The Location Economics of Biomass Production for Electricity Generation

The opening decade of the twenty-first century has been marked by substantial increases in the cost of fossil-fuel based energy. This increase in energy costs has been driven by a variety of factors including the diminishing availability of these resources, political uncertainty in some of the major fossil-fuel producing regions of the world and a rapidly increasing demand from growing economies such as China and India (Clancy et al. 2008). Ireland, given its limited availability of domestic fossil-fuel, is particularly vulnerable to the uncertainty regarding future energy supply and prices. Furthermore, concerns over man-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and their potential impact on global climate change have fostered a desire in many countries for substitution of fossil-fuels which produce high levels of GHG emissions with renewable energy sources. For example, the European Union (EU) has proposed that 20 % of EU energy consumption should be from renewable energies by 2020 (Directive 2009/28/EC). As a result, Irish energy policy is set firmly in the global and EU context which has put energy security and climate change among the most urgent international challenges (Department of Communications and Marine and Natural Resources 2007). This combination of economic, regulatory and environmental pressures heightens Ireland’s need to identify viable alternative renewable energy sources.