Wood-Fired Power in Greenfield?

[sachem_head]

There's a ZBA meeting tonight in Greenfield about a proposed Biomass plant that a developer would like to build in the industrial park. Here's a blog post by Myriam Erlich Williamson at The Back Forty that contemplates the issue. I found it interesting that environmentalist heavyweight Bill McKibben posted favorably about the biomass projects in

Comments

Hmm

[littlevisigoth]

I've never heard of this technology before. In my business, when I hear "biomass", that almost exclusively refers to wastewater sludge. I've heard of various technologies that utilize that sort of biomass in incinerators or gasifiers, in an attempt to recover energy from a waste product that would otherwise be landfilled. I'm sure they're horribly inefficient, especially since moisture contents are often quite high, but it doesn't matter, since they are waste materials.

With "slash" (as I'm understanding it from your references) being termed "biomass", I wonder if the central argument is over whether or not this is properly being considered a "waste product". I'm not well versed with the environmental regulations in Massachusetts, but I'm assuming that the air permit restrictions on new facilities such as this are fairly stringent and the impact to local air quality will be largely insignificant.

As an FYI, we pitched a proposal for some entity around Gulf Coast Texas (not sure if it was City of Houston, Harris County, Galveston County, or what) to utilize a portable generator that would burn debris from hurricane cleanup and generate power for areas economically impacted by Ike. Hundreds of acre-feet of debris (largely fallen trees, branches, and leaves) gets collected and shipped to a landfill or other disposal site after these storm events, when it could be locally converted to electricity for communities that don't have it or can't afford it. I think the capital investment was too great. Anyway, I thought it was a neat idea when I heard about it.

Re: Hmm

[sachem_head]

Yeah, biomass power generation really splits the environmental community. It's domestic, the supplies are generally local, and it is a renewable energy source. It's categorized as a "green" energy source and it gets a boost by being a practical, attainable source of considerable energy. But you're still burning fuel, so you're still polluting.

As somebody who burns wood for household heat, I find it hard to reject the idea out of hand, but the problem is in the details. When you start talking about burning waste products, people immediately start talking about costruction and demolition waste. Apparently, Massachusetts is very stringent about what you can do with C&D waste and a lot of it ends up getting trucked to other states. So a lot of people think that biomass is a back-door way of allowing incineration of C&D waste.

There is a real difference of opinion on whether a biomass plant would promote sustainable forestry practices (by making it profitable to clean up slash) or whether it would drive more clearcutting.

Re: Hmm

[littlevisigoth]

If you think about how much compost and tree waste we put in the landfill each year I think it would be clear that it will be very hard to ever run out of fuel for this plant. A study I read last week said it would not be necessary to cut down trees since there is so much growing that people cut down already, and today a story in the Wall St. Journal said that many biomass plants are growing special grasses that create huge amounts of fuel.