It's quite strange that this should "crop" up today. I am off to a workshop tomorrow for stakeholder consultation for a GEF funded UNIDO initiative to do pilots in The Gambia to establish mini-grids up-country. I have read the proposed schemes and it's the usual solar set-ups which look great but hardly provide the wider socio-economic benefits other schemes could provide.
I may well throw the spanner in the local wheels with a quick paper outlining the wider benefits of local community based - - managed woodlot/orchard - provide nutrition - harvest firewood for export to the urban areas - coppice to power a fuel efficient mini power plant - provide employment all round - use residue to enrich soil in woodlot and surrounding fields - hummm - have I forgotten something? and see what happens. Cheers George from the semi-desert In a message dated 7/26/2010 7:09:35 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, [email protected] writes: DD : Dan Dimiduk comments Dear Cornelio The 'big future for biomass in the formal sector power generation sector' was the idea that wood is renewable so it makes sense to plant and harvest huge areas as a sort of slow farming of energy. DD The big businesses always take the easiest, simplest way to profit. In reality, they are better equipped to handle the more difficult processes, such as recycling concentrated waste streams. Regulation should focus on that. Not on limiting the small guys projects. There are two problems emerging: people object to the entire idea when it comes to actually planting and harvesting forests in the developed world, and the energy equation is not perhaps as positive as initially hoped. DD In the eastern United States, as elsewhere, trees grow weather we plant them or not. The question is if we want nature to decide what is planted or if we will decide. Nature tends to favor invasive and short lived species following clear cutting that destroys the stumps. Coppicing is cutting with the intent to regrow from the same root/ stump/ trunk. This practice is the best for many hardwoods as it accelerates the regrowth tremendously and even produces better timber. On poor soils such as strip mining sites, selected hardwoods such as locust can outgrow other trees and rebuild the soil as well. The idea that forests should not be cut at all is pretty ingrained in the US mental space even though the area covered by forests in the East has increased enormously in my lifetime. That is why the deer population is so high (and the number of crashes between them and cars). I think Dan D may have something say about that. DD All so true, but now the coyote population is exploding to harvest the deer population explosion. Now we have coyote running in packs, in the city, even though they are not traditionally pack animals. Remind those who object to deer harvesting, that venison is better eating than dog meat. The best use of harvested woods is to first produce timber from the quality wood. Use the lower quality wood for chipboard (such as OSB) and then residues from that operation as biomass fuel. Then recycle the used demolition lumber into charcoal at the end of it's use cycle. In most areas, due to paper recycling, pulpwood is now in oversupply and hardly pays for the hauling. The former pulpwood stream can be redirected to fuel biomass combustion. Regulate that! The biomass potential in the Eastern US is huge but getting it to happen is not looking good. DD Is it a co- incidence that a large amount of coal and now natural gas from shale is produced here? The old guard still controls politics to a large degree. It is no accident that alternatives that compete with " clean coal" are finding more difficulty with new regulations than alternatives that compete with oil. Isn't Mr. Obama from a coal producing state? I believe that the carbon cap and trade bill is an end run around the coal producers political power. Austria seems to have achieved the right balance - I think they have two wood fired generating stations now and they are probably the world leaders in small wood burners, certainly on the research front. I am impressed anyway. In the rest of the world a lot of people want everyone to move away from wood for all sorts of obvious reasons and I am left wondering if perhaps processed wood is a best available option for some time to come. There is increasing interest in what I can call artificial charcoal from processed biomass as a cheap and non-wood alternative for peri-urban modernizing areas. DD Why is it that published trends always favor the usage of fuels with a large middle man? Is there any studies on the efficiency of a single man harvesting and utilizing his own fuel from his own land? I just don't see how large operations can ever compete with that. Everyone seems to want some process that requires a store bought devise to make the process more efficient. How can hauling large amounts of biomass to a single site for processing be efficient unless a waste stream is involved? _______________________________________________ Stoves mailing list [email protected] http://listserv.repp.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_listserv.repp.org http://stoves.bioenergylists.org http://info.bioenergylists.org
