The director of the Croatian timber industry cluster, Marijan Kavran, said at the Zagreb conference that the state authorities should make sure that the domestic use of raw materials is higher than its exports.
"The authorities can easily amend public procurement provisions in order to provide for the replacement of old fossil fuel-run systems by systems based on renewables during the regular replacements. That way we can promote pellets produced in Croatia as ecologically acceptable fuel, and we will consume the raw material on a mass scale in our country," Kavran said.
President of the World Bioenergy Association, Heinz Kopetz, said that biofuel would become an important source of energy in the future in Europe.
Pellets are a very attractive source of energy, and its consumption rose 22% last year globally, Kopetz said adding that this kind of renewables was widely used in Europe and the United States.
In Austria, renewables account for a third of the total energy consumption, and 17% goes on biomass, he said.
Vesna Bukarica of the Croatian Environment Protection and Energy Efficiency Fund said that so far the Fund had earmarked 48 million kuna in grants for 84 projects, worth 259 million kuna, designed to promote the use of biomass fuels.
In 2015, we have granted 9 million kuna to Croatians for the purchase of 484 biomass-fuelled heaters. I believe that these statistics will rise in the future, she said.
(EUR 1 = HRK 7.6)