How is biomass currently used?

Domestic heating

The most significant contribution to renewable energy use in Austria comes from domestic heating with logwood. Since 1990 a marked decline in wood use in domestic heating can be observed, which is due to the replacement of wood stoves and old wood boilers by central heating systems based on natural gas and oil. The reversal of this trend towards increasing use of modern wood boilers is the greatest challenge for Austria's renewable energy policies at present.

This is particularly difficult as the switch to other energy carriers is partly due to the decline of traditional lifestyles that involved producing firewood privately in the forest. Thus the effects of lifestyle changes must be offset by new strategies and services that make heating with wood attractive to young people who give userfriendliness a high priority in the choice of heating systems. Financial incentives have been established in a number of provinces to stimulate the installation of modern wood boilers. Complementary actions will be necessary to enhance fuel supply services, distribution networks and maintenance services. The most convenient option for domestic heating with wood is district heating. More than 400 small scale biomass district heating plants have been established for this purpose within the past 20 years, mostly in rural areas.

In particular, recent developments in the biomass fuel sector (pellets) and in the fields of financing and organisation (contracting, micro networks) offer promising options for the future.

Industrial biomass use

The second largest contribution to the use of biomass in Austria comes from the pulp and paper industry where bark and black liquor, which contains mainly lignine from wood pulping, are burned in large boilers to provide process heat and electricity.

The third major contribution comes from woodchips, sawmill residues and bark. They are used in the wood industry to produce process heat for drying wood, in biomass district heating plants and in smaller wood chip boilers for domestic heating.

Figure 1 shows the annually installed thermal capacity of woodchip boilers in Austria. These include both district heating (total 483 MW) and industrial boilers (total 1486 MW). All contributions of other renewable energy sources are relatively insignificant. This is also true for straw, which represents a significant potential for bioenergy in Austria that is not used presently, due to the abundance of cheap biomass from forestry.

Fig. 1: Annually installed capacity of woodchip boilers Source: NÖ-Landeswirtschaftskammer

[ previous chapter 1 ] <= [ Technology Profile ] => [ next chapter 3 ]