Should we move away from fossil fuel boilers and switch to biomass boilers for electricity generation?
A boiler is a closed vessel in which coal, gas or oil is burnt to heat water and produce vapour or steam. The most used applications of a boiler are water heating, central heating, cooking and boiler-based power generation.
Water is boiled by fossil fuels burned in a power plant. It produces steam. The thermal energy is converted into mechanical energy to spin turbines and finally into electrical energy. About 41% of all electricity is generated by firing coal and 20% by natural gas.
Across the globe each year we now burn over 4,000 times the amount of fossil fuels burnt during 1776. Coal-fired power stations produce over 10 Gt of CO2 each year. That amounts to 1/5th of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, making it one of the largest causes.
Scientists have been forecasting the downsides of fossil fuel burning since 1882. It was only a 100 years later, in the 1980’s, we built the world’s 1st commercial power plant driven by renewable sources.
While 60% of electricity is generated by coal and natural gas, cleaner sources generate the rest. Of which, 5.6% is from solar/wind/geothermal/tidal/ and 2.3% is from biomass.
Similar to fossil fuels, biomass is burned in biomass boilers to produce steam. Biomass can fire on its own in biomass boilers. Or it can serve as a substitute to a part of coal to co-fire in existing power plants. The Central Government of India has made it mandatory to co-fire biomass (at least 5%) for all coal fired power plants.
Related read: What is biomass? Is it really a renewable source of energy?
To move in the right direction powered by clean energy, more than 40 countries have pledged to phase out burning coal by the 2040’s. This will lead to development of more and bigger projects of solar, wind and biomass boiler power plants.
As the setting-up of these projects happen on one side, at Buyofuel, we’re organising the biomass raw materials sector on the other. We’re enabling farmers, small-scale agricultural waste producers and large-scale waste aggregators to sell their waste to biomass boiler power plants.
By the time newer biomass plants of larger capacities are set up, we hope to divert a significant portion of the 750 MMT/year biomass to them. If you or someone you know are part of the agricultural sector or the biomass generation sector, get in touch with us. We’ll help you get the value you deserve for your raw materials and scale your business in a sustainable way.