Biomass is seen as a very promising option for fulfilling the environmental goals defined by the European Commission as well as various national governments. The goal of this paper is to analyse the possibilities for energy provision from biomass in general and from solid biofuels in particular. The potentials of solid biofuels as well as their current use is analysed and discussed in the context of the overall energy system. The result of this analysis shows that there are still unused potentials, which can contribute significantly to cover the energy demand within the EU-15. The most important markets for solid biofuels are analysed in detail; markets for solid biofuels with low, medium, and large variations of fuel properties. This investigation shows that biofuels with essentially uniform fuel properties have shown the most impressive market developments in recent years. The main prerequisite to achieve this significant growth in market volume has been standardisation of the fuel properties. Therefore biofuel standardisation is seen as a major key issue to develop the markets. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.