Biomass is any organic matter that is used to generate energy. This could include both common animal waste and many agricultural crops. It can be burned or converted into a liquid to generate electricity. No energy source, including biomass, is ideal. Using biomass energy plants to generate power has both advantages and disadvantages, despite being renewable. Utility bidder analyses the pros and cons of using biomass as a source of energy.
They are as follows:
Renewable Energy Source
Biomass is a plentiful resource: organic matter is all around us, from woods and croplands to garbage and landfills. All biomass obtains its energy from the sun. Because of photosynthesis, biomass resources can be replenished in a minute fraction of the time it takes to replenish fossil fuel resources, taking hundreds of millions of years. Consequently, we will never run out of biomass to use as an energy source.
Waste Reduction
Landfills have a variety of detrimental environmental effects, including contamination of neighboring air, soil, water, and greenhouse gas emissions.
Many hazardous and poisonous products wind up in landfills; depending on how these materials are handled, they can contaminate our land, air, and water, resulting in adverse environmental and human health implications.
Reliable Source of Energy
Many biomass energy plants are dispatchable, which means they can be turned on and off quickly. This permits grid operators to utilize electricity generated by these facilities during peak demand periods.
Bioenergy, unlike other renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, is neither intermittent nor variable: the sun doesn’t always shine on the sky, and the wind doesn’t always blow. You can’t always rely on solar or wind energy sources when you need them without storage systems.
While the availability of some biomass resources is subject to seasonality, biomass energy facilities can always turn on to generate electricity, regardless of the weather outside.
Higher Costs
There are additional costs integrated with extracting, transporting, and storing biomass prior to energy generation and the initial expenditures of getting the plants up and operating. Other renewable technologies do not have to account for this additional cost because they rely on free, on-site resources (tides, sunshine, wind, etc.) for energy.
Land Area Requirements
Biomass energy plants require a lot of room, which limits where you can put one. Companies often need to locate these plants close to their biomass supply to save money on transportation and storage.
Additional acreage may also be required to cultivate the organic matter itself; if power companies grow crops or trees solely for bioenergy instead of using agricultural waste, this results in a bigger land footprint per unit of electricity produced.
Environmental Degradation
Like many other kinds of energy, producing power from biomass has a number of environmental drawbacks. Unsustainable bioenergy operations, for example, might result in deforestation over time, depending on the type of biomass used to generate electricity.
Companies that clear-cut forests to provide material for biomass energy plants endanger the natural environment and damage plant and animal habitats. Clearing plants and organic matter from the land can have a negative impact on the health of nearby soil, which relies on biomass for compost and fertilization.
