Building Integrated Renewable Heat from Biomass: Facility Management, Life Cycle Costing, and Environmental Impacts

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Energy production from renewable sources not only plays a critical role in cutting carbon emissions, but also reduces dependency on fossil fuels and diversifies the energy supply mix, enhancing national and regional energy security and independence. Renewable energy also presents itself as a driver behind community development by creating decentralized energy production capacities that are in line with local needs. This in turn contributes to enhancing the resilience of energy supply infrastructure by providing access to distributed capacities and reducing the load on centralized systems. In this sense, increasing the share of renewable energy is a major component of many national and regional energy directives across the globe. However, most of such support programs focus on use of renewables for electricity generation and less attention on generation of heat from renewables. According to International Energy Agency (IEA), heating is associated with about half of the final energy use globally, compared to about 30% and 20% shares for electricity and transport. This clearly highlights the importance and impact of increasing the share of renewable energy sources for heat generation. In the particular case of non-domestic buildings, according to IEA, about half of the energy consumption belongs to space heating and hot water supply.