DOMESTIC BIOMASS BASED HEATING IN GERMANY, DETERMINATION OF THE NUMBER OF SINGLE FIREPLACES FOR WOOD FUELS BY AN ALL-GERMAN DATA COLLECTION

摘要

Due to the rising energy demand and related energy costs as well as environmental aspects thermal utilization of biomass, particularly of wood, becomes more relevant. Especially for the energy consumption in households, biomass burning is an established alternative to fossil fuel based technologies. In the course of growing environmental awareness, debates have been initiated about the particulate matter emission (PME) from small biomass combustion and their contribution to the ambient air quality. In spite of that, the knowledge about types, numbers and distribution of installed small biomass fireplaces is still insufficient. To evaluate the effectiveness of PME mitigation measures it is essential to have an idea about the number and distribution of currently installed fireplaces. Purpose of the work is a collection of data about the structure of biomass based heating with single fireplaces in Germany. In addition to the determination of number and distribution, further complementary information about the fireplaces was gained during this data collection. These details are year of commission, nominal heat output, type of fuel, flue gas cleaning, frequency of chimney sweeping, and fuel storage capacity at the site. More than 80 thousand datasets have been collected so far. The paper describes the current status of progress of this all-German data collection and derives first conclusions.