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Some back of the envelope maths, he said it takes an area 18 miles by 18 miles every year to produce 7% of the UKs electricity demand. Pine trees are harvested
by VBprogrammer 6y ago
Some back of the envelope maths, he said it takes an area 18 miles by 18 miles every year to produce 7% of the UKs electricity demand.
Pine trees are harvested around 30 years old (ignoring thinnings deliberately here). So to set up a 30 year rotation of 300 square miles you are looking at an area roughly the size of Wales.
That seems pretty unsustainable from a UK point of view but obviously there are less densely populated parts of the world where wood can be shipped from.
I'm not sure. Perhaps as a dispatchable source of power it makes sense.
- hinkley 6y agoCarbon neutral has to cover the entire supply chain, for which pellets are going to have a lot of sooty diesel engines in the mix.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoThere are few coal mines left in the UK so coal has the same issue. I think we can all agree that biomass might be a slightly less bad than coal solution to reliably dispatchable power generation. It's far from perfect though.
- hinkley 6y agoCoal is irredeemable. We don't talk about if it's neutral because you can't even see neutral from where coal is. We need improvements, and we should encourage them. But. If we stop shy of the goal because people start misusing terminology or using fuzzy math then we are just as dead but drag it out longer. The Earth doesn't care about spreadsheets or feelings. It only cares what actually happened.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoThe UK already has around 12,000 sq miles of forest, which is about 13% of the area. Half of the UK's land is owned by 1% of the population - a mix of aristocrats, wealthy individuals, and corporations. There is no practical issue with mass reforestation contributing to energy self-sufficiency, but there would be huge political issues.
- nicoburns 6y agoAnd huge environmental issues. Forests of 30 years old pine are not the same as ancient forests.
- bobthepanda 6y agoIndeed. Japan is actually thinning its forests because its forests are largely monocultures that are so thickly grown that no sunlight reaches the forest floor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC4gRGPbTqE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC4gRGPbTqE https://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/17/science/japan-s-cedar-forests-are-man-made-disaster.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/17/science/japan-s-cedar-for...
- neilwilson 6y agoWe need the land for people not trees. The UK has a food deficit. Nut trees would be better than pine. Offshore wind and storage is the way forward. We need to press on with getting that sorted and save the land for other uses.
- ben_w 6y agoThe Netherlands, with roughly double the population density of the UK, became a net exporter of food fairly recently. I think they did this by adding a lot of greenhouses. I think the UK probably can’t add so many greenhouses because, in my opinion, local politics means “pretty” is valued more than “functional”. This is also why on-shore wind isn’t already everywhere in the UK even though wind farms don’t prevent agriculture.
- iguy 6y agoAside, but do you know if that means net exporter in value or also in calories? I had the impression all those greenhouses were great at making relatively expensive things like fresh salad, which you can then trade for cheap Canadian wheat etc, but I could be wrong.
- 6y ago
- twic 6y ago> So to set up a 30 year rotation of 300 square miles you are looking at an area roughly the size of Wales. Well, what are they using Wales for at the moment?
- VBprogrammer 6y agoMostly raising talented singers and sheep.
- mrlonglong 6y agoTalented singers - that's debatable.
- Scoundreller 6y agoCanada has plenty of land that’s uninhabited, unsuitable for farming/grazing, but usable for forestry. Wood has about the heat output as lignite per kg, and half that of anthracite. Should still be amenable to shipping.