Biomass Power Plants

My previous post here looked at solar lighting and how it makes a lot of sense to install solar panels on your roof if you live in a sunny climate. In this article, I'm going off on a tangent away from cutting waste to look at another environmentally friendly method of producing power: biomass.

Biomass is another word for anything that has once lived such as that which has been created from plant matter, or produced by a process of photosynthesis using energy from the sun. In ordinary speak, that means wood, coal, peat or similar that will burn. This doesn't include oil or its derivatives as we know them, such as diesel or petroleum, plastics etc, although we'll get onto them in a minute.

Green Electricity Production

A biomass power plant is one that can produce electricity from burning stuff that would otherwise end up in a landfill site, thereby helping to cut down on land pollution while benefiting society by producing some of the power it needs. That power produced in biomass power plants displaces some of the power that would otherwise be produced by oil, or coal fired power plants or nuclear power plants, thus similarly cutting down on that variety of power production.

So what can go into a biomass power plant?

Fuel to Convert Into Electricity

Well, the easy stuff is paper, cardboard, processed woods such as chipboard, medium density fibreboard (MDF) and pretty much anything else that will burn and would otherwise have ended up polluting the land in a landfill site.

Some of the more unpalatable substances that biomass power plants can use which greatly benefit the environment are things like sewerage effluent, animal manure etc which is obviously better burned and the pathogens they carry killed in the process than them ending up in rivers and the oceans.

The gases that are produced by the combustion of these waste products are also collected to be re-used as fuel for further power production, so very little is wasted in a biomass power plant.

So you see, biomass power plants do a great deal of good whilst producing the electricity we need by recycling waste products and making good use of them in the bargain. That's good for us, good for the environment and good for the future of our planet that we should all be investing in.

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