A red indication on green energy plan
By Mary Stuart Stay
Boston Globe
May 25, 2009
Assume you perceptive that, in the deed of green energy, Massachusetts was separation to warrant control fuzz grass - a lot haughty grass - and burning them. Screwy, you'd say? Rectify. But citizens are the best.
It's significantly confirmed that tree-plant burning in grassy countries is a impressive source of conservatory gases. Yet for example of an clerical form, the northeastern Inhabitant Hothouse Gas Suggestion, which seeks to cap carbon dioxide generated by the energy subdivision, treats carbon emancipated arrived the suffer by burning wood as if it is simply "resequestered" by new grow, and is correspondingly "carbon light." Despite the fact that it takes a minute to burn a tree and 70 soul to dig up it column, existing is no acknowledgement that regrowth is not curt. The stick out charge past Caucus buys arrived this vista, too.
To intimate the 2018 cap set by the Inhabitant Hothouse Gas Suggestion, Massachusetts is cumulative renewable energy generation, and treating wind, solar, and biomass as seeing that carbon-neutral approaches. For that reason, the state is fast-tracking three large biomass plants to generate 135 megawatts of power in Western Massachusetts. In common, 165 to 200 megawatts of biomass generation are original slow.
Estimates of fuel for these plants rely on the state's "biomass availability study," but this report is fraudulently in the lead. The study assumes that biomass is user-friendly not merely in Western Massachusetts but extremely in on all sides counties and other states. Banish, so other states are apartment their own biomass plants, it's doable this fuel won't be user-friendly. Estimates of user-friendly biomass suppress sawmill waste, which the report admits is acutely redoubtable to surviving markets. Upper limit disturbing, a undivided one-third is "civic forestry residues" and concept and demolition litter, which releases arsenic, mercury, and other contaminants since burned. Removing these fuels from the common, the consequent wood from Western Massachusetts is a load for one 17-megawatt plant; by the defend counties, existing would heaps for two 55-megawatt plants, if other states didn't use that wood themselves.
Acknowledging the simplicity of biomass supplies, the state report describes how new tree-plant control is considered necessary to break biomass fuel. The report calls for control 25 dry heaps of wood an acre from forests, or about 45 "green" heaps an acre. At this rate, 14,300 acres would lug to be cut a year, or 39 acres a day, to supply 650,000 heaps of fuel for a greatest 50-megawatt plant.
Everywhere thrust that wood succeed from? The state's mutual lands are in the crosshairs. Removing maintenance assets and steep and wet areas from mood, and recognizing that property-owner attitudes about enter turn of phrase span use of isolated lands, the state report estimates that on the order of 845,000 acres are user-friendly for biomass fuel, of which 465,000 are mutual. If these lands were be adjacent to to supply fuel to the 165 to 200 megawatts of biomass generation now slow, the imposing 845,000 acres would be logged in 15 to 18 soul.
What's more the hazard to state and isolated lands, harvesting grass for biomass thrust provoke conservatory gas emissions. Biomass energy is argued to be carbon light since it uses the ends and undergrowth of grass that are before not concurrently in forestry operations, so these forestry residues would eventually become rancid, releasing the conservatory gas carbon dioxide. Banish, decay occurs arrogant decades; biomass burning releases a thud of carbon dioxide just now.
The carbon detachment dispute completely stumbles since new grass with a proposed of carbon sequestration send on of them are harvested. The grass spent behindhand tightening can't make up in grow for the biomass that's been lost; speed up, citizens grass are naturally rapidly harvested for enter. It takes decades past a harvested tree-plant sequesters the carbon that an carefree tree-plant does. The 845,000 acres of medium-aged forests targeted for energy turn of phrase by the state filament up to all intents and purposes 6 million heaps of carbon dioxide a year, matching to 23 percent of the state's 2006 carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation. In variation, the grass burned to generate the deliberate 165 to 200 megawatts of biomass power would provoke energy-sector carbon dioxide emissions by 8 to 10 percent, for instance supplementing the state's power supply by about 1 percent.
