Some wood burning plants are greener than others, and one environmental group wants the Legislature to take that into account in a renewable energy bill.
The Vermont Natural Resources Council is pushing the Legislature to prioritize more efficient biomass plants in this year’s energy bill, but its pleas seem to be falling on deaf ears.
A bill in the House Committee on Natural Resources and Energy would require utilities to buy 35 percent of the electricity in their portfolios from “renewable” sources and shoots for a goal of 75 percent renewable electricity by 2032.
The most recent version of the bill makes a distinction between new renewable projects and existing ones that went on line before 2005. It doesn’t do much to separate or prioritize different types of renewable energy.
When it comes to different types of biomass, some say this is a problem.
Jamey Fidel, forest and biodiversity program director for the Vermont Natural Resources Council, said a report to the Legislature by the Biomass Energy Development Working Group, recommended a tiered structure that would reward more efficient electricity generating biomass projects.
The idea is to encourage more efficient projects that use less wood to produce the same amount of energy through better technology, including things like combined heat and power rather than the somewhat inefficient process of burning wood just for electricity.
Without some sort of tiered approach, the state would allow less efficient projects to go online and count toward the renewable portfolio standard, Fidel said.
“There’s no incentive at all for efficient projects without this,” Fidel said.
From an environmental standpoint, Fidel said, the more efficient a project is, the quicker it will become “carbon neutral,” meaning the carbon released by burning the wood has been captured by young trees. More efficient projects that use the heat from burned wood to create electricity and heat take less time to get to this neutral state because they emit less carbon, Fidel said.
“The basic premise is forests need to regrow,” Fidel said. “When you harvest wood and burn it, it releases carbon. It takes a lot longer for you to get that beneficial carbon neutral state the longer the process is.”
More efficient plants mean less carbon in the atmosphere.
According to a study by the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation, the state has more than 4.5 million acres of forest land. Vermont harvests average around 2.7 million green tons of wood each year. The McNeil Generating Station in Burlington and the Ryegate Power Plant combined consume roughly 435,000 green tons of harvested chips, with less than half of that amount estimated to come from within the state.
A proposed combined heat and power plant in Fair Haven would demand about 362,000 tons of wood per year. Another plant in Springfield is awaiting approval from the Public Service Board.
While Fidel said some sort of “tiered” approach has widespread support among numerous stakeholders from industry representatives to environmentalists, the proposal has yet to make it into any of the energy bills drifting through the House Committee on Natural Resources and Energy.
Rep. Tony Klein, who chairs the committee, said a tiered approach to biomass is really a camouflage for getting rid of large biomass facilities.
Klein said his committee is trying to be “technology neutral.” He said the state has already worked to get rid of artificial restrictions that would allow one energy generator from qualifying as “renewable” while another similar project would not. The most high profile example is the state qualifying all hydroelectric power (including large-scale dams in Quebec) as “renewable.”
“I’m hesitant to, without a great deal of research and investigation, embark on another imposed restriction on another defined renewable,” Klein said. “That tiered structure, for better or for worse, would eliminate the possibility of large biomass in the state.”
On its current path, the state will fall short of its goal of getting 20 percent of its electricity from renewable generation projects by 2017.
If utilities contract with larger biomass facilities the state might meet that goal, Klein said.
But Fidel said meeting that goal and encouraging more efficient projects are not mutually exclusive. VNRC and others are pushing for language that would have the Department of Public Service and the Agency of Natural Resources develop some sort of efficiency standard.
For example, under proposed Massachusetts rules, projects that are very efficient would get a full renewable energy credit, which is a method of accounting for the “clean” nature of the power it produces, while a less efficient project gets a percentage of a credit.
Whether a project would qualify or not is still an open-ended question depending on how it’s designed, Fidel said.
Klein’s committee aims to vote on the bill by the end of this week.