French President Emmanuel Macron in September announced plans to convert the country’s two remaining coal-fired power plants to biomass. A brief whitepaper issued by FutureMetrics LLC on Oct. 2 predicts how those conversions could boost demand for wood pellets.&nbsp;The whitepaper, authored by FutureMetrics President William Strauss, explains the two coal-fired facilities have a combined nameplate capacity of 1.6 gigawatts (GW). France aims to convert them to biomass by 2027.The Cordemais Power Station has two coal-fired units, each with a capacity of 630 megawatts (MW). Those units fire imported bituminous coal. Emile Huchet Power Station has one coal-fired unit with a capacity of 647 MW. That unit fires regionally sourced lignite coal.According to FutureMetrics, all three units are based on pulverized coal (PV) technology, which require fuel to be pulverized into very small particles for use in the burners. For biomass-based fuels, the only suitable solid fuel that can be milled to the needed particle size in the plants’ coal mills is pellet fuel, Strauss explained.&nbsp;The Cordemals already utilizes port facilities to import coal, and is already positioned to import large quantities of pellet fuel, according to Strauss. Data sourced from an online dashboard that complements the white paper shows that the two plants would require approximately 4.78 million metric tons per year of white pellets.&nbsp;A full copy of the whitepaper is available on the FutureMetrics <a href="https://www.futuremetrics.info/">website</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp;

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French President Emmanuel Macron has announced plans to convert the country’s two remaining coal-fired power plants to biomass. A whitepaper issued by FutureMetrics predicts how those conversions could boost demand for wood pellets. 

FutureMetrics: Biomass conversion of French coal plants to create significant pellet demand

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