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Comment by midasuni | Hacker News Reader

Biomass is a small impact. The next big impact will be ever increasing wind power and the shift from gas to electric for heating.

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Drax is huge, and now burns canadian imported wood rather than coal which is was built for because it can be considered carbon-free.

Farmed wood should actually be considered carbon neutral. Other than transportation cost and the carbon emitted during harvesting, it’s a legitimate way of capturing carbon from the atmosphere and then just emitting the same carbon back

The problem is that at this point we need to be actually capturing carbon and not re-emitting it.

Capturing carbon is literally a fantasy. Other than growing forests there is no hope we can invent a technological way out of our carbon emissions by capturing them. Companies which promise otherwise are essentially a scam.

And growing forests is a viable option but the problem is that the carbon is only captured for as long as you don't burn the wood or let it rot, it has to be either buried or turned into things which ultimately won't release their CO2 back into the air.

Grow a forest, convert the wood into charcoal, then store it in a salt mine.

Converting to charcoal is pointless, just burry biomass which is how we got fossil fuels in the first place.

A dump beats every commonly proposed method of carbon sequestration because people pay you to take it and all you need to do is prevent that carbon from entering the atmosphere.

If we can increase our CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere we can become carbon neutral faster as increased concentrations drive forest growth and allow plants to grow in previously desert regions.

Farmed wood shouldn’t be considered carbon neutral as there’s transportation and other factors to include

Plus we should avoid burning captured carbon

Drax which burns biomass is self-styled as "the UK's largest renewable power station"

Right now it’s generating less power than Solar - in the depth of winter, 8%

Gas is 50% higher at 12% and that doesn’t include the gas usage in keeping homes warm

Wind (32%) imports and nuclear are all higher than gas for the electricity generation, let alone imported wood generation.

It's not ideal to compare at any point in time. It's a clear day (and midday), not long after a storm has passed generating record levels of wind energy - during a national holiday when demand is always low (and prices often go into negative territory)

I'm not disagreeing what'll be the next impact, just saying Drax and biomass is perhaps worth more than the statement of it being 'small impact'.

In 2022 biomass was 5%

https://www.edie.net/what-did-the-uks-electricity-generation...

It is worth bearing in mind that it can be seen as stored energy that can be used at any point in time, unlike wind and solar.

In other words, 5% as an average means it's far higher during periods lacking light and wind.

Solar is down as 4.4%, though in peak Summer during the day it can satisfy about a 1/4 of demand, cheaply.

It’s not clear if solar includes reduced demand from rooftop solar, or just grid connected solar

Either way 5% is a tiny amount.

biomass is also far better than gas for those times when you do need to boost supply, so increasing biomass still seems like a win.

agreed. It can seem counter-intuitive with biomass since it's "burning trees", but generally it's a carbon neutral process or far closer to one than burning buried fossil fuels.

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