A cooperative forest culture takes root in Austria, where wood biomass heat supply is widespread
Updated by Yasunao Kobayashi on September 30, 2025, 9:43 PM JST
Yasuhisa KOBAYASHI
Alpha Forum, Inc.
President of Alpha Forum, Inc. and Steering Committee Member of the Platinum Forest Industry Initiative. Ltd. in 2001, taking advantage of the company's venture support program. In September 2023, he received the Wood Use System Research Association Award.
In Austria, the standard tax rate (equivalent to the Japanese consumption tax) is 20% and the food tax rate is 10%. The standard tax rate in the Nordic countries is 25% or more. In this column, I would like to discuss how we should share a new forest culture based on "a sense of trust in the state, public resources, and public works. I would like to discuss the following. Whether or not we trust and believe in the Japanese government and local governments, Japanese people like to save. They believe that they will not be able to live on their pensions alone, and they want to save as much as they can while they still can. The fact is that the huge amount of deficit-covering government bonds is supported by the fact that the Japanese people are saving. Now, let me summarize some of the "differences from Japan" that I felt during my business trips to Austria and other countries.
About 20 years ago, when I traveled to Germany to meet with a client, I was asked, "Are you Doctor or Mister?" He asked me, "Are you a doctor or a mister? I answered "Mr." since I did not have a doctorate. I felt a little cold and superior, but in Japan we all have a middle class consciousness and do not openly classify people by birth or educational background. The conversation with him was so lively that he invited me to his house (apartment) for dinner. Although the dinner in English was so tiring that I did not know what I had eaten, he told me, "Most of the people in this condominium have an annual income of 20 million yen or more, and it is a community of people of similar social status. There is a district heat supply (hot water), and the monthly fee is the same for all households (subsidized), so if we don't improve the insulation, we will be excluded from the community..." He told us.
In Japan, people say, "If I pay for it, I can use it! What's wrong with having money to spend on luxury and energy? There is also the idea that "heat energy" is a necessity for daily life. If we were to subscribe to heat energy, which is a necessity for daily life, people might say, "I pay a fixed price, so I can use as much as I want.
There are no ticket gates on the German and Austrian subways. There are machines that print out the time of the ride, but there are no machines or people to check tickets, commuter passes, etc. for each individual. Naturally, one purchases a ticket to use public transportation. My friend told me that "there is a non-profit organization that checks tickets, and when they find a non-paid rider, they collect a kind of fine that is 10 times higher than in Japan, half of which goes to the railroad company and half to the NPO. If the same system were applied in Japan, I fear that many people would be "okay as long as they don't get caught...". Am I the only one who is concerned? Considering the cost of automatic ticket checkers and labor, I think it is reasonable in Europe. This is probably because the public awareness community is so mature.
In Austria, large areas of forests are often owned by barons. Since forests also include national borders, they are probably positioned differently from those in Japan due to the fact that they used to be a line of defense for military purposes. I have heard that after the World War II, the national and local governments promoted the "equivalent exchange" of forests for residential land, which led to the concentration of forests in the hands of people who hold titles.
So, the authority of national and state certified forester will be different. Japan is also promoting a forester system (comprehensive forest supervisor system), but it will be far from taking root because the underlying culture is different. First of all, it is up to small communities (about the size of a letter or a village) to communicate "let's minimize energy use and promote carbon dioxide absorption together by planting trees" and "it is 'shameful' to live in a house with poor insulation, drive a car alone, or eat food brought from far away!
More than 1,500 wood biomass heat supply projects have been established in Austria. This is a district heat supply system in which large boilers (1000 kW and up) are operated by laying 0.5 to several kilometers of heat conduit, rather than operating boilers on a one-to-one basis.
The standard plan is for the entire community to participate in the project, with 1/3 of the capital to be provided by public subsidies, 1/3 by capital (investment), and 1/3 by bank loans. 1/3 of the capital is often provided by the CEO or COO who is responsible for the management of the company, and in many cases by the owner farmers/foresters who supply fuel woodchips. Self-cut forestry operations generally do not have large heavy machinery and are responsible for collecting logs with a winch, drying them as logs, chipping them, and feeding them into a silo next to the boiler.
For example, a 2000 kW-class wood biomass chip boiler requires about 4000 tons (<401 TP3T-wb) of fuel chips per year. In terms of logs, this would be over 5,000 cubic meters. In contrast, a team of about 10 self-planted foresters is made up of three to four people, and the planned fuel input is ensured through coordination among the team. It is noteworthy that the team is responsible for "chip quality. The quality of fuel chips varies depending on the moisture ratio, grain shape, degree of bark contamination, and other factors. If one member of the team fails to ensure quality, the team is jointly responsible. Teams should communicate and check each other to ensure that quality is not compromised. By competing with each other for quality, the overall quality of the product will not be compromised, but rather will improve.
The utilization rate of wood biomass chip boilers introduced in Japan is low. One of the major reasons is "chip quality. Since cost reduction is the direction by lowering quality, uniformity of moisture content and grain shape becomes lax. Changes in chip quality, such as clogging and combustion imbalance in the silo feeding to boiler feeding of fuel chips, are a major risk to stable operation.
The "mutual coordination, monitoring, and collaboration" in the preceding Austria seems very reasonable. A fuel tip supplier may invest in a heat supply business. Some companies have devised a system in which the price of fuel chips is variable depending on whether or not they have a stake in the company and the ratio of their stake, in other words, the unit price of chips is raised for fuel suppliers who have a large stake. We would like to learn from this legitimate "competition" that should exist in a capitalist society. This kind of social and cultural background is the basis for the spread of many woody biomass heat supply businesses. (President, Alpha Forum, Inc. and Yasunao Kobayashi, Steering Committee Member, Platinum Forest Industry Initiative)
