efficiency of plants - 1%
efficiency of photovoltaic - 20%
so photovoltaic is 15 times more land efficient then burning biomass. so we absolutely need trees to provide ecological functions. but in era of 5kwp PV array paying itself in 5-6 years(and still working afterwards), to heat water... its is ridiculous to cut trees and burn them to have hot water. 80% of time Canadian citizen can have 100% solar hot water (PV), less then 100% rest of the year.
It's always ridiculous to cut trees for firewood. There is no need, since there is so much dead firewood lying around, and so many trees die every year, and since most people use much cleaner natural gas for heating. As for oil and gas, those are still cheaper, denser, and more portable -and even more sustainable when you consider the mining for rare earths and lithium- than any renewable energy source.
Green trees are not used for fire wood or for paper. Burning green wood makes for terrible fire wood it also causes issues with chimneys due to having more Creosote.
It is illegal In The logging Industry to use merchantable wood for paper or fire wood. Wood has grades and graded wood is worth a lot more than fire or paper wood. Paper wood also has a grade but it is a low grade. Often firewood can be shipped to paper mills as an example.
You need to also factor in the efficiency loss of turning electricity into captured carbon, plus the emissions made mining and then manufacturing and installation and disposal. It is still pretty good, but it isn't basically free like letting trees grow, plus there are other benefits to having large mature forests.
I am happy to see that PV is being deployed at incredible speeds. But dismayed at the lack of large scale storage projects & international interconnects.
Is distributed scale storage projects not enough? The grid doesn't need huge storage projects if every house has a house-sized battery and an increasing number of cars can double as a storage buffer (V2G/V2X). Both of those things are statistically hand-in-hand with current PV rollouts, not always sold together, but they form a virtuous cycle for the average home owner if a home can manage PV, storage, and EV all together to (selfishly) reduce reliance on the grid and keep energy patterns much more localized (if not fully "off grid").
A PV-heavy grid potentially starts to look a lot more distributed in interesting ways like scale than the traditional grid which was always more centrally orchestrated than it sounded.
Not every house has enough space for battery storage. And management of millions of small batteries is harder than management of thousands of bigger batteries. Millions of small batteries are also vastly more expensive than thousands of bigger battery projects.
> Not every house has enough space for battery storage.
Then it becomes a building/complex/neighborhood community building problem in some cases. The shift to a properly distributed scale is that it can be bottom-up rather than top down. Also, some large scale projects may still be needed, it isn't an either/or, a mixture of provides flexibility in the long term. But you certainly need to worry about planning fewer large scale projects if you are expecting a market full of small ones.
> And management of millions of small batteries is harder than management of thousands of bigger batteries. Millions of small batteries are also vastly more expensive than thousands of bigger battery projects.
The cost is more distributed rather than being only one or two infrastructure companies in a region. The management is more distributed with more entities involved. Top-down control is harder, but in some ways that is as much a feature as a bug. Local batteries can prioritize local needs, that's a feature versus "just do what your central provider wishes". Grid-wise needs become a larger market with more players, which also means more competition and more interesting prices.
large scale for me is every house has water tank, which can drain tens of kwh every day. cars which sit on parking lots for 80+% of day... 11kw charger can supply 30 miles of range per 1 hour of shopping, bowling, movie watching... and you do not need V2X, just plug with relay/lock. (esp32+nfc reader for billing)
Sorry, just to clarify: OC is about sequestration of carbon, not using trees (biomass) as fuel, right?
Which I oppose; my own governor is arguing that exporting wood pellets is a net gain. Face palm.
That said, learning about biochar is on my todo list. I do forest restoration work (volunteer) and am excited to try anything which helps build topsoil, store carbon, hastens reforestation. example question: So we'd capture that wood gas when making biochar...?
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Otherwise, I agree with all. Especially comment elsethread about our existing "distributed storage" system(s) like hot water tanks and EVs at rest.
Fortunately, misc startups are trying to tap into that potential. eg combining heat pumps and water tanks, residential district heating. eg virtual power plants (peer-to-peer systems) aggregating residential batteries (EVs, power walls, and soon appliances) into grid level storage.
It's such an amazing time to be alive. The opportunities are insurmountable.
Totally fallacious argument. Trees grow by themselves in much of the world. They can be harvested with very low investment and directly contribute to a reduction of carbon in the atmosphere, as it now is the tree.