Does wood pellet heating have its place in the collective?

Thanks to its energy density, its homogeneity, its cost, its excellent carbon footprint and its clean combustion and flexibility of use, this type of heating meets specific needs that make it essential in the French energy mix.

With more than 1.100 wood pellet heating plants in France, the feedback is numerous and very satisfactory: schools, high schools, offices, town halls, gymnasiums, housing estates, etc.

To better identify the market and assess the areas of economic relevance of these facilities, Propellet conducted the survey. This study, delivered in November 2020 “Linking uses between granules and wafers” was funded by ADEME, the France Bois Forêt (FBF) interprofessional organization and jointly carried out with the Bois Energie Interprofessional Committee (CIBE) and the National Union of Producers of Wood Pellets (SNPGB).

The domestic pellet market today represents 95%. Very significant potential for the collective and industrial market

Today, the domestic market (stoves and boilers) represents 95%. And, in 2019, the cumulative consumption of pellets for the collective and industrial sector amounted to 70 t / year, or less than 000% of the consumption of wood pellets in France!

Excluding CPCU (Compagnie Parisienne de Chauffage Urbain), pellet represents only 2% of the energy in collective and industrial wood-fired heating systems (while the number of “wood” heating systems represents nearly 20% of the total). The vast majority of it is supplied by shredded wood (forest chips, allied wood industries, end-of-life wood shreds, etc.).

The French landscape in collective and industrial pellet heating is marked by the predominance of small and medium-sized boilers. In fact, in the collective / industrial sector, the CIBE identifies, for 2018, a fleet of 1 wood pellet heating plants of more than 156 kW for a cumulative power of 50 MW. More than 178% of pellet boilers have an output of less than 90 kW.

Suitability of the pellet and capacity of the sector

The recent government announcements concerning the ban on the use of gas in new collective housing from 2022 (RE2020) will accelerate the development of this market. The wood energy sector is ready to tackle this shift.

Wood energy is a virtuous circle, since the use of wood in construction allows both to store CO² in the building and to generate wood co-products which are used to manufacture pellets.

In 2019, France produced 1.6 million tonnes of wood pellets. Thanks to new factory projects, the capacity should reach 2 million tonnes within 2 to 3 years. Beyond the compulsory switch to energy sobriety which will reduce needs, the outlook is reassuring since the resource from the forest is abundant. The natural increase in the forest is 10% per year in volume and only half of this increase is collected for all uses (timber, industrial timber, fuelwood).

Decision-making logic of specifiers in favor of a wood solution

Studying the added value of the granule compared to the wafer facilitates the decision logic.

The choice is made on the basis of feasibility studies and recommendations from project managers and experts. The will of a client to develop a local wood resource in order to boost the territory can often guide the decision in favor of the plate; in particular in the case of municipalities with forests.

Platelet / granule comparison = the decision factors

When the choice of wood energy is made, the trade-off is between chipboard and pellet. The first questions that the client will ask himself concern:

Technical elements

The technical or land constraints related to the area of ​​the site of the boiler room = the energy density of the pellet means that 3 to 4 times less space is needed for storage than for the wafer.

• Site accessibility to delivery trucks = unloading conditions. The granule therefore also requires 3 to 4 times fewer deliveries than the wafer.
• The means to ensure the operation of the installation = the wafers require more skills and supervision (internal staff or operating contract).
• Note: Splitting the output into several boilers is common in pellet plants. Due to a lower minimum authorized power than for a single boiler, this configuration makes it possible to cover a greater part of the thermal needs by wood (including domestic hot water needs in summer), possibly up to 100%, that is to say without resorting to additional fossil fuels.

Financial elements

• Analysis of differentiated investment / operating costs for project owners (a fairly rare situation).
• Economic analysis in overall cost = decisive for the choice of the client. This is where the question of the intermittent use of heat arises. The flexibility of a pellet plant is an advantage in the case of this intermittence but, above all, for the same installed power, the intermittence will result in less energy consumption which will make the use of the pellet economical.
• In the industrial environment, projects are generally evaluated in terms of gross return on investment rather than overall energy cost. A pellet plant will have a better gross return on investment than a wafer project, (if small variations in the prices of the 2 fuels), and for low energy needs.

Analysis of the economic interest of the solutions

The analysis of the economic interest of a project is generally carried out by comparing the energy bills in total cost for each of the solutions.

This graph shows that when we break down the overall cost:

• The energy share is lower for the pellet compared to fossil fuels
• The part of the pellet appliance (maintenance included) is less important compared to the wafer

Major trends from a financial point of view after analysis

• Faced with domestic fuel oil (€ 95 including tax / MWhPCI), the wood-fired boiler rooms are systematically competitive.
• Faced with natural gas (55 € TTC / MWhPCI), on the other hand, dedicated wood-fired boiler rooms are only competitive in rare cases: schools, health and social or collective residential establishments, for example. Monitor the impact of RE 2020.
• When the two wood solutions are compared with each other, the “granulated” solution becomes more relevant when the intermittency increases or when meeting low thermal needs.
• The higher the price of fossil energy used as back-up, the greater the area of ​​relevance of the granule solution: with the granule, only 10% of the needs are covered by the back-up energy against 15% for the solution wafer. This represents a 33% reduction in the use of this additional energy.

A global reflection to be carried out on wood heating networks in rural areas

The recent government decisions (fuel oil and gas) require an overall reflection and actions to develop wood energy in rural areas. Hundreds of thousands of families, public and commercial buildings will be affected and will have to find an alternative.

But individual solutions are not desirable. It will be necessary to avoid the switch to propane (derived from fossil petroleum) or to electric heating in all these forms (by Joule effect or more virtuously by heat pump) which would worsen the peak of electrical power demand in winter.

Collective reflection is essential. Small renewable heat networks in rural areas have their place.