$629 Million in Taxpayer Dollars for Bioenergy

- by Erin Voegele, March 19, 2015, Ethanol Producer Magazine

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"434","attributes":{"alt":"burning money","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 153px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]On March 12, the U.S. Energy Information Administration published a report on direct federal financial interventions and subsidies in energy for fiscal year (FY) 2103. The report, which responds to a request from Reps. Fred Upton, R-Mich., chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Power, is an update of two earlier EIA reports covering FY 2007 and FY 2010.

Overall, the report finds the total value of direct financial interventions and subsidies in the energy markets decreased by nearly 25 percent between FY 2010 and FY 2013, declining from $38 billion to $29.3 billion. In FY 2010, $11.69 billion in subsidies were electricity related, with $10.7 billion in subsidies for fuels used outside the electricity sector and $15.57 billion in subsidies for conservation, end uses, and the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program. In FY 2013, the breakdown included $16.11 billion in electricity-related subsidies, with $5.21 billion in subsidies for fuels used outside the electricity sector and $7.94 billion in subsidies for conservation, end uses, and LIHEAP.

Kauai Biomass Facility to Get Fuel from Burned Forest

- by Chris D’Angelo, March 5, 2015, The Garden Island

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"427","attributes":{"alt":"Biomass logging in Hawaii","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 221px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: Chris D'Angelo/The Garden Island"}}]]It is unlike any other logging operation in Hawaii’s history.

And the $90 million biomass-to-energy facility the logs are destined for is as unique as the project itself, state officials say.

“This is the largest operation that we’ve had,” said Lisa Hadway, administrator of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Forestry and Wildlife, on a tour of the once-charred grounds Wednesday. “Given that the biomass plant is here on this island, I think this is a great way to help us improve this forest for recreation, for the watershed and for the restoration of this area.”

Now well underway, the Kokee Forest Restoration and Replanting Project calls for the removal of an estimated 15,000 tons of eucalyptus and pine trees from about 300 acres of forest reserve land scorched during fires in the summer of 2012, followed by the replanting of native and non-invasive species.

In January 2013, former Gov. Neil Abercrombie green-lighted the project via an emergency proclamation. Its purposes include “mitigating the post-fire damage” from the three blazes that burned about 4,000 acres in the Kokee area and eliminating the threat to public health and safety from potentially devastating post-fire effects, including flash flooding and erosion.

RWE Drops Biomass Power, Adds Biomass Thermal, Wind

- by Anna Simet, March 12, 2015, Biomass Magazine

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"422","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 255px; height: 171px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]While RWE Group reported it achieved its earnings targets for 2014 and EBITDA was significantly better than planned, low electricity prices and unusually mild weather negatively affected business performance, which dropped 25 percent from 2013 to 2014.

Peter Terium, CEO of RWE, said that currently, 35 to 45 percent of the utility’s conventional power stations are no longer making any money under current market conditions. “I am not talking about book values—these power stations are costing us real money,” he said. “We cannot avoid the sobering fact that conventional power generation is hardly viable any longer under current market conditions.”

He added that recent modernizations of RWE’s portfolio of power stations haven’t paid off, and that it is difficult to keep a gas or hard coal-fired power station commercially feasible. Previous Investments have made RWE the third-largest gas-fired power station operator in Europe, with capacity of around 15,000 megawatts across the continent. “Considering how quickly the electricity wholesale price fell in recent years, it would be impossible to cut a power station’s costs at the same rate to maintain margins or even make any profit at all,” he said.

Firing Up Hawaiian Biomass Facility

- by Chris D’Angelo, February 11, 2015, The Garden Island

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"401","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 250px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]Green Energy Team, LLC’s $90 million biomass-to-energy facility in Koloa is now hot.

“They lit the boiler and have started making steam,” said Kauai Island Utility Cooperative spokesman Jim Kelly, who is handling press inquiries for GET. “For the next probably three to four weeks, they’re going to basically be pumping steam through it and cleaning out the tubes.”

The company began testing the facility for the first time last week and expects to have it connected to the KIUC grid and producing electricity by April, according to Kelly.

The 6.7-megawatt facility is located near Knudsen Gap and will provide about 11 percent of the island’s electricity — enough to power 8,500 households and replace about 3.7 million gallons of imported oil annually. It is the first closed-loop, biomass-to-energy plant in the United States, and will rely completely on its own sources of Kauai biomass wood chips.

U.S. Added 254 Megawatts of Biomass Energy in 2014

- by Erin Voegele, February 6, 2015 Biomass Magazine

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"343","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 198px; height: 198px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Office of Energy Projects has released the December edition of its Energy Infrastructure Update, reporting the U.S. added 254 MW of biomass energy capacity last year.

In December, the U.S. added five biomass generating units with a combined capacity of 23 MW. During the full year 2014, the U.S. added 58 biomass generating units with a combined capacity of 254 MW. In 2013, 142 biomass units were added with a combined 858 MW of capacity.

Within its report, the FERC highlighted LES Service LLC’s 6 MW landfill gas-to-energy, which came online in December. The project, known as the Zimmerman Energy Facility, is located in Fulton County, Indiana. Power generated at the facility is sold to Northern Indiana Public Service Co. under a long-term contract.

Dirt Cheap Clean Energy? | January issue of Energy Justice Now

Just in time, the January issue of Energy Justice Now — the national forum for the Dirty Energy Resistance — is here!

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"381","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"480","style":"width: 333px; height: 333px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"480"}}]]Inside this issue:

- Dirt Cheap Clean Energy

-  Energy Storage and Solar Inspiring Customers to Drop Utilities?

Destruction of Demand: How to Shrink Our Energy Footprint

...and more!

Please share the January 2015 issue of Energy Justice Now with your friends, colleagues, neighbors, media, and elected officials! 

Subscribe to monthly email issues of Energy Justice Now!

 

 

Citizens Urge EPA and Congress to Choose Public Interest Over Politics on Energy Policy

- Mike Ewall and Samantha Chirillo

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"370","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"400","style":"width: 333px; height: 333px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"400"}}]]In December, 900 Americans, including 100 organizations across the U.S. collectively voiced their concerns about major parts of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, in comments submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Citizens specifically asked the EPA to:

·      set more aggressive targets and address environmental justice

·      not encourage more fracking (gas) or nuclear energy, and close the methane loophole

·      disallow a shift from coal to biomass and trash burning and close the biogenic CO2 loophole

The EPA released their revised framework in November 2014, shortly before the comment deadline on the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan.  In a memo dated November 19, 2014, EPA announced its decision to virtually ignore the carbon dioxide emissions of biomass energy in its revised Framework for Assessing Biogenic CO2 Emissions from Stationary Sources. After years of urging to accurately account for these emissions, grassroots advocates across the U.S. contend that the EPA’s biogenic carbon loophole will open the door to an onslaught of incineration that will harm public health, exacerbate runaway climate change, and degrade our nation’s forests and drinking watersheds.

Ignoring its own Scientific Advisory Board, the EPA has demonstrated that politics trump science when it comes to climate change. Sound science has shown that biomass energy facilities are not “carbon neutral” and emit 50% more carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced than a coal-fired facility.  Trash incineration emits 2.5 times as much CO2 as coal per unit of energy produced.

Sound science has also shown that a biomass energy facility emits higher levels of dangerous pollutants, such as particulate matter, per unit of energy produced than a coal-fired facility, harming especially children and the elderly.  In the case of trash incineration, it's far more polluting than coal by every available measure.

This new EPA policy allows CO2 emissions from burning waste to be completely ignored.  This would include incineration of trash, food waste, animal waste (such as poultry litter), sewage sludge and construction/demolition waste.  This is justified on the assumption that these wastes would cause more global warming emissions if landfilled, as if conventional landfilling is the only alternative.

/*-->*/

The new EPA policy, still largely uncertain, will at best ignore CO2 emissions from forest and agriculture-derived biomass and at worst provide political cover for the destruction of the public’s natural resources in the most vulnerable states. Each state gets to choose whether it will address these sources in its compliance plan to meet Clean Power Plan goals. The memo states that “. . . the EPA expects that states' reliance specifically on sustainably-derived agricultural- and forest-derived feedstocks may also be an approvable element of their compliance plans.” Rather than specifying the requirements to pass a sustainability test, “the agency expects to recognize the biogenic CO2 emissions and climate policy benefits of waste-derived and certain forest-derived industrial byproduct feedstocks, based on the conclusions supported by a variety of technical studies, including the revised framework” and consultations with various stakeholders. This could include industry, industry-funded scientists, and environmental groups funded to make deals with the industry.

 

“Government agencies already work with industry, biased scientists, and compromised environmental groups to label destructive public forest logging as ‘sustainable.’ What’s worse with this new EPA policy is that it falsely portrays this logging as beneficial for the climate, and now the states most politically dominated by the timber industry can get more money to log more of our forests without taxing the multinational private forest owners,” explains Roy Keene, public interest forester for 40 years and Executive Director of Our Forests, based in Oregon, the state with the largest timber harvest volume.

 

The EPA recognizes that some states, like Oregon, already have “sustainable” forest management plans without critically evaluating from even a carbon accounting standpoint what is “sustainable” or “sustained yield,” as forest management plans call it. The O&C Act of 1937 mandated that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) sustain the whole forest and its multiple uses by the public -- the waterways, soils, recreation value, and timber harvest – although never implemented as such. The National Forest Management Act mandates that the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) calculate non-declining yield (a.k.a. “sustained yield”) levels from the sale of timber from each forest.  However, the mandates and the reality are totally different. Already an increasing trend not only among state agencies, but also in the U.S. Forest Service, managers are hiding data on timber harvest and soil and telling nonprofits they’ll have to file a Freedom of Information Act request to get data.

 

Over time, these agencies, including the USFS, have shifted from using the board foot to the inappropriate cubic foot as a unit of measurement yet still claim a “sustainable yield” of timber. The cubic foot is adequate when measuring the entire volume of the tree. However, the board foot, used to measure just the wood that can be made into lumber, is generally considered the more honest unit of measure of harvest volume from a forest when comparing among trees of different sizes or stands of different ages. A larger tree without defect has more board feet per cubic foot that can be made into lumber than a smaller tree. The larger tree historically has had a higher price per cubic foot than a smaller tree, although biomass energy market is now increasing the value of that smaller tree that is meanwhile less suitable for use in construction. Agencies using cubic feet overinflate the harvest volume of younger trees to justify replacing one slower-growing older tree with six faster-growing seedlings. Even if the cubic feet in a logged stand increases, the quantity of wood in that stand that can be made into a board foot of dimensional lumber declines.

 

The total carbon stored also declines then, especially considering that half of the carbon in Pacific Northwest forests is stored in the soil and largely lost upon logging. In his book Reforming the Forest Service, Randal O’Toole predicted that board foot sales from national forests would decline 30% as long as the USFS reports cubic feet while making the bogus sustainable yield justification. Of course, the market for chips has increased all the while. Drawing a flawed comparison using cubic feet ignores both the longer-term economic and ecosystem benefits of an older, biodiverse stand over a young plantation. When an agency changes the unit of measurement it uses, one can no longer validly compare its harvest data before and after the change.

 

Moreover, existing state plans are complex, involving multiple levels of government and stakeholders and took years to create. Will the EPA force any state to revise its forest management plan when it was partly written and claimed to be “sustainable” by scientists at the state’s leading agriculture university (e.g. Oregon State University)? States without existing plans can simply “encourage participation in sustainable forest management programs developed by third-party forestry and/or environmental entities,” the EPA recognizes. However, the way the system works currently, forest certifiers have a financial incentive to certify, and certified forests are not independently and credibly monitored, according to Keene. There are no common minimum sustainability standards among certifying bodies, which focus on process, not on outcomes. Consumers do not have adequate information. University of Alberta policy analysts have recognized such market failures of certification and that, “given the drawbacks associated with certification, there may be more appropriate alternatives” for “the elusive goal of sustainable forest management.”

 

The “environmental entities” may be logging selectively instead of clearcutting but are logging a much larger area and destroying the soil using a mechanized approach rather than creating jobs and are not independently monitored. There is little to no citizen involvement or oversight of either forest certification schemes or logging operations contracted by or consented to by environmental groups.  If “sustainable forest management” is so “sustainable,” why the lack of transparency and accountability?

 

The timber and bioenergy industries and their politicians, leading proponents of the EPA’s biogenic carbon loophole, also promise that more logging and burning will yield more jobs and revenue. However, based on Oregon State Employment Department and U.S. Forest Service data, dramatic increases in the timber harvest volume from the end of the 2009 recession and 2013 are not accompanied by proportional increases in jobs or revenue. Keene argues that cutting and burning more of the public’s carbon-storing forested watersheds at a time when chip and pellet exports to fuel facilities in Europe and Asia are at an all time high is making the U.S. a resource colony. If Obama and Congress want to increase jobs and bolster rural economies, why don’t they stop the rising export of raw logs and chips from public forests and tax private exports?

 

At least half of the harvest volume from privately owned forests in Oregon is already exported to Asia in one form or another, untaxed. The southeastern U.S. has been the leading export region of forest biomass to European countries that similarly do not count carbon dioxide emitted from biomass energy facilities. In early November, citizens in Chesapeake, VA, protested the climate impact and degradation to their own environment from biomass export.

 

“We’re alarmed that the Obama Administration’s climate action in the form of this EPA decision will actually worsen climate change, further drain local economies and disproportionately impact the poorest Americans,” said Chirillo, M.S., M.P.A., Steering Committee member of the Anti-Biomass Incineration Campaign.

 

Chirillo explains that the timing of the EPA’s decision is not surprising, as the Subcommittee on International Trade, chaired by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, and others in Congress put the finishing touches on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the newest NAFTA-derived trade deal. “This trade deal, combined with the EPA’s legitimizing burning forests for energy essentially greases the skids for more of the public’s forest resources and jobs to be shipped overseas, contributing to climate change while degrading public health and food security at home. Hardly sustainable.”

Although U.S. Senator Wyden’s O&C bill to increase logging on public forests in Oregon ultimately stalled, the EPA decision gives similar or even more destructive logging legislation by Republican majorities in both houses new political cover.

/*-->*/

“This kind of legislation is de facto privatization. It allows more industry manipulation with even less public involvement, basic accounting, or scrutiny of forest practices that contribute to climate change. The water that flows out of the forest irrigates farms. More logging and biomass extraction will exacerbate the drying effects of climate change,” forester Keene warns.

 

Forest legislation in Congress generally does not consider already degraded watersheds and does not account for the economic effects on agricultural irrigation or domestic water supply. In 2014, the National Weather Service rated drought in Oregon as “severe” and neighboring California, a top food-producing state, as “extreme.” Currently, most states do not require that new bioenergy facility owners show they can continuously source enough biomass to keep producing energy, let alone leave water supplies intact, before state agencies under the authority of the EPA hand out pollution permits. How can states or the EPA claim "sustainable forest management" without supply assessment?

Biofuel Hell

- by Richard Adrian Reese, February 17, 2013, Wild Ancestors

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"364","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"350","style":"width: 333px; height: 243px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"480"}}]]I keep having nightmares about one possible future: biofuel hell.  Clearly, they are visions sent by ancestral spirits, and they are meant to be shared.  Perhaps they will inspire writers, movie makers, and other creative people to produce healing, mind-altering work.  Perhaps they will inspire contemplation and sincere conversations.  At this point, I’m just going to dump a bag of jigsaw puzzle pieces on the table.  See what you can do with them.

During World War II, when gasoline was rationed, or unavailable to civilians, hundreds of thousands of vehicles in dozens of nations were converted to run on wood gas.  Car owners installed equipment that weighed 400 to 500 pounds (180 to 225 kg), plus another 50 to 100 pounds (22 to 45 kg) of fuel — wood chips or charcoal. 

In the firebox, fuel was ignited to release the gasses, primarily nitrogen and carbon monoxide.  Carbon monoxide was the flammable and explosive energy source.  It was also extremely poisonous, much to the delight of morticians.  Many folks drove with their windows rolled down.  The gas contained twice as much non-flammable nitrogen as carbon monoxide, which meant that it was not a high-powered fuel. 

In wartime Germany, 500,000 wood gas vehicles were in use, including cars, buses, tractors, motorcycles, ships, and trains.  These vehicles were also used in Denmark, Sweden, France, Finland, Switzerland, Russia, Japan, Korea, and Australia.

Charcoal-powered cars were developed in China in 1931, and they remained popular into the 1950s.  Before World War II, the French were consuming 50,000 tons of wood for vehicle fuel.  This increased to 500,000 tons by 1943. 

Readers who want to get a better feel for what life was like in an era of wood-fuelled transport should read Producer Gas & the Australian Motorist by Don Bartlett.  It’s a 26 page discussion of what Australian drivers experienced during World War II, when little gasoline was available. 

Today, rising gasoline prices are renewing interest in wood-power.  Modern technology allows wood-powered cars to cruise at 68 mph (110 km/h), with a driving range of 62 miles (100 km), consuming 66 pounds (30 kg) of wood.  There’s just one little drawback with biofuels.  “If we were to convert every vehicle, or even just a significant number, to wood gas, all the trees in the world would be gone and we would die of hunger because all agricultural land would be sacrificed for energy crops.  Indeed, the woodmobile caused severe deforestation in France during the Second World War.”  France was not alone.  Remember that there were far, far fewer cars in the world 70 years ago.

Americans are fiercely defensive about their sacred guns, but this passion is trivial in comparison to our God-given right to drive energy-guzzling motorized wheelchairs.  Most of us would rather be stoned to death by an angry crowd of Taliban than switch to bikes or buses.  Have no doubt that when gas rises above $20 or $30 a gallon, or when filling stations are out of gas for days or weeks at a time, countless hucksters will fall out of the sky, selling wood gas conversion units — and every one of them will be bought.

Will Energy Storage Plus Solar Inspire Customers to Abandon Utilities?

- by Lisa Cohn, February 28, 2014, Energy Efficiency Markets

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"363","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 266px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]To hear the Rocky Mountain Institute tell the story, it’s not a question of whether utility customers will start defecting from their utilities in favor of off-grid solutions that involve energy storage and solar energy. It’s a question of when.

Truth is, it’s already happening in Hawaii—where solar plus storage are cost-effective when compared to utility electric prices, says Jon Creyts, a managing director at RMI. Along with Homer Energy and CohnReznick Think Energy, RMI just released a report detailing the potential for customer defection from the electric grid in major markets by 2025. And customers could do this without incurring higher costs, the report says.

“The economics for grid parity today are already happening in Hawaii. A very robust set of developers and suppliers entered and were doing quite well,” Creyts says. However, the utility experienced troubles taking in high levels of solar from independent solar producers. The power was overloading some of the transmission lines. So regulators took action to restrict developers’ activity, he says.

It makes sense that this is happening in Hawaii, where utility rates are three times higher than the average rates in the US. But what may come as a surprise is the speed at which off-grid solar, combined with energy storage, may be cost-effective in other parts of the US, particularly California and New York City, says Creyts.

Destruction of Demand: How to Shrink Our Energy Footprint

- by Richard Heinberg, November 4, 2014, Post Carbon Institute

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"362","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 237px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]The human economy is currently too big to be sustainable. We know this because Global Footprint Network, which methodically tracks the relevant data, informs us that humanity is now using 1.5 Earths’ worth of resources.

We can temporarily use resources faster than Earth regenerates them only by borrowing from the future productivity of the planet, leaving less for our descendants. But we cannot do this for long. One way or another, the economy (and here we are talking mostly about the economies of industrial nations) must shrink until it subsists on what Earth can provide long-term.

Saying “one way or another” implies that this process can occur either advertently or inadvertently: that is, if we do not shrink the economy deliberately, it will contract of its own accord after reaching non-negotiable limits. As I explained in my book The End of Growth, there are reasons to think that such limits are already starting to bite. Indeed, most industrial economies are either slowing or finding it difficult to grow at rates customary during the second half of the last century. Modern economies have been constructed to require growth, so that shrinkage causes defaults and layoffs; mere lack of growth is perceived as a serious problem requiring immediate application of economic stimulus. If nothing is done deliberately to reverse growth or pre-adapt to inevitable economic stagnation and contraction, the likely result will be an episodic, protracted, and chaotic process of collapse continuing for many decades or perhaps centuries, with innumerable human and non-human casualties. This may in fact be the most likely path forward.

Is it possible, at least in principle, to manage the process of economic contraction so as to avert chaotic collapse? Such a course of action would face daunting obstacles. Business, labor, and government all want more growth in order to expand tax revenues, create more jobs, and provide returns on investments. There is no significant constituency within society advocating a deliberate, policy-led process of degrowth, while there are powerful interests seeking to maintain growth and to deny evidence that expansion is no longer feasible.

Nevertheless, managed contraction would almost certainly yield better outcomes than chaotic collapse—for everyone, elites included. If there is a theoretical pathway to a significantly smaller economy that does not pass through the harrowing wasteland of conflict, decay, and dissolution, we should try to identify it. The following modest ten-point plan is an attempt to do so.