Barriers and opportunities for biomass utilization in Hungary

There is no technical barrier for medium and middle sized equipments. But as it is explained below there are some other barriers against these types of boilers.


Regarding the technical barriers of large scale equipments these are feasible technically but as it was mentioned under chapter 3.3 Present Biomass Utilization three large scale power plants were built in the last years. These three power plants use a great amount of biomass; therefore new large scale equipments could not purchase enough biomass from the Hungarian market for the operation. This is a technical barrier but it could be eliminated by plantation of energy forest and energy grass since there is no such plantation in Hungary (only test fields are cultivated).

Further to the technical barriers the economical barriers has to be taken into account. The price of natural gas is greatly subsidized by the Hungarian State; therefore the price of it is really low (it is below the world natural gas price). Due to this fact the price of the natural gas is not competitive with biomass on the market. In the last years steps were taken to increase the price of the natural gas for the people. As a result it seems that the price of the natural gas would reach the world natural gas price in few years and only a minority would get the subsidies form the state instead of almost all the Hungarian people.

Further to the price of natural gas there is an other barrier against wide spread of biomass utilization at households. The vast majority of the households (the most in the EU) use natural gas boilers for heating and/or hot water and cooking due to the abovementioned reasons, namely that the natural gas’ price is heavily subsidized. Most of these boilers are designed only for natural gas; mixed combustion (natural gas and i.e. biomass) is not possible. In order to convert or change these natural gas based boilers the people would have to invest a relatively big amount of money, which is not really likely. As a result without the financial contribution of the Hungarian State (or other sources, i.e. EU) the majority of the people would not convert or replace these natural gas based boilers to biomass based boilers.