Just to warn you, this post is a bit trite and must have been done before, but here goes…
I reckon if you chipped all the Christmas trees in the UK and fed them into a biomass CHP , you’d provide enough zero carbon heat and electricity to supply about 25,000 new homes for the entire year.
If you can be bothered, here’s how I got there:
- 25m homes in the UK, half of which will have Christmas trees
- each tree 10kg of useful biomass so 125kt total
- 40% moisture content giving you around 75,ooo dry tonnes
- energy content of 5000kWh/t for soft wood at v. low moisture
- so total available energy of 375GWh
- assume a CHP of 0.6 electric to thermal and a total efficiency of 70%
- So total heat output of about 164GWh and electric output of about 98GWh
- So something like 25k to 30k homes, depending on how efficient they are
There. Now I’m deeply ashamed of myself. But then again, I might be onto something…
carbon limited 
g33k!
🙂
Every little helps.
Why not suggest it to your local authority.
without wishing to be too scrooge like, what about all the non-LED christmas tree lights out there?
A neighbour has 40 (or so) 40watt external incandescent bulbs on a tree in his front garden. Over a 35 day period, left on 24hrs thats 1300kWh. Over £150 and 560Kgco2.
Hmm. not sure it is worth it.
bah – humbug