COACH BioEnergy – a project for sustainable bioenergy utilisation in Central Europe – has come to the end of its first year and shows first structures of future knowledge management and consultancy.

Biomass utilisation has great future prospects in Central Europe. More than one third of Europe’s environmentally compatible bioenergy potential till 2020 can be found in the COACH BioEnergy project countries Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. This means that these countries could quadruple their common bioenergy utilisation – without harming the environment.

Although biomass already plays a major role in several countries’ renewable energy mix, sustainability is a factor of outmost importance for the future. Biomass production and harvesting processes that stress the environment as less as possible, effective conversion technologies, efficient logistics and maximised social effects are needed for an optimal use of bioenergy that contributes to fighting climate change.

The aim of COACH BioEnergy – co-funded by the Central Europe Program of the European Commission – is to evaluate and promote the ways of sustainable energy production from biomass. Renowned universities, research institutions and consultancy bureaus develop an extensive knowledge and consultancy network, which gathers the most recent research results on environmental, economic and social aspects of biomass utilisation and disseminates these to local actors.

The first year of COACH BioEnergy focused on developing the structures of the virtual net – the database that will contain scientific know-how on sustainable biomass use –, on defining selection and adaptation criteria to be able to decide which content is of wide interest and high quality at the same time – and on laying down the processes of information flows.

In the next months the virtual net will be uploaded with information on environmental, economic and social effects of selected biomass technologies, and the consultancy network will be implemented.