129 Gigawatts of Biomass by 2020?

Elec­tric­i­ty Gen­er­a­tion from Bio­mass: Installed Capac­i­ty Fore­casts for Ded­i­cat­ed, Co-Fired, Anaer­o­bic Diges­tion, and Biore­fin­ery Facilities

May 27, 2013. Source: PR Newswire 

Account­ing for 3% of glob­al elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tion capac­i­ty, bio­mass pow­er gen­er­a­tion (“biopow­er”) offers reli­able base­load pow­er to the grid and is expect­ed to play a cor­ner­stone role in meet­ing renew­able ener­gy tar­gets world­wide. Capac­i­ty expan­sion is like­ly in this decade across a range of con­ver­sion plat­forms, includ­ing ded­i­cat­ed green­field facil­i­ties that burn bio­mass exclu­sive­ly, brown­field bio­mass and coal co-fired plants, anaer­o­bic digesters pro­duc­ing bio­gas, and indus­tri­al biore­finer­ies uti­liz­ing cogeneration.

Although bio­mass feed­stocks are avail­able world­wide, logis­ti­cal chal­lenges asso­ci­at­ed with its col­lec­tion, aggre­ga­tion, trans­porta­tion, and han­dling, cou­pled with its poor ener­gy den­si­ty rel­a­tive to fos­sil fuels, make biopow­er finan­cial­ly attrac­tive in only a nar­row set of cir­cum­stances. For this rea­son, biopow­er remains a sub­sidy-depen­dent enter­prise in most markets.

Sup­port­ed by strong pol­i­cy and healthy incen­tives, Europe cur­rent­ly accounts for 50% of installed capac­i­ty deployed world­wide. Capac­i­ty addi­tions across Asia Pacif­ic and Latin Amer­i­ca through 2020 are expect­ed to result in a mod­est shift away from Europe. Growth in North Amer­i­ca is con­tin­gent upon the antic­i­pat­ed roll­out of advanced biore­finer­ies for advanced bio­fu­els production.

Nav­i­gant Research fore­casts that, under an aggres­sive sce­nario, glob­al installed biopow­er capac­i­ty will reach 129 GW by 2020.

This Nav­i­gant Research report pro­vides capac­i­ty and rev­enue fore­casts, mar­ket siz­ing, and mar­ket share analy­sis for elec­tric­i­ty pro­duc­tion from bio­mass, cov­er­ing ded­i­cat­ed/­co-fired, anaer­o­bic diges­tion, and biore­fin­ery facil­i­ties. The report also quan­ti­fies the expect­ed sup­ply of elec­tric­i­ty from bio­mass and the amount of feed­stock con­sumed at gen­er­a­tion facil­i­ties on an annu­al basis. World­wide rev­enue and capac­i­ty fore­casts, seg­ment­ed by appli­ca­tion and region, extend through 2020.