Forests, agriculture, and wastes are the three major sources from which, huge amount of biomass feedstocks are generated (Table 1).
There are two major class of biomass; woody and non woody.The estimated potential amount of non-woody and non-fodder biomass, which is prospective for energy in India was estimated to be 325 Mt (472 PJ) in 1996–97, and the anticipated value for 2010 is 450 M (656 PJ) as shown in the Table 2 (Ravindranath et al., 2005). The estimated power generation potentials of renewable energy sources in India have been outlined in Table 3 (Renewable energy statistics, 2005). The power generation potential of biomass is considerably high in the world including greater in the India.