Wood distribution systems

Other includes net imports of coal coke and electricity produced from wood, waste, wind, photovoltaic, and solar thermal sources connected to electric utihty distribution systems. It does not include consumption of wood energy other than that consumed by electric utiUty industry. 

Business executives expect growth of the wood-for-energy business to occur slowly. While the means exist to collect and convert wood into useful products, the lack of wood fuel distribution systems is perceived to be a major barrier to growth. A further concern of executives is the lack of assurances regarding the long-term availability of supplies. 

Business executives see the barriers to widespread use of agricultural residues for thermal energy as similar to those in the wood segment. The lack of collection and distribution systems for the feedstock is a key barrier, as is the cyclical nature of its availability. 

Figure 7.8 illustrates a distribution system composed of (a) the distribution pole and (b) a customer s house. A distribution pole is made up of a steel pipe, a steel frame with concrete cement, or wood with a down conductor. The ratio of the pole height and the basement length h2 is about 1 3. A customer house involves the groundings of home appliances and a telephone line, that are made up of either copper or a steel rod with a length of about 1 m. 

Domestic and commercial boilers fuelled by wood logs, wood chips or wood pellets are available. Boiler designs and controls mean that modern boilers can be highly automated. With a water-based heat distribution system already in place, it is relatively simple for any household or commercial operation to remove an existing boiler and replace it with a wood-fuelled one that will do much the same job. 

Treatment of wood with multi-component systems is likely to result in separation of the components when large wood samples are treated. This has been likened to the action of a chromatography column (Schneider, 1995). This is a significant problem that is often only encountered during scale-up of laboratory-based studies, where satisfactory results were previously obtained on small wood samples. Similarly, treatment of large wood samples can often lead to considerable variability in results due to inhomogeneous distribution, which again may not be evident with small samples treated under laboratory conditions. 

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