La biomasse, activité alternative au développement des zones rurales

a) A system of heating combined biomass-solar on a village scale

In Deutsch-Tschantschendorf in Austria, a village co-operative, created in spring 1993, sets up in October 1994 a station of central heating of 1100kW. The food is ensured by glazing bar and bark coming almost

exclusively cleaning of the forests neighborhood. The system combines with 325m2 solar panels. The solar panels provide hot water to the twenty-nine users, in particular in summer when the boiler is not lit and bring a supplement of energy the remainder of the year. The project is integrated in a baptized program « Renewable area of energy »^37(*) and which relates to the district of Güssing.

The farmers of the villages of Burgenland, area where the village of Deutsch-Tschantschendorf is, have a strong tradition of family mutual aid. Associations and co-operatives are usually created to support local projects. In Güssing, chief town of surroundings 3000 inhabitants, the municipality was declared interested to create in the castle of the old city one « center for renewable energy » which would play the part of regional agency of energy. The farmers were interested to draw a supplement from income of the cleaning of the forests but the firewood is not competitive compared to fuel oil or electricity. The district and the area thus decided the creation of a protection system and financial assistances :

· there is not and will not have there local gas distribution

· since the wood and the imported chips of Hungary are much less expensive than those produced locally, the regional government, which finances these installation partly communal, imposes a minimum price for the chips coming from the local forests. It also provides to the users a credit atvery low interest rate (0,5% over 10 years) to finance the individual expenditure of connection. On its side, the Funds Federal for ecology ensures control and scientific research.

In Austria, the history of the collective stations of heating to the biomass started in the Eighties. In 1990, the first station of Burgenland is born on the initiative of a co-operative of farmers. At the beginning of 1993, two inhabitants of Deutsch-Tschantschendorf decide to count, by making door-to-door, all the people interested by the installation of a system of this kind.

In the middle of the station, a boiler of 1.100kW with two tanks functions surroundings seven months and half per annum. Wood is stored meadows of the station and is crushed twice a year by dechiqueuteuse a mobile. The chips are then stored. All the one at four weeks, the needs, part of the heap is versed in a container from where it is transported automatically towards a drier then in the boiler. The boiler is equipped with a system of ventilation and burns at high temperature so that combustion is complete. Smoke is filtered, the residues and ashes being able to be used as manure in the fields.

The boiler has an effectiveness of 85%, the losses of distribution being of 15%. The relationship between capacity installation and length of the system shows that the dispersed inhabitants should not resort to these heating systems, the losses being too important.

The first year, the co-operative sold 750.000 kWh with 0,04 euro/kWh, which corresponds to the average cost of production of kw starting from fuel oil, the least expensive of fossil energies.

The environmental improvement of the framework that the initiative brought to the permanent residents is a factor of stabilization in this village where the tradition of emigration is old.

* ³⁷ Document Internet, Rural Europe, http://www.rural-europe.aeidl.be, consulted the 20.02.01