Bioenergy production in Finland and its effects on regional growth and employment

Finnish national climate and energy strategy sets the share of renewables in energy use to 38%, and a significant amount of this should be covered by biomass based energy. In 2020 forestry is set to contribute 24 TWh and agriculture 4-5 TWh to energy production. In particular, bioenergy resources are considerable in the rural areas. However, the regional aspects have gone without investigation before this study. This study is a general equilibrium analysis. We considered only the by-products and waste material from agriculture and forestry as the resources for bioenergy, and only heat and power production were considered as the potential end uses. A regional CGE-model (RegFinDynBio) was used to analyse the impact of increased use of bioenergy potential. Increase in bioenergy use will lower the levels of GDP and employment marginally but will, nevertheless, help to achieve the emission reduction goals. However, the regional results showed the uneven distribution of the costs. The regions that beforehand seemed to be the