It works like this. When you burn wood you release carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas, but if you were to let nature take its course and leave the tree alone, sooner or later it would fall to the ground and rot. And when it does, it will release the exact same amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it will if you burn it.
Sure, burning the tree for fuel speeds up the process, but if you plant a new tree it will absorb the CO2 from the tree you burned. And here's the key part: Since the trees are already on the surface of the earth, this is considered "old carbon." It's been here on the surface and in the atmosphere for millions of years in one form or another. The trouble, as environmentalists see things, begins when you mine the earth for oil and natural gas, because by doing this, you're bringing "new carbon" to the surface. You're increasing the overall amount of carbon on the surface, and that's the problem.
So by burning wood, or by using ground-source heat pumps, we move closer to becoming "carbon neutral," and that's a big part of what's driving the European heating market right now, and it's changing things quickly. In 2006, and for the first time ever, the combined sale of wood-pellet boilers and ground-source heat pumps exceeded the total sale of oil-fired boilers in all of Europe, and cut significantly into the sales of gas-fired boilers as well. The public favor is moving away from fossil fuels and toward these other options, and the major manufacturers are responding to this with some amazing products. These new boilers feed themselves wood pellets, and operate on outdoor-reset controls, and they burn clean.
Keep an eye on this technology. We have lots of wood in this country.
And then there's solar. I saw a tank-in-a-tank storage unit at the Buderus booth that had me smiling. The water from the solar panel enters the inner tank through an ingenious baffling system and then heats the domestic hot water. The DHW, in turn, heats the water in the outer tank, which then flows to radiant floor panels to heat the house. Solar heats domestic; domestic heats space-heating water, and all from one tank. And if the sun's not shining, a wall-hung condensing boiler steps up and carries the load. There can also be a wood stove with a back-burner tied into all of this. And figuring out what flow goes where, and when, is a circulator/valve/control module that's designed to do just what you need it to do. You tell the manufacturer what you want to achieve, and they give you a plug-and-play module that will get the job done. More and more of European hydronics is plug and play.
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