The Renewable Energy Neither Candidate is Talking About

[Takeda Shingen]

Originally Posted by Betonov

A birch tree can be ripe for chopping in 20-30 years.
But you wont believe how much firewood you get from one tree.

I own 5 hectares of forrest. It has enough birch trees ripe for chopping to heat my home for 5 winters. In that time enough birches will grow to the desirable size to cut them for another 5 winters and so on and so on...

Slovenia has 1.816.000 hectares of forests, about 58% of the entire country. Enough firewood to heat 1.000.000 homes (counting out the industry aplicable wood) per winter. In a country of 2.000.000 people we have enough to export.

Of course, lets be real. Wood burning only really works in rural areas and sub-urbs. One fammily houses. But its enough to shift oil and gas consumption from half the population.
And Texas or Spain would also be an exception here.

I know how much firewood you can get from one tree. It all depends on the size of said tree. Here's a good estimate from the University of New Hampshire:

http://extension.unh.edu/resources/f...44_Rep1200.pdf

The age of the tree can be estimated using diameter as noted by the Missouri Department of Conservation:

http://mdc.mo.gov/landwater-care/hom...s/how-old-tree

I buy one cord of wood for the fireplace in my home, and we go through that entire cord by spring only burning recreationally. My bet is that if I heated my home with a wood stove, I'd need at least 4 cords, and probably more like 6-8. For the sake of argument, let's pick a very small number; say two cords per household seasonally.

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html

Census data puts the number of households in the US at 114,235,996. We'll round down for expediency's sake and say 114 million. If 1/4th of all US households switched to wood heat that would be 28.5 million households. At two cords per household that is 57 million cords of wood, requiring approximately 2.85 billion 5" diameter trees seasonally. Each 5" diameter tree requires 25 years to mature.

No, it's not at all sustainable in large scale. That's why no one is talking about it.