The Government of Castilla y León plans to heat 1,200 public buildings with biomass

The Junta de Castilla y León plans to heat 1,200 public buildings with biomass. The use of biomass for energy purposes in Castilla y León will be substantially boosted thanks to the measures against climate change that the Board has agreed to approve 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 to heat administrative buildings to replace fossil fuels.

According to Javier Díaz, president of the Spanish Biomass Association –AVEBIOM-, “the Agreement adopted is excellent news for our sector. The Board's increasingly defined commitment to biomass, and the example that this represents for the rest of society, will generate activity and new jobs, both in forestry exploitation and in the manufacture of pellets and chips. and in the installation of combustion equipment.”

The president of AVEBIOM recalls the benefits that the energy recovery of biomass entails: “reduced 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 thermal systems in more than one hundred public buildings. From now on, it is intended to act on another 1,200 buildings, among which there are nearly 300 primary education centers, whose management is shared with the town councils.

Furthermore, according to the 2019 inventory of assets, the Board owns, or holds some real right, of 2,700 properties, the vast majority of which require heating and DHW. The potential is, therefore, enormous.

The autonomous community is a “mine” of forest biomass: it houses 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 in charge of managing 1.3 million hectares of wooded forest area, guaranteeing the sustainability of the “mine” through increasingly orderly management: close to 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 in the PEFC scheme.

The pine forests managed by the Board, 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 / anus).

In these mountains it has been used as average during the last five -year period 1.4 mm ³ /year, that is, 60% of its possibility. A figure higher than the national average and similar to the eur Opea. It was explained by Javier Ezquerra, head of the Forest Management Service of the Junta de Castilla y León, during the International Conference on the Pellet Market organized by Avebiom in September 2019. In private mountains the use is approaching 50%.