Energy and carbon...how to get real numbers?

Many of my deeper questions in permaculture come down to a question of numbers and science, surprisingly, and those facts are hard to find. Perhaps they simply haven't been discovered yet. For example, in my current climate (25 inches rain Mediterranean CA), many rapid growth trees require irrigation, which I currently provide with a grid-powered well. If I am heating with wood, how can I calculate whether the energy cost (as well as the cash cost!) of irrigated coppice wood is worth the benefit of having the additional irrigation-generated biomass to burn? There seem to be WAY too many variables in this seemingly simple question to come up with a usable answer. For instance, what are the ultimate sources of grid power in this region (coal, gas, nukes, wind, solar, hydro ?) And the carbon footprint of each. The caloric fuel yields of the various species I'm planting, and their response, or lack thereof, to supplemental irrigation. As an aside, there are the possible improvements in home insulation and stove technology, each of which has it's own cost in cash, time, and embodied energy.....It's such a confusing mess that I'm currently throwing up my hands and scrounging firewood wherever I can find it and planting whatever I think of willy-nilly as long as I think it's hardy enough to not be dependent on irrigation after establishment.

I'm interested how you feel you got on with this in the end? There are so many 'it depends' answers that I suspect that getting bogged down in the possibilities prevents many people producing a sound energy crop production plan.
I know our plan consisted of growing a wide range of trees in the hope something would grow, and work on reducing our heating energy needs in the meantime. The figures never did add up, but we seem to manage OK buying a top up in the summer when woodfuel is more easily avallable to supplement our own grown wood.

The book the carbon farming solution by a great guy who has a very long last name starting with a T, probably.

I found the best starting place for real numbers.  There are tables, and a wonderful tendency to cite his sources so we can deep dive where it interests us.

Found it
https://permies.com/wiki/51864/Carbon-Farming-Solution-Eric-Toensmeier

Here's a resource on biomass possibilities from trees.


At present they have only developed an app for the UK, but maybe in time will expand to cover more of the world. The free version gave reasonable results for me.

Nancy Reading wrote:Here's a resource on biomass possibilities from trees.
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At present they have only developed for the UK, but maybe in time will expand to cover more of the world. The free version gave reasonable results for me.

The principles certainly make sense. The one thing that is possibly not accounted for is the amount of labour required to harvest and process low-density woods vs. high-density woods. Low density woods work fine, but there's a lot more volume to handle.