Tag Archives: CO2

Solar: jobs, leadership, grid, independence, and health

Peak power when you need it: solar. Somebody has been studying it, and addressing problems local decisionmakers right here in south Georgia have been raising.

Solar Power Generation in the US: Too expensive, or a bargain? by Richard Perez, ASRC, University at Albany, Ken Zweibel, GW Solar Institute, George Washington University, Thomas E. Hoff, Clean Power Research. That’s Albany, New York, but it applies even more to Albany, Georgia and Lowndes County, Georgia, since we’re so much farther south, with much more sun.

Let’s cut to the chase:

The fuel of heat waves is the sun; a heat wave cannot take place without a massive local solar energy influx. The bottom part of Figure 2 illustrates an example of a heat wave in the southeastern US in the spring of 2010 and the top part of the figure shows the cloud cover at the same time: the qualitative agreement between solar availability and the regional heat wave is striking. Quantitative evidence has also shown that the mean availability of solar generation during the largest heat wave driven rolling blackouts in the US was nearly 90% ideal (Letendre et al. 2006). One of the most convincing examples, however, is the August 2003 Northeast blackout that lasted several days and cost nearly $8 billion region wide (Perez et al., 2004). The blackout was indirectly caused by high demand, fueled by a regional heat wave3. As little as 500 MW of distributed PV region wide would have kept every single cascading failure from feeding into one another and precipitating the outage. The analysis of a similar subcontinental scale blackout in the Western US a few years before that led to nearly identical conclusions (Perez et al., 1997).

In essence, the peak load driver, the sun via heat waves and A/C demand, is also the fuel powering solar electric technologies. Because of this natural synergy, the solar technologies deliver hard wired peak shaving capability for the locations/regions with the appropriate demand mix peak loads driven by commercial/industrial A/C that is to say, much of America. This capability remains significant up to 30% capacity penetration (Perez et al., 2010), representing a deployment potential of nearly 375 GW in the US.

The sun supplies solar power when you need it: at the same time the sun drives heat waves.

The paper identifies the problem I’ve encountered talking to local policy makers, especially ones associated with power companies: Continue reading →

Biomass plant approved for Macon-Bibb County

How to get a biomass plant approved in Georgia: tack it onto an existing business. Remember to get an industrial authority to use a public bond issue to expand the private business.

Carla Caldwell wrote in the Atlanta Business Chronicle 7 June 2011, Graphic Packaging gets $140M bond deal

A deal OK’d by the Macon-Bibb County Industrial Authority provides revenue bonds for a $140 million expansion of Marietta, Ga.-based Graphic Packaging International’s Macon, Ga. mill. Improvements will include the addition of a biomass boiler and a 40-megawatt turbine generator geared to reduce emergency cost and improve profitability, reports Macon Telegraph website macon.com.

The authority approved the deal on Monday for the provider of packaging for food, beverage and consumer products. The biomass system, which is scheduled for operation by mid-2013, is expected to generate power from about 400,000 tons of logging materials, mostly the tops of trees, the Macon newspaper reports. Graphic Packaging’s (NYSE: GPK) Macon mill makes an estimated 1,600 tons of paperboard daily.

Maybe we should put some parameters on the types of industry we want around here to avoid this happening with the bonds the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority (and the Lowndes County Commission) floats.

This rationalization is precious: Continue reading →

VSU Faculty Senate passes anti-biomass resolution

Karen Noll reported on WACE’s facebook page that the VSU Faculty Senate passed a resolution Thursday 19 May 2011 that biomass will not be considered renewable for VSU’s climate commitment goal.

Why? Because leading medical associations have identified woody biomass incineration as increasing risks of “a variety of illnesses, some life-threatening”, because biomass incineration produces more CO2, NOX, and fine particulates than existing coal plants, and because it “may lead to unsustainable forestry practices and a net increase in global greenhouse gas emissions”.

Who proposed this? Continue reading →

You, here, now —Bill McKibben @ Power Shift

A great honor and a terrible burden.

I think he meant not only the people in front of him but also everyone willing to do something.

As for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:

We cannot stop money but we can strip them of their credibility.
That applies to some other organizations, as well.
We need to fight with art and music, too.
10,000 young people went to DC to hear him in Power Shift 2011. We are all late to the fight. As he says:
Try to change those odds.

Here’s the video.

-jsq

PS: Owed to Raven.

Offshore wind energy cheaper than nuclear –EU climate chief

Inland south Georgia doesn’t have much wind, probably not enough to generate significant electricity, but wind farms off the Georgia coast could. Now we hear fromm Zachary Shahan in Clean Technica that Offshore Wind Energy Cheaper than Nuclear Energy, EU Climate Chief Says:
EU climate chief Connie Hedegaard has added that offshore wind energy is cheaper than nuclear.

…

“Some people tend to believe that nuclear is very, very cheap, but offshore wind is cheaper than nuclear,”

He’s picking up the story from the Guardian, in which Fiona Harvey and Terry Macalister wrote 17 March 2011: Continue reading →

No Adage biomass plant in Hamilton County, Florida

According to Power-Gen Worldwide, Plans for biomass power plant ends:
The company still has a permit to build a 55 MW plant in Florida but there are no plans to start construction and the company is expected to let the permit lapse in June. Adage ended plans in 2010 to build another plant in Florida.

Why is Adage giving up on Hamilton County, Florida? Christopher Dunagan writes in Kitsap Sun:

Meanwhile, a similar project by Adage in Northern Florida also will not be pursued at this time, according to DePonty. That project has been fully permitted and was about to move ahead if only the electricity market had provided the financial incentive, he said.
Here’s the Florida air permit. Despite having that air permit and promising jobs, jobs, jobs Adage is apparently not going to build in Hamilton, County, Florida.

The source of the many stories on this appears to be Continue reading →

The business of carbon trading in Georgia

Rich McKay wrote for the ajc, Carbon limits a boon for traders: Proposed emissions standards may galvanize business in Georgia.
The carbon-emitting companies pay the farmers to not cut down the trees or to plant new trees. The idea is that the trees, which gobble up carbon, will store up the carbon from the atmosphere and offset what the smokestacks spew.
Blake Sullivan, of the Macon-based Carbon Tree Bank, has 26,000 acres of forest in the state under contract for carbon banking.

“Georgia has an abundance of forests right here, and trees are like the lungs of the Earth,” he said. “They inhale carbon and exhale oxygen. We can be part of the solution right here in our own backyard.”

Why is this suddenly a business? Continue reading →

Georgia forests worth more standing than incinerated

Sandi Martin writes in Southeast Farm Press:
A University of Georgia researcher has found that Georgia’s forestlands provide essential ecosystem services to the state worth an estimated $37 billion annually.

This is in addition to the value of timber, forest products and recreation. This is the first time these indirect benefits of Georgia’s private forests have been estimated.

That’s substantially more than the $28 billion annually from the conventional wood-products industry.

What are these ecosystem services? Continue reading →

Where’s the wood to come from and who will buy the electricity?

Here’s video of what I asked at the recent VLCIA biomass event (6 Dec 2010) and the answers from the panel.

So there’s actually not any new study of wood sourcing (Brad Lofton told me after the meeting that the study had been “completed” after we met in June), and the study that exists is not publicly available. Someone from Sterling promised me after the meeting to redact the private parts of the wood sourcing study and provide the rest for public distribution. We’ll see.

Regarding my question about who will buy the electricity and whether we’ll end up like Plant Scherer, selling electricity to Florida while keeping the pollution here, the answer was: Continue reading →

Biomass: “a sub-prime carbon mortgage”

BirdLife International writes about Bioenergy – a carbon accounting time bomb:
The first study, carried out by Joanneum Research, identifies a major flaw in the way carbon savings from forest-derived biomass are calculated in EU law as well as under UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol mechanisms. It concludes that harvesting trees for energy creates a ‘carbon debt’: the carbon contained in the trees is emitted upfront while trees grow back over many years. The true climate impact of so-called woody biomass in the short to medium term can, as a result, be worse than the fossil fuels it is designed to replace.

“The EU is taking out a sub-prime carbon mortgage that it may never be able to pay back. Biomass policy needs to be fixed before this regulatory failure leads to an ecological crisis that no bail out will ever fix”, commented Ariel Brunner, Head of EU Policy at BirdLife International.

Hm, this seems to contradict VLCIA’s assertion that the document they gave me proves their proposed wood incinerator would be carbon neutral. That document openly admits that biomass produces more CO2 than coal, and calls for national or regional studies, which didn’t exist. Nonetheless, when I pointed that out (again) to VLCIA Executive Director Brad Lofton, he asserted that “Carbon is absolutely not an issue with our plant.” Hm, well, now there is a study, and it shows that burning woody biomass is not carbon neutral.

And this excess production of CO2 isn’t limited to burning whole trees. Looking at the actual study:

When residues are left on the forest floor, they gradually decompose. A great deal of the carbon contained in their biomass is released over time into the atmosphere and a small fraction of the carbon is transformed into humus and soil carbon. When the residues are burnt as bioenergy, the carbon that would have been oxidized over a longer time and carbon that would have been stored in the soil is released immediately to the atmosphere. This produces a short term decrease of the dead wood and litter pools that is later translated into a decrease of soil carbon.
So it doesn’t really matter that VLCIA asserts that their proposed plant will never burn whole trees. The tops and limbs they want to burn produce the same problem.

The study also includes comparisons with CO2 saved by biomass offsetting coal burning. The catch for the proposed biomass incinerator in Lowndes County is that it’s not offsetting anything: it’s in addition to the coal burned at Plant Scherer. We could offset some coal through efficiency and conservation, plus solar power. None of those things produce any emissions.