this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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It's fairly expensive to generate electricity by burning stuff, even biomass. A decent wind, solar, and storage rollout will displace most of it quite cheaply.
The corn ethanol thing is likely to continue in the US as long as we're still burning gasoline in cars.
The massive limiting factor for wind/solar/storage is still capex. Biomass is often labeled sustainable, thus often profits from subsidies, and has low capex. It has high opex and allows for high levels of centralization — which is exactly the kind of business power companies know.
Fwiw, our local utility (mid-sized German town) is currently investing in "green" wood-burning and waste-burning facilities for district heating. It's obvious that none if this is sustainable even as a business because there's simply not enough wood waste in the 200-odd km radius they want to use. There's also not enough household waste in the region for the waste facility. They do it anyway, partly because they're incredibly scared of heat pump economics.
Waste burning at least seems to make sense, if its not burnt its only going to go into landfill and emit methane.
That's actually fine if the landfill has methane extraction systems. The methane can be used to generate electricity