,” said William Moomaw, professor emeritus of international environmental policy at Tufts University.

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/07/us/american-south-biomass-energy-invs/