Issues
Learning from Europe
Austria
“Individual heaters and domestic central heating systems in Austria are in slightly less than 500,000 principle domiciles. The majority of these installations are operated in line with modern 
combustion technology. As a result of strict provisions in force since the 80ies significant progress has been achieved in the technological development of combustion and controlling engineering for small-scale heating installations. Emissions of organic combined carbon and carbon monoxide could be reduced to between one tenth and one hundredth at both manually operated and automatically fed installations which in turn has a positive effect on the sale and use of the latter. The efficiency of the new devices rose from on an average 60% to 80% in the course of the past years, while both the quality of design and comfort of handling could be essentially improved. In order to achieve further handling comfort when using biomass, pellets have been increasingly promoted over the past years and the expected results have materialised: Pellet-fired installations (2001: approx. 4,900 sold devices) significantly surpassed those fired with wood chips (2001: approx. 2,300 sold devices). During the period 1997 to 2001 altogether about 10,500 wood chip installations to some 12,300 pellet-fired plants were installed within a capacity range of up to 100kW.”