The report has extensive information about residential and commercial pellet heating trends as well as a section on the pellet stove market, the residential boiler market and the commercial boiler market.
AGH reproduces part of the free sample report, which is just a fraction of the entire 177-page report. We urge our readers to buy the full report, or become a member of Bioenergy Europe to get a free copy.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Founded in 1990, Bioenergy Europe is a non-profit, Brussels-based international organization bringing together over 40 associations and 120 companies, as well as academia and research institutes from across Europe.
Excerpts of the report:
Across Europe, pellet appliances provide renewable heating to more than 6.5 million households.
The pellet sector always likes a cold winter and the 2025 – 2026 heating season generously gave us one after all. Stocks that had accumulated along the supply chain – sometimes from 2022 and 2023 – finally ran out and this led to a boost in production across several
European markets: a nice contrast from the situation in the last two years. Sometimes, too much of a good thing can be stressing as well and tensions were felt around February 2026, when supply dried up and prices took an upward trend. In some countries, the situation was such that the pellet sector was brought back into the media spotlight (probably for the first time since 2022), but thankfully the tension was short-lived as temperatures rose and spring came. Although nobody would call this a “crisis”, it highlighted that the supply and demand gap for pellets is not always comfortably wide on the supply side.
On the front of the pellet appliances, the political discussions on the revision of the Ecodesign
Regulation appear to be frozen for now. The market situation shows recovery of sales for pellet boilers and stoves in 2025, although the numbers remain well below the historical highs of 2021-2022 and the situation in 2023-2024 has been generally very bad. But there are two main trends worth discussing briefly. The first is that the situation in the pellet stoves market looks somewhat better than the pellet boiler market. Buyers of pellet stoves range from high-income households who want an impressive fire in a beautiful appliance in their living room, to low-income households who prioritize cost savings, so creating a uniform narrative and explanations as to this is not straightforward. But on the whole, it seems that pellet stoves work well with the wider electrification trend in heating and are deployed more and more as a complementary heating system to heat pumps. The second trend concerns the pellet boilers and their connection with subsidies for their purchase. As more expensive investments overall, pellet boiler sales boom when there is good support for their purchase – as has been the case in the last years in Austria and Poland.
We already know that the new-bridging mechanism for Drax (progress has been made for Lynemouth as well) is expected to roughly half the UK demand.
As illustrated in Figure 4, this total is split between large-scale uses, which account for 58% of demand (~30,1 million tonnes), and small-scale heating applications, which make up the remaining 42% (~21,5 million tonnes).
Europe remains by far the world's largest pellet consuming region, representing 70% of global demand when industrial and small-scale uses are combined. European small-scale heat alone accounts for 37% of total consumption, reflecting the continued importance of wood pellets in residential and commercial heating across the continent. European industrial use, primarily
power generation and combined heat and power, contributes a further 33%.
At the same time, the intersection between the premium and industrial pellet markets could
become one of the most delicate issues in the coming years. The revision of support schemes for large Northern European plants may release significant pellet volumes currently destined for industrial use, making them available to other markets, including the residential one. However, the actual magnitude of this phenomenon remains difficult to assess.
In previous years, pellets were perceived in many European markets as the leading renewable option for residential heating, before strong competition emerged among different renewable technologies, including heat pumps, which are now slowing down in several national markets. As a result, uncertainty remains high among consumers regarding which technology can truly guarantee the most reliable and cost-effective solution in the medium term.
 |
Country abbreviations:
The ENplus® certification scheme ensures wood pellet quality for pellet professionals and end-users over the entire supply chain (i.e. from production to end-user delivery). The certification has been active for almost 15 years now and is governed and managed by Bioenergy Europe (through its network - the European Pellet Council)
ENplus® continues to invest significant resources in fraud management. In 2025, the scheme management team has further strengthened the scheme’s blacklist database by identifying fraudulent entities alongside misleading websites and contact details that users should avoid. As of May 2026, ENplus® has successfully detected and resolved a total of 1.470 fraud cases – an achievement that underlines the scheme’s ongoing commitment to preserving its integrity and protecting its users.
Bioenergy Europe
Place du Champ de Mars 2A
1050 Brussels
T : +32 2 318 41 00
info@bioenergyeurope.org
