Here’s an interesting video interview with Dr. William Sammons, the doctor who spoke in Traverse City just before that biomass plant was nixed.

Is it more important to reach the target … or to say we have new information and we need to revise the targets and what qualifies?

He’s talking about potential billions of dollars of health costs from particulates, about “waste” wood (what they say they will burn) vs. whole trees (what they end up burning), and most importantly about sustainability.

Biomass plants don’t have to report their CO₂ emissions, so if all the proposed biomass plants get built we’re talking about as much as 800 million tons of CO₂ from biomass plants by 2020, 12 to 14% of total CO₂ emissions for the U.S. (not just power emissions: total national emissions). Trees don’t grow fast enough to suck all that back out of the air in ten years.

He also gets into the economics of how biomass has gotten piggy-backed on top of wind and solar as a renewable energy source, leading to a grant gold rush for biomass proponents to build it and flip it.

You could apply the same economics to a solar plant, with less permit red tape, and zero particulate emissions.

Instead of spending $100 billion of taxpayer money in the next five year supporting biomass, why not spend it in retrofitting houses, deploying an electrical smart grid, and installing solar and wind. Here in south Georgia, if we used distributed solar like they do in Austin, Texas, we wouldn’t even need to revise the grid first. And for jobs, how about reforestation, which produces twice as many jobs as biomass?

Where is the state renewable energy plan for Georgia that takes all these factors into account?

-jsq

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