Biomass
The Castile and León regional government plans to heat 1,200 public buildings with biomass
The Castile and León regional government plans to heat 1,200 public buildings with biomass. The use of biomass for energy purposes in Castile and León will be substantially boosted thanks to the climate change measures the regional government has agreed to implement starting in 2020.
Among the 10 measures included in Agreement 26/2020, of June 4, the third indicates that biomass is the reference energy source for heating administrative buildings as a replacement for fossil fuels.
According to Javier Díaz, president of the Spanish Biomass Association (AVEBIOM), “the agreement reached is excellent news for our sector. The increasingly clear commitment of the Regional Government to biomass, and the example this sets for the rest of society, will generate activity and new jobs, both in forestry operations and in the manufacture of pellets and wood chips, as well as in the installation of combustion equipment.”.
The president of AVEBIOM highlights the benefits of energy valorization of biomass: “lower risk of forest fires, energy sovereignty, rural employment, and all within the framework of the sustainable circular economy, inherent to our sector.”
Since 2013, Somacyl has promoted the installation of biomass heating systems in more than one hundred public buildings. The plan now is to work on another 1,200 buildings, including nearly 300 primary schools, which are jointly managed with the local councils.
Furthermore, according to the 2019 inventory of assets, the Regional Government owns, or holds some real right to, 2,700 properties, the vast majority of which require heating and hot water. The potential is therefore enormous.
The autonomous community is a "mine" of forest biomass: it has a forest area of 4.9 million hectares, of which three million are wooded and 1.8 million hectares correspond to closed forest.
The Ministry of the Environment is responsible for managing 1.3 million hectares of wooded forest area, guaranteeing the sustainability of the "mine" through increasingly orderly management: nearly 70% of this area is managed according to some type of technical document – management project, technical plan, etc. – and more than 751,000 hectares are certified under the PEFC scheme.
The pine forests managed by the Junta, a fundamental source of biomass for energy uses, offer a "possibility" - or amount of wood available to be used in an environmentally friendly way - of 2.5 million cubic meters each year (Mm 3 /year).
meters has been harvested over the last five years , representing 60% of their potential. This figure is higher than the national average and similar to the eur . Javier Ezquerra, head of the forest management service of the Regional Government of Castile and León, explained this during the International Conference on the domestic pellet market organized by AVEBIOM in September 2019. In privately owned forests, the harvest rate is closer to 50%.
