bioenergy

[The forest footprint for a biomass incinerator is massive. Will be interesting to see if any probe is done in regards to this facility. -Ed.]

-  by Erin Pottie, June 27, 2014, Cape Breton Bureau

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"223","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 187px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: CBC"}}]]A Cape Breton environmental group is calling for an emergency review of harvesting practices at Nova Scotia Power’s biomass plant in Point Tupper.

On Friday, the Margaree Environmental Association issued a letter to Premier Stephen McNeil requesting a delay in harvesting to allow the province to examine the plant’s wood supply.

Association co-chair Neal Livingston said the plant has shown itself to be a “voracious” consumer of wood fibre.

Not only is quality material being directed to the plant, there is also too much forest resource being cut, he added.

“You basically kinda have a monster there and it wants to be fed,” Livingston said. “I think that rather than get it wrong and have it continue to be a bigger and bigger problem, it’s a really good time to take a look at what’s going on here.”

NSP has said up to 650,000 tonnes of wood waste will be needed to run the plant per year.

The 60-megawatt power generating station, located in Richmond County, is part of Nova Scotia’s plan to source 25 per cent of the province’s electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

But in recent months, business owners who rely on the forest for a living have told The Chronicle Herald that high-quality hardwoods are making their way into the biomass plant.

[The heavily-subsidized, polluting biomass energy industry cries foul over getting a smaller slice of the taxpayer pie than smokestack-free solar energy in California. -Ed.] 

-  by Bonner R. Cohen, July 15, 2014, Heartland

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"222","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"253","style":"width: 200px; height: 253px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: kids.esdb.bg","width":"200"}}]]The California Wind Energy Association and other renewable energy groups criticized a new law extending special tax breaks to the California solar power industry. Wind power, biomass, and geothermal power groups say the special benefits for solar power tilt the playing field against other renewable power options.

Senate Bill 871, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on June 20, extends until 2025 an exemption for solar power systems from state property taxes. The existing exemption was not scheduled to expire until 2017, but the legislature rushed the new exemption into law at the end of the session with almost no advance notice or opportunity for debate.

Renewable Groups Criticize Solar Deal
"There is no reason for the State Legislature and Governor Brown to extend a property tax exemption to large scale solar energy projects at this time," said Nancy Rader, executive director of the California Wind Energy Association, in a press statement.

"What is disturbing is this tax break for the solar industry comes at a time when existing biomass projects are shutting down," Julee Malinowski-Ball, executive director for the California Biomass Energy Alliance, said in the same press statement. "Wind and geothermal renewable energy producers are also facing challenges in getting utilities to recontract for their existing resources. California needs these resources to balance our energy portfolio and meet long-term greenhouse gas reduction goals."

-  by Bob Berwyn, July 7, 2014, The Colorado Independent

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"220","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 222px; height: 165px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: NFS"}}]]Even here, in a cool forest hollow near Tenmile Creek, you can feel the tom-toms.

It’s a distant beat, born in the marbled halls of Congress, where political forces blow an ill wind across Colorado’s forests. Nearly every Western elected official with a clump of shrubby cottonwoods in his or her jurisdiction claims to be a forest expert. And when senators and congress members make forest policy, rhetoric usually trumps science — as is the case with laws requiring new logging projects that may wipe out some of the very trees needed to replenish forests in the global warming era.

The drumbeat of support for logging is a political response to the threat of a forest health crisis that no longer exists, and maybe never did.

Showing their natural resilience, Colorado forests are bouncing back from the pine beetle outbreak that peaked between 2007 and 2009, when the bugs spread across a mind-boggling 1 million acres of forest each year. But by last year, bug numbers dropped back to natural levels — just enough to take out a stand of sick, old trees now and then. Contrary to the spin out of D.C., it’s nature’s way. After all, pine beetles are no foreign invaders. They evolved with lodgepoles over millions of years to drive forest death and rebirth.

-  June 23, 2014, Bioenergy Insight

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"219","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 200px; height: 129px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: Lufkin Daily News"}}]]InventivEnergy, an asset management firm, has selected NRG Energy Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of NRG Energy, to restart the Aspen Power biomass plant located in Lufkin, Texas.

NRG will also operate and maintain the facility once it resumes operation. The plant first opened in August 2011 and was the first wood-fired biomass power plant in the state. It can consume about 525,000 tonnes of logging debris and municipal wood waste per year.

The Aspen power plant has the capacity to deliver approximately 50MW to the grid and uses locally sourced clean wood-waste biomass as its fuel supply. Work to restart the facility began in mid-May and commercial operations are expected to be achieved by late July. NRG is in the process of hiring the site management team and operating staff.

'The Aspen Power facility was shut down in the fall of 2012 due to market economics. Since then, our projections show an attractive opportunity for the plant to resume operations and provide competitively-priced clean energy to the Texas market,' says John Keller, CEO and founder of InventivEnergy.

- by Cascadia Forest Defenders, July 7, 2014, Forest Defense Now

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"218","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 187px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]Scores of activists with Cascadia Forest Defenders and Earth First! converged on the Seneca Jones biomass plant this morning to protest the company’s privatization of public lands in the Elliott State Forest and ongoing pollution in West Eugene.

Currently several people have locked themselves to equipment at the plant, effectively blocking the “truck dump” where biomass is loaded into the incinerator. A banner has been dropped off of a tower reading: “Seneca Jones: Privatizing the coast range, polluting West Eugene.”

The activists are bringing attention to Seneca Jones Timber’s role in privatizing the Elliott State Forest. This month Seneca closed on their purchase of 788 acres in the Elliott, called East Hakki Ridge. Co-owner of Seneca Kathy Jones recently expressed the company’s intention to clearcut East Hakki and replace it with Douglas fir plantation.

Cascadia Forest Defender Richard Haley commented, “However Kathy Jones paints it, her company is a bad neighbor everywhere it operates. Here in Eugene, Seneca pollutes. In the Elliott, Seneca clearcuts and puts up ‘no trespassing’ signs in pristine, never before logged forest. East Hakki is no longer a place where locals can go hunt, fish, hike, camp or watch birds. Now it is corporate property.”

- by Larry Phillips, June 30, 2014, Leader and Times

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"216","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 480px; height: 300px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: Chris Linenbroker"}}]]Firefighters responded to an explosion Sunday evening at Conestoga Energy’s Arkalon Ethanol Plant. Fortunately, no one was injured from the blast or subsequent fire, according to Seward County Fire Chief Mike Rice.

“We got the page at 7:04 p.m. (Sunday) about a possible explosion at the plant at 8000 Road P,” Rice said earlier today. “Preliminary reports from plant staff is they had a natural gas explosion in a combustion burner in the feed dryer system on the second floor.”

Other than the author's support for so-called "sustainable" biomass, overall a decent piece. - Josh

- by William H. Schlesinger, June 18, 2014, The Hill

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"213","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"270","style":"width: 222px; height: 125px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;","width":"480"}}]]In America’s Southeastern states, there’s a booming energy trend that’s as big a step backward as imaginable.

In fact, it stretches back to the time of cavemen. Power companies are burning trees to produce energy, a deeply misguided practice that’s razing precious forests, producing fuel dirtier than coal and boosting carbon pollution right when we need to sharply curb this key contributor to climate change.

- by Mike Ewall, Energy Justice Network

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"206","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"338","style":"width: 444px; height: 333px; margin: 5px 10px; float: left;","width":"450"}}]]Most progress in stopping polluting energy and waste industries is accomplished by grassroots activism, stopping one project at a time. Many assume that grassroots groups are "NIMBY" types just pushing polluters from one community to another. However, 50% to 95% of each wave of industrial development in recent decades has been blocked, be it coal, gas or nuclear power plants, biomass or waste incinerators, landfills or related industries. Most groups quickly move from NIMBY to "Not in Anyone's Backyard" (NIABY) mindsets once they see the bigger picture and get networked with similarly-targeted communities. 

We need to step up the solidarity in the face of new trends, however. We're seeing coal use declining, but rising record levels of natural gas use, and stronger-than-ever push for waste and biomass incineration as a climate solution. We're even seeing this in the Obama Administration's CO2 and waste deregulation rules, which threaten to do more harm than good as coal power plants are encouraged to switch to these false solutions.

It's now fairly well documented that natural gas is worse than coal for the climate, due to leakage throughout the system and the fact that methane is now known to be 86 to 105 times worse than CO2 over a 20-year time-frame. It's also now well-documented that trash incineration is 2.5 times as bad as coal for the climate, and that biomass incineration is 50% worse -- and that these are not "carbon neutral" as claimed. It's also a fact that trash incineration is far worse than coal by every other measure of pollution. 

Despite these facts, EPA is pushing an unprecedented deregulation effort that will allow wastes to become "fuels" that can be burned, unregulated and without community notification, in coal power plants and even your neighborhood elementary school's boiler. This waste-to-fuels rule is a giant, undiscussed loophole.

It's urgent that we band together comprehensively as anti-combustion advocates. Just as it's not acceptable to stop a coal plant and encourage it to be built in the next county or state, it's not acceptable to allow the coal plant in your area to switch to burning trees, trash or gas when those impacts will be felt locally, globally, and across a different set of impacted communities where gas or trees are extracted, pipelines are built, or toxic ash is dumped.

- by Chris Jensen, May 23, 2014, New Hampshire Public Radio

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"153","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 280px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;"}}]]About 51 percent of the wood purchased for the new Burgess BioPower biomass plant in Berlin during its first two months of operation came from New Hampshire, according to a new “sustainability” report filed with the state’s Site Evaluation Committee.

Thirty-five percent came from Maine.

Five percent from Vermont.

Eight percent from Massachusetts.

And "one truck load" came from Canada.