Along a busy four-lane road in Kaga, Japan, situated between strip malls and rice fields, is a firewood business called Kuberu, meaning “to stoke a fire.” On many weekends, when the weather is pleasant, I join a group of four or five people to chop wood and stack it beneath rows of solar panels. In exchange, I get to fill the back of my pickup with firewood for heating my own house.
Tatsuya Ueda, the owner of this operation, gets felled trees from local forestry cooperatives, and from gardeners and maintenance crews. This year, he expects to process enough wood to heat about a dozen homes through the long, wet winter here. The solar panels that shelter the wood could power 15 more for an entire year. Solar is clearly a less carbon-intense alternative to the imported fossil fuels that fulfill the majority of Japan’s energy needs. Under the right circumstances, burning wood or other organic materials may be too.
This tidy system of renewable-energy production isn’t scalable. It cannot replace the need for solar and geothermal power plants, or wind farms. It wouldn’t make sense in exactly the same way elsewhere. But it makes sense here and now.
For Ueda, putting up solar panels just seemed like a good business idea. His family used to have a store that sold fresh and cooked fish, and souvenirs to passing tourists. But it was torn down to make way for a wider road. Ueda was wondering what to do with the long narrow strip of land he was left with, and decided that a small solar farm could be profitable. His timing was just right to benefit from a national tariff program meant to stimulate investment in renewable energy, which guaranteed the purchase of solar power at a set price for 20 years. (Ueda sells his solar energy to a regional utility company.) Because Ueda had a woodstove at home, he made the racks for the solar panels tall enough to store firewood underneath. The inspiration to make the firewood into a business, too, came from a friend.
Joshua Pearce, a professor of engineering and business at Western University, in Ontario, was delighted by the idea of drying firewood under solar panels. He specializes in making solar-energy systems more efficient, and by using solar panels “instead of putting up a structure that, you know, is stupid and doesn’t do anything,” he told me, “you’re making biomass more sustainable and more economic.” Pearce and a colleague have calculated that, per unit of electricity, installing small-scale solar on buildings requires less energy (as embodied in metal, concrete, and so on) than building large solar farms. In terms of energy and carbon, solar farms pay for themselves within a few years, he said, but put solar panels on an existing structure, and “the payback time becomes extremely fast, and in some cases, instantaneous.” Similar logic applies when the solar-panel racks serve a dual purpose, such as shading crops and sheltering livestock—or firewood—because instead of building two separate structures, you need to build only one.
Ueda’s decision to install solar might have been mostly economic, but with the firewood, he’s intentionally addressing an environmental concern. In the mountains around this sunny valley are plantations of sugi: Cryptomeria japonica, which is often called Japanese cedar (though it’s actually a kind of cypress). These evergreen monocultures, originally planted as lumber during the country’s postwar building boom, cause annoying seasonal allergies and dangerous erosion that leads to mudslides. And, Ueda explained, because nut-bearing trees are scarce in these sugi forests, bears who cannot find enough food end up coming into residential areas (one even sneaked into a nearby shopping mall) in search of sustenance.
Ideally, the sugi would be replaced with a biodiverse forest. But many plantations have fallen into neglect, so the trees are no longer useful for lumber. If they’re harvested at all, they end up as wood chips; Ueda buys them at a higher price than foresters might otherwise get. Sugi doesn’t burn as hot or as long as hardwoods such as oak and cherry, but it can burn efficiently in modern woodstoves. It lights quickly: I like sugi for getting my fire started and for burning in fall and spring, when the intense heat of oak is too much. By encouraging customers to mix sugi with more popular hardwoods, Ueda hopes to play a part in revitalizing forestry and restoring biodiversity.
But what makes environmental and economic sense in one place doesn’t necessarily work somewhere else. In densely populated areas, particulate pollution from woodstoves—even the most modern, clean-burning ones—can add up and contribute to respiratory problems. And although burning a tree releases roughly the same amount of carbon as natural decomposition, just faster, the amount of carbon that widespread biomass combustion would release all at once would be disastrous. Japan’s green-energy incentives have already led to large-scale importation of wood pellets from Canada, outsourcing deforestation and, presumably, burning fossil fuels to move all that biomass across the Pacific.
Right now, Japan gets only about a quarter of its energy from renewable sources; solar accounts for just 11 percent as of 2023. But it’s a growing sector, and I notice small solar farms like Ueda’s all over the countryside; many of them use fallow farmland, or shade crops such as grapes. By 2050, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry plans for 50 to 60 percent of Japan’s electricity to come from renewables, including biomass, hydropower, geothermal, and offshore wind as well as solar—with a controversial increase in nuclear-power production filling in the gaps. But some researchers say that 100 percent renewable energy is possible if more solar is installed on rooftops and on farms as part of the mix. Most of the country is mountainous, without wide swaths of flatland that could accommodate the kind of massive solar and wind farms seen in parts of the United States. In the same way that Japan’s patchworks of small fields once helped produce enough food to feed the whole country, a network of small solar installations could help Japan reach energy self-sufficiency.
This type of distributed production is an important part of the renewable-energy transition across the world. According to the International Energy Agency, just the amount of distributed solar installed from 2019 to 2021 could cumulatively cover the needs of France and Britain. In the U.S., smaller renewable-energy projects can help fill energy gaps in rural places and urban neighborhoods with unreliable electricity.
Local energy resources can help people prepare, too, for natural disasters and infrastructure failures. The popularity of woodstoves peaked in Japan in the years after the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in 2011. But even in a more average year, when the power supply is disrupted in winter, a woodstove can be lifesaving.
On a tiny scale, my woodstove is teaching me to think differently about the energy I consume. When I’ve chopped, hauled, and stacked wood myself, I don’t want to burn it up frivolously. To get the most out of the wood I’m using to keep warm, I roast sweet potatoes and boil tea on top of my little woodstove. In the morning, I cook toast and eggs; at night, I hang up laundry to dry the clothes and humidify the air while I sleep. Instead of outsourcing each of these tasks to different electrical appliances, I get them all done around the hearth.
Last winter, besides the wood I earned with my labor at Kuberu, I burned scrap from the old house I’m renovating. What would have otherwise ended up at the dump heated my home (and the only fuel burned to transport it was the food I ate before hauling it home by the armload, or in a wheelbarrow). And for now, burning local wood makes sense where I live. Someday, when the electricity running into my home comes mostly or entirely from renewable sources, I might use the woodstove less, or not at all. Part of the beauty of small-scale energy production is that it uses local resources efficiently, in ways that can be adjusted over time, to meet the exact needs of the particular people living in a particular place.
The post Why I Chop Wood appeared first on The Atlantic.
