renewable energy Archives

Publisher’s Notebook: Managing forests for carbon storage, wood energy & lumber

January 31, 2018 by David Atkins Leave a Comment

Is using wood for energy renewable? Is it sustainable? Does it destroy forests or make them better managed?

At Treesource, we are in the middle of a series of articles on wood energy. There are some strongly divergent perspectives on the carbon benefits or detriments of using wood for energy.

In my previous career, I was a forest ecologist and forester who developed and managed a program focused on using waste wood to heat schools, hospitals, colleges and more. So this is a debate with which I am familiar.

As with many debates, people often talk past one another because they have different assumptions about the fundamentals of the debate – sometimes out of lack of knowledge, sometimes with the purpose of misleading or diverting the discussion. [Read more…]

Today’s timber markets: Who will buy Northeast’s low-grade wood?

January 15, 2018 by admin 7 Comments

*Forest thinning in Claremont, N.H. (Stillwater Forestry)*

Van Webb, a logger and farmer from Sunapee, harvested from a mostly white pine lot on a 57-acre property in Unity, N.H., in 2016.

Many of the pine trees he harvested were low-grade — meaning the logs could not be sawed into boards at a sawmill. Instead, he sent the wood to the biomass plant in Springfield, N.H., where it was burned to create electricity.

Without a local market for this low-grade material, the harvest would probably not have been possible.

“I don’t know what we’d do if the Springfield wood energy plant was gone. In this part of the state, there is no other low-grade market for pine.” Webb said. “Without that market, this landowner would not have been able to have this property harvested — or at least not in a way that removes the low-quality trees along with some of the good trees — and leave a shelterwood forest of good quality that can now regenerate naturally with new seedlings.” [Read more…]

Burning question: Is woody biomass the 21st century fuel?

September 18, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

*Processors thin small-diameter pine on the Malheur National Forest. Photo: Marcus Kauffman*

For hundreds of millennia, humans have depended on wood as a basic but reliable source of fuel. Today efforts to grow that dependence in the face of an evolving energy landscape are widespread. But they’re also contentious.

The debate over biomass, an umbrella term that encompasses a range of organic materials used for energy, rests primarily on the question of “carbon neutrality.” It’s taking place at the federal level — the House Appropriations Committee voted during the summer to designate biomass “carbon neutral” — and across the states.

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker announced in August that his administration would move to designate fuel derived from felling trees and clearing brush in forests as renewable energy. In Arizona the state’s Public Service recently ordered to research forest bioenergy as part of its power portfolio. The biomass industry’s main trade group is part of a just-hatched PR and advertising blitz planned for later in September by an umbrella renewable-energy consortium that also includes wind and solar and has dubbed itself National Clean Energy Week. [Read more…]