European use of wood fuel Some countries produce a significant fraction of their electricity needs from wood or wood wastes. Sweden, for example produces 1,490 megawatts of electricity this way and Austria produces 747 megawatts[citation needed]. The Swedish figure corresponds circa 4.5 % of the nation's total installed production capacity (33 400 MW in 2003). In Finland, there is a growing interest in using wood waste as fuel for home and industrial heating, in the form of compacted pellets.
In Scandinavian countries the costs of manual labour to process firewood is very high. Therefore it is common to import firewood from countries with cheap labour and natural resources. The main exporters to Scandinavia are the Baltic countries (Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia).
[edit] Historic Japanese use of wood fuel Wood, during the Edo period, was used for many purposes, and the consumption of wood led Japan to develop a forest management policy during that era. [8] Demand for timber resources was on the rise not only for fuel, but also for construction of ships and buildings, and consequently deforestation was widespread. As a result, forest fires occurred, along with floods and soil erosion. Around 1666, the shogun made it a policy to reduce logging and increase the planting of trees. This policy decreed that only the shogun, and/or a daimyo, could authorize the use of wood. By the 18th century, Japan had developed detailed scientific knowledge about silviculture and plantation forestry.
A pile of firewood logged from the Barmah Forest in Victoria.[edit] Firewood use in Australia About 1.5 million households in Australia use firewood as the main form of domestic heating.[9] As of 1995, approximately 1.85 million cubic metres of firewood (1m³ equals approximately one car trailer load) was used in Victoria annually, with half being consumed in Melbourne.[10] This amount is comparable to the wood consumed by all of Victoria’s sawlog and pulplog forestry operations (1.9 million m³
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