“When burned, biomass emits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere like any other combustion. A 2012 paper by Synapse Energy Economics estimated that burning biomass emits 50 to 85 percent more CO2 than burning coal since the energy content of biomass is lower than coal relative to its carbon content.”

So why are more and more power plant adopting wood instead of coal to generate electricity if it actually creates more CO2 than even coal? My assumption would be that wood is cleaner because it doesn’t pollute the environment with lead, radiation and other contaminates that come off of coal burning.

My assumptions are completely wrong, the whole reason power plants have chosen wood is because of the faulty assumption that it emits less CO2 than coal. This assumption has sense been proven wrong but regardless climate policy has caused a huge bio-mass movement that sees increasing amounts of power generation via burning wood.

I live in Tyler Texas and we even have plans for a biomass power plant to built very close to my house. So all of this is in reality very close to home for me. I of course don’t think that CO2 is harming or catastrophically warming the planet but I find it funny how biomass requires twice the amount of coal to give the same energy output, the switch to wood is all about the EPA and UN regulations and nothing about science or economy, and this form of generation is more than twice the cost of generating via coal.

Talk about the government trying to fix a problem but then only making the problem worse.

You can read more about this here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/09/wood-burning-power-plants-misguided-climate-change-solution/