Another busy day. Met Peter Heydorn at 0730h in Ebeltoft, Jutland and we took the car ferry to Zealand. Peter has been generous with his time and I am grateful to the NZ Danish Trade Commissioner, Jakob Andersen, for the introduction. Peter is very knowledgeable about matters environmental and energy-related, and has worked on many environmental engineering and energy projects for the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. You can contact him at phk@heycon.dk if you are looking for advice on international bioenergy projects. Peter has been to New Zealand recently and my colleague Mark Windsor at EECA has seen his waste-to-energy (W2E) presentation in Auckland.

Our first stop on Zealand was at the Danish National Laboratory for Renewable Energy at Risø. You can read about their work at http://www.risoe.dk/Research/sustainable_energy.aspx . There I was lucky enough to spend some time with a senior researcher in the Biosystems division,  http://www.risoe.dk/About_risoe/research_departments/BIO.aspx  Anne Belinda Thomsen. Anne Belinda gave me a very good overview of the unique capabilities of Risø, and their work on biorefinery for energy and biomaterials. Anne Belinda has some unique work on enzymes and fermentation. I was particularly impressed with the life cycle and sustainability aspects of their work - an integrated approach, working closely with colleagues in the bioresources area, who focus on nutrient balances and other systems issues associated with biomass.

Next stop was Copenhagen and a meeting at the Danish Energy Agency with Finn Bertelsen, who works on bioenergy for the Energy Supply and Renewable Energy division. Their function is the overall planning of Denmark's electricity, heat and natural gas supply. The goal is to develop a socioeconomically and environmentally optimal energy sector for the benefit of consumers. You can see some of the interesting bioenergy facts that Finn gave me at http://www.izes.de/cms/upload/pdf/Finn_Bertelsen.pdf  . Some other snippets from that meeting:

Busy day - visited two biomass boiler manufacturers (Passat and Weiss), a gasification plant, two a wood district heating plants and a straw fired district heating plants. All the district heating plants had Weiss boilers, ranging from 3.5 MW to 5.0 MW. We discussed technology transfer. The wood for the second plant comes from a 25 km radius. The straw comes from one farmer, and they use 6000 500kg bales a season. One kg of straw is 4 KWh. Electricity here is about 55 cents a KWh of which 22 cents approx. is tax - so lots of incentive for efficient heating such as biomass.

The first plant is buring wood processing residue and demolition wood residue and has to landfill its ash. Landfill tax is about DK350 per tonne. Wood  waste can't go back into the forest because of cadmium accumulation but the straw ash can, as long as it goes back into exactly the same fields the straw came from, at intervals of no sooner than three years. It is high in Ph.

The gasifier was a demonstration plant. Pretty cool.  Tomorrow I am off to meet scientists at the National Energy Laboratory of Denmark at Risø, and bioenergy colleagues at the Danish Energy Agency.