Energy from renewable sources is a growing trend in Europe and all over the world, as a reduction of greenhouse gases by a certain percentage is a political goal according to the Kyoto Protocol. In order to achieve the goals envisaged in the treaty–a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 20%(base year 1990) during 2013-2020–the propagation of renewable energy sources is one of the strategies followed by politics and administration. Though in every country the increased usage of renewable energy sources is favoured and sponsored. There is rarely a study that evaluates the effects of the consumption of renewable energy resources with respect to the spatio-temporal dimension on a fine grained level of detail. So far only studies exist that evaluate renewable energy projects on a global/local level-eg for a whole country or province (eg Arbeitsplattform Wald und Holz in Kärnten 2007, Möller and Nielsen 2007).

The work presented in this paper focuses on effects of wood chip heating plants on the availability of lumber for wood chip production on a fine spatial and temporal granularity. In order to model the “consumption” of timber for heating purposes, an agent-based model coupled with a GIS is employed (Crooks and Heppenstall 2011, Johnston 2013, Van Berkel and Verburg 2012, Mandl 2003). In a generic way the model mimics the competition of several heat plants for biomass. In addition, it includes a basic forest growth model as well as a sequence of forest operations that result in lumber for wood chip production. The scientific question of this paper tries to answer if a spatio-temporal effect of competition for renewable energy resources exists. The paper evaluates the question in the context of the wood chip market which serves as energy source for heating plants in a given test area. The theoretical model is applied to a data set of Carinthia, a province of Austria. The paper is organized as follows: section 2 elaborates on the test area, the data used in the study and the general approach of the study. The theoretical model, following an agentbased approach, is described in section 3. The first results are given in section 4, followed by a discussion and conclusions.