Anglesey Energy Island, Advantages of Biomass for Greener Energy

Posted under environment by David Phillips

When considering alternative energy strategies, the advantages of biomass are notable and one significant one is that burning the fuel does not contribute to the carbon cycle like fossil fuels in an unsustainable way. With an inexorable rise in levels of carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, there is an urgent need to tackle the sources if the earth is to avoid irreversible climate change.

Biomass is a renewable source of organic energy coming from a wide variety of materials including alcohol fuels, tree roots, branches, wood shavings and chips as well as from agricultural waste such as livestock manure, silage and crop residues. The fuel for biomass reactors can either be specially grown, such as miscanthus, switch grass, hemp or poplar and willow trees, or as a by-product such as wood pellets.

Plainly among the advantages of biomass is the ability to significantly curtail the burning of fossil fuels to produce electricity, heat and steam in industrial, farming and residential contexts. Another plus for using biomass is that it is highly available in relative terms. Given the option for continuous replanting it is fairly described as a renewable, which sees the carbon released by combustion being recovered during plant growth, and so this source is properly describes as carbon neutral.

The value of the original source crops is increased when the wastes from such crops, like straw and husks, are used as a by-product for producing the biomass fuel. A carbon sink is set up to sequester the carbon dioxide created when burning fuel, and when replanting follows oxygen will also be released into the atmosphere.

With the ever increasing pressure on landfill sites to absorb municipal waste streams, the use of this source as biomass will see a gradual tailing off of waste heading to these sites, where significant releases of methane, a greenhouse gas over twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide, occurs.

Among the advantages of biomass is the ability to use it in a way that has less intense environmental impact than when there is combustion. This means that instead of burning the biomass, a process which then has to be balanced by sufficient planting of trees to act as a carbon dioxide sink, the process of anaerobic digestion is used to convert the waste into gases which can be used to drive turbines.

Ethanol sourced from biomass can be used in a range of new biofuel blends, with the extra benefit of being cleaner burning than the mainstream fossil fuels, as well as the improved efficiency of combustion efficiency in road vehicles. It’s clear that biomass derived fuels can be employed to generate heat and electricity as well as an alternative fuel to petroleum distillates.

National and regional governments are aware of the need to address environmental as well as energy security issues when granting permission for building new renewable energy sources. There is, however, another area for consideration and that is the need to provide a steady baseload supply as opposed to supplying the peaks of demand. While wind and solar, and even tidal energy, though to a lesser extent, are subject to the problems of intermittency, the advantages of biomass sources is that they have no such constraint assuming a steady supply is available.

Coming from the beautiful island of Anglesey in Wales, UK, the author, David Phillips, manages a helpful online resource covering local news and information. Discover more about Anglesey biomass projects and the prospects for this energy island. Get a totally unique version of this article from our article submission service

categories: biomass,renewables,electricity,energy,business