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Comment by dkjaudyeqooe | Hacker News Reader

We burn wood for heating and it makes perfectly good sense environmentally and economically. I live in a small village surrounded by scrub and smaller to medium size trees. Typically we rent some land (or use our own) and chop down what is there, or find fallen trees on public land, for use in our central heating wood furnace. It's not old growth forest, it grows back in a few years, and as a result we're not burning fossil fuels. And if you don't mind a bit of labor, it's cheap.

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Visit Athens in winter and see how wood burning for heating scales...

Wood burning is fine in the same way ICE vehicles are fine, when you have one it's nice, when you have a billion it's a whole other problem

The point is small communities should be able to have local renewable solutions, even though the solution would not scale to large communities.

Is that the point? Because that's not what the tweets are about at all...

No, but people who live in big cities tend to advocate for solutions that only make sense in big cities. It's certainly worth keeping a bit of perspective.

Worth what? Nobody is stopping or complaining about rural homeowners burning wood pellets for heat. This is specifically about using imported, overseas pellets in a retrofitted coal plant to produce electricity. It's an inefficient environmental disaster.

Same situation with for me, I heat exclusively with a wood stove. Oil is ungodly expensive and so is electricity meaning neither can compete with 250CAD/cord of cut, split wood. Costs me about 1000$ to heat my house all winter long.

Sure it's a bit of effort, but I think it's worth it in my situation. I know a lot of people hate wood, and I understand it's not great for my health, but I'll continue to burn it for purely economic reasons if nothing else.

I'm skeptical of using wood for biomass energy generation, but not for heating.

Even if it does harm the environment its more important people don't freeze, its not really much a of a choice at this point.

Immediately stops making sense when you try to scale it to anything beyond what would be possible sourcing from basically walkable distances.

(also: you can rent land, scrub it clean, then return it bare without the owner minding?)

> you can rent land, scrub it clean, then return it bare without the owner minding

That's the idea, he's renting it for firewood. So we might rent it for 3 years during which time we'll have wood for 3 winters then return it to him cleared.

We use a tractor, which of course burns diesel but that's only a few liters. The wood is maybe 2 to 5 kms away. It still makes sense compared to using fossil fuels or (local gas based) electricity.

Ok, so "renting" is more a term for "buying the harvest, but we have to do the harvesting ourselves".

Perfectly makes sense in an environment where that's a regular occurrence, but here in isolation it sounds a bit like "I live in hotel rooms: it's not actually that expensive, if you put the furniture on eBay at the end of your stay the room almost pays for itself". Thanks for the clarification!

>> Immediately stops making sense when you try to scale it to anything beyond what would be possible sourcing from basically walkable distances.

More than walkable distances, I think the problem is the population density. It escales until the population is so high that you must reuse the same spot before the tree grow back. How many years you must wait to reuse the same spot? Does the owner plant new trees or they grow naturally? Are you burning the leftovers?

I think that similar arrangements were usual, but the idea was to cultivate some crops for a few years after removing the trees. Are you skipping the cultivation phase? Is the land bad for crops?

I'm just getting into wood burning as an adult, but the rule of thumb I've heard is that you need about one acre to sustainably produce one cord per year. So if it takes 4-5 cords per winter to heat your home with a newer gasification-type burner, then you'd need to be in an area with an average lot size of 5 acres to consider that sustainable. That's decidedly rural, but practical for many, especially with even better insulation. Save the higher density, cleaner burning energy sources for places with denser populations and shared walls. Although unfortunately with nonsensical zoning policies, city buildings tend to be older and poorer insulated.

Obviously we'd be better off with heat pumps run by renewable electricity supplying most heat. But lack of storage seems to be the missing piece right now - peak solar production and peak heating load are on opposite sides of the day, unlike air conditioning. Nuclear would be capable of generating electricity at the right time, but it's presently stalled for many reasons. But even if we had widespread nuclear, that wouldn't help from the individual perspective of still needing a heat source during a power outage.

Solar+heat pump is cheaper than a tractor

Drilled water heat pumps cost far more than you save to install. Air exchange heat pumps don't work in cold weather (that is, cold where I live, ymmv).

They work well enough up to -20C or so. Thats the climate we get here (and occasionally worse) and gov subsidises replacement of pellet stoves (which cost similarly to heat pumps anyway) with heat pumps. You just have to be ok to either rough it out or turn on expensive resistive heating few days per year.

That all sounds great, another great case is to use rest material from other wood production.

If all wood pellet burning had these origins then it's a carbon neutral energy source which is much better than many alternatives.

In my country (EU) the local wood pellet manufacturers use all sorts of biomass that would otherwise be considered junk, such as hulls from sunflower seeds. I find it hard to believe that companies are cutting down trees and using the best parts to make wood pellets, when there is so much demand for that wood elsewhere.

Compared to burning wood directly, pellets burn a lot cleaner meaning they release a lot less local pollution in the point of use. A friend added a pellet hopper to his wood furnace a few years ago and was amazed that after the switch he had no smoke and very little ash. And he no longer has to go and load it every morning and evening.

Sure, you're not buying manufactured pellets, like the majority of burnt wood.

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