Score - Sustainable Construction in Rural and Fragile Areas for Energy efficiency
Guidelines for Integrated territorial Planning:
Biomass
The use of biomass for energy purposes is seen in Portugal, not only as the use of endogenous resources, present in the country in large scale, but also as a contribution to the reduction of forest fires and the reduction of GHG and from an economic perspective, as a valuable contribution for job creation through the establishment of an industrial and commercial chain.
Energy recovery from biomass should be a national desideratum, and lies within the concerns of society in general, for reasons that go far beyond the energy issue.
Biomass is used in Portugal, in several forms and as a way to produce several types of energy:
- Thermoelectric power plants, using biomass in its several forms and types (forestry residues, urban solid waste, industrial residues) to produce electric energy associated with heat. The majority of this energy is introduced in the national electric net;
- Small installations in domestic and services (schools, elderly homes) to produce heat;
- Residual forest residues are most of the times neglected but represent in the total a very high amount of energy that is in our days burned since is a high potential for fires and other problems in the forest. The solution for this problem could be the creation of small energy production plants that could supply local and/or regional entities/domestic consumers.
To develop this sector and to really achieve all the goods incomes that from there could come, several solutions are being pointed as part of the solution:
- Improvement of the energy selling rate equivalent to other energy forms, like wind or solar energy;
- Increasing the raw material value, making it economically attractive, to achieve the double main: energy production and forest cleaning;
- Allow the installation of a larger number of power plants, allowing greater access to the electric net, thereby relieving the transport costs of raw materials, which can some cases be, a factor of economic unfeasibility for new installations.
In Portugal, there is only one installation of electricity generation using biomass as the main fuel. This is the central Mortágua Thermal Power Plant, located in the center of the country, on the right bank of Aguieira.
This plant uses forest waste, very abundant in the area, to produce electricity, thereby creating, in addition to the energy that is essential in our day-to-day conditions for forest owners to feel motivated to keep the woods and forests cleaned. Thus, the Mortágua Central contributes to reduce the number of fires and the area of forest management center of the country, which annually produces an estimated value of nearly 500 tons of forest residues (biomass).
The Thermal Power Plant of Mortágua began operating in August 1999 and allows the flow of 100,000 tons per year forest waste burned in a boiler 33MWth.The Center has an installed capacity of 10MVA - 9 MW and is designed to deliver to the distribution of electricity by about 63GWh Year.
http://www.edp.pt/