关键词：生物质能；经济；生产；发电
摘 要：The opening decade of the twenty-first century has been marked by substantial increases in the cost of fossil-fuel based energy. This increase in energy costs has been driven by a variety of factors including the diminishing availability of these resources, political uncertainty in some of the major fossil-fuel producing regions of the world and a rapidly increasing demand from growing economies such as China and India (Clancy et al. 2008). Ireland, given its limited availability of domestic fossil-fuel, is particularly vulnerable to the uncertainty regarding future energy supply and prices.