The Dirty ‘Renewable’ Energy Increasingly Heating Swiss Homes

A protection forest near Toffen that was logged in 2019

 LUCIE WUETHRICH

Lucie Wuethrich’s activist journey started when her neighbor came to her crying. They lived below a protection forest near Bern, the Swiss capital, yet logging created a risk of rocks crashing onto their property. Her neighbor’s driveway had already been pelted with a massive boulder.

In response, Wuethrich started investigating why trees were being cut down in a protected area. She learned that this type of logging was allowed for forest maintenance, but “what shocked me enormously was to discover that 95% of this would be burnt.”

What Wuethrich had stumbled on was a corner of the biomass energy industry, in which wood is burnt as an energy source. Many politicians love it because they typically get to mark this in their environmental balance sheets as a source of renewable energy, under the premise that the trees that are logged will get replaced with freshly planted trees. So biomass helps governments meet their carbon reduction goals, even though burning wood remains a major source of carbon dioxide emissions and air pollution.

Many foresters appreciate the industry because they get a market for their so-called low-value wood, which typically can’t be used for more profitable purposes like construction. Some maintain that forests need to be periodically thinned anyway to maintain good forest health and low fire risk, so these thinnings might as well be used to heat people’s homes.

Defenders of biomass energy also contend that the industry isn’t leading to deforestation. “For years, the forest area in Switzerland has been increasing annually despite timber harvesting,” comments Nöel Graber, a spokesperson for Axpo, the country’s largest producer of renewable energy.

 Who doesn’t praise the biomass industry? Many environmentalists. They point out that the biomass industry is so massive that it doesn’t solely use thinnings and waste wood; that trees need to remain in the ground to continue absorbing carbon; and that overall, burning wood is an inefficient and highly polluting source of energy generation that doesn’t deserve to be called renewable.

 The Bremgartenwald forest, where increasing logging has been documented recently

And in response to the biomass industry’s point that Swiss forests are actually expanding, Wuethrich, who works with environmental organizations including Biofuelwatch and the Biomass Working Group of the Environmental Paper Network, counters that the picture varies widely by region. She’s seeing shrinking forest cover locally.

As well, the quality of forest matters. Under Swiss government definitions, Wuethrich points out, “Radically thinned/logged forests still count as forest, as indeed do forestry roads and forestry installations.”

Unlike the UK, which imports most of its wood pellets from the US, Switzerland generally logs its own forests as a source of domestic heating. Its main source of renewable energy is hydropower, and the country may have limited space for solar and wind energy. It’s long been customary in Switzerland to burn wood for heat, with little awareness of the impacts on deforestation, air quality, and human health.

Within this mix, wood burning is set to expand. Demand for tiny, uniform wood pellets, and the associated prices, are climbing. According to Wuethrich, government and industry parties are looking to increase woody biomass production by 40% or even more.

In Bern “energy wood has been called the ‘Oil of Emmental’,” says Wuethrich, referring to a central region of Switzerland. She believes that a desire for energy self-sufficiency and a diversity of energy sources, coupled with the government’s 2050 target of net-zero emissions, is driving the push for biomass energy.

“The government is very pro-biomass while the general public knows very little about it,” Wuethrich believes. “It is an uphill battle here.”

 Stacks of wood destined for combustion, near Studen

 LUCIE WUETHRICH

Surprisingly, some major environmental groups in Switzerland are actually encouraging people to burn more wood. One of these is myclimate, a nonprofit that provides subsidies for heat pumps (an energy-efficient form of heating) – but also for wood pellet heating systems.

According to Kai Landwehr, the head of marketing for myclimate, “we want to change the way houses get heated as soon as possible. Hence, we need to shut down and replace fossil heating systems. It is simply not possible to install a heat pump at every location. Reasons for this are, for example, noise protection regulations or because the necessary drilling is not possible. In these cases, pellet heating offers an alternative.”

myclimate promotes only automated pellet heating systems, which it argues produce less particulate matter than older models. Yet even newer models of wood-burning stoves, designated as environmentally friendly, still produce very high levels of tiny particle pollution.

So instead of incentivizing people to burn wood, Wuethrich says, “The infinite renewables such as solar, wind, hydro and geothermal energies should be promoted and further subsidized instead.”

She’s frustrated by the gap between the perceptions and the realities of forestry use. “People think of Switzerland as a green and pleasant land, but we leave disproportionally large carbon footprints thanks to our lavish lifestyles,” Wuethrich believes. To counter the image of lush and pristine forests, she has been monitoring and documenting what she calls “radical logging” of carbon-storing trees that are then sent on to wood chippers.

What Wuethrich needs is for more environmentalists and policymakers to take notice of the unsustainability of biomass energy. “That is why I am still fighting for this. I never really expected this in Switzerland.”

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Christine Ro

Source: Forbes 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2022/03/16/the-dirty-renewable-energy-increasingly-heating-swiss-homes/

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