This commentary is by Claire Greenburger, a student at Middlebury College, and the media & communications fellow at 350Vermont, an environmental justice organization based in Burlington.
“Started to wonder what was going on, watching these loaders go around like little animals in the huge pile of chips,” says Chris Gish, who lives a block away from the McNeil biomass plant in Burlington’s Old North End.
After he moved to the Old North End, he said, he “started just watching every night from the Overlook at the edge of Manhattan drive.” After investigating the plant’s environmental impacts, Gish grew concerned.
A 10-foot-high barbed-wire fence encloses the McNeil Generating Station, a nine-story baby blue building routinely encircled by trucks and tractors. Every hour, 76 tons of wood chips are hauled inside the plant and burned Steam billows out of the plant, accompanied by an incessant, high-pitched whistle and drawn-out electronic beeps.
The McNeil Generating Station began operations in 1984. Though the plant was created with the intent of diversifying fuel sources, Burlington Electric Department today claims that biomass is a zero-emission alternative to fossil fuels, critical to the state’s attempts to transition from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources.
The troubling reality is that burning wood emits more carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced than burning fossil fuels, destroys forests, decreases biodiversity, and releases air pollutants that are harmful to human health.
To meet the McNeil plant’s operating costs, Burlington Electric Department and Vermont utilities depend on renewable energy credits.
“The reason McNeil runs at all is because it generates renewable energy certificates as it generates electricity,” says Peter Duval, who worked on the 1992 low-temperature district energy project proposed by Burlington District Energy Corp. “In the New England region, electrical utilities participate in the business of exchanging environmental attributes. In some states, regulations for this trading process assume — wrongly — that burning biomass is zero emission, comparable to solar or wind energy.”
In 2019, renewable energy credits constituted 35% of McNeil’s revenue.
Burlington’s Net Zero Roadmap sets the goal of reaching Net Zero Energy by 2030. It has been considered one of the most aggressive municipal climate plans in the country. The plan, however, omits two of Burlington’s largest sources of emissions: the McNeil biomass plant and the Burlington airport.
“They’re cooking the books from the start,” says Gish.
In December 2022, growing concerns about statewide greenwashing, along with the emergence of a decades-old plan to expand the McNeil plant, led to the beginning of Stop BTV Biomass, a coalition of Burlington residents, including both Duval and Gish. Members are concerned that biomass, biofuels and “renewable” natural gas are being promoted as solutions to the climate crisis.
The group has united to oppose a new plan to expand McNeil by constructing a mile-long steam pipe that would supply heat to the UVM Medical Center. The project would cost an estimated $40 million. Darren Springer, general manager of the Burlington Electric Department, told VTDigger that the project “would help to reduce annual carbon emissions by approximately 13,000 tons in the city.”
Stop BTV Biomass’ main concern with the steam pipe is that it would act as justification for keeping the McNeil plant open long-term, despite its harmful environmental impacts.
“If you connect this steam pipe, and then say, ‘McNeil is the critical steam supplier for the hospital,’ then that becomes the excuse to keep running McNeil all the time, which is exactly the wrong thing to do,” Duval said. “The right thing to do is to shut it down and go about the business of making sure every new building is super insulated and requires no heat.”
“It will incent the plant staying open for decades,” says Gish. “The only reason the city is so interested in it is because of the faulty rules around ‘renewable energy.’”
The steam pipe will allow McNeil to qualify for additional thermal renewable energy credits, which would be traded via a local scheme enabled by Town Meeting Day Ballot Question 2 and S.5, the Affordable Heat Act, now under consideration in the Legislature.
The Affordable Heat Act supports biomass as a heating fuel alternative. It would require fossil fuel dealers to earn “clean heat credits” by switching their fuel supply over time from fossil fuels to approved alternatives. As written, the act would award McNeil clean heat credits.
However, that “doesn’t accurately account for biogenic emissions and all the kind of associated lifecycle effects from doing something like cutting forests or growing crops to make fuel,” Gish said.
“The incentive to transition to carbon-intensive and polluting fuels like wood, biofuels and renewable natural gas is appearing in so many places that we are deeply concerned about the direction we are heading as a state,” contends Stop BTV Biomass.
350Vermont is advocating for amending the Affordable Heat Act so it disqualifies liquid biofuels, renewable natural gas, biomass and hydrogen from earning clean heat credits, allowing for more accurate emissions counting that would effectively transition us away from all combustion fuels for heating.
Disqualifying biomass would likely be the downfall of McNeil, as has been the case with other biomass plants in the region. ReEnergy Black River biomass power facility in Fort Drum, New York, is set to close this spring because New York no longer considers biomass to be renewable, and the plant is unable to stay open without the subsidy provided by renewable energy credits.
“McNeil should have been shut down long ago, like its contemporary Midland SECO. Stored Solar Ryegate, ReEnergy Black River, and other wood chip plants are in trouble and closing because they are simply too expensive to operate in a competitive energy market,” Duval said. “McNeil is kept on life support with REC subsidies. Those subsidies are disappearing and are widely opposed by environmental groups.”
Stop BTV Biomass believes in the importance of education campaigns to raise awareness and educate the public about the plant. “I think there is a major lack of understanding,” says Gish. “I think people in power have been steeped in the purported environmental benefits of McNeil for a really long time.”
Gish believes in exposing these mainstream climate solutions for what they really are, a “kind of desperate, neoliberal attempt to fit climate action within our existing unsustainable economic system.”
On March 7, Burlington voters approved Ballot Question 2, which allows the city to impose a fee on certain buildings that install fossil fuel rather than renewable heating for the stated purpose of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The proposal failed to inform voters that systems fueled by wood are considered “renewable.”
Not all hope is lost, according to Stop Biomass; the City Council still has to make the proposal into an ordinance, which provides an opportunity for the council to bring the question back before voters about whether to put an impact fee on biomass, liquid biofuels, and renewable natural gas.
It is critical that Vermonters contact their city councilors to express their concerns about the carbon impact fee and to state their opposition to the McNeil expansion.
“Burlington ratepayers do not benefit (from the steam pipe to UVM Medical Center). Their energy-efficiency charge is being siphoned off to fund the development of this project. So they’re already losing money on it,” Duval said.
Gish hopes the movement to stop the steam pipe expansion project will act “as a window, ultimately working to decommission McNeil.”
