Have been working on a review of the DC’s Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS). Like many RPS policies in the nation, credits with significant monetary value are being awarded to less than ideal technologies; technologies that are not particularly new, innovative or environmentally benign and much less beneficial. The intent of most RPS policies is to create markets and drive new and inventive technologies, processes or material uses that promise significant climate/environmental benefits.
In many of these policies as currently written, basic combustion and incineration are being extraordinarily rewarded when they, in fact, are new and innovative in name only. The District of Columbia is a member of an 11 state Renewable Energy Credit( REC) trading consortium, as a result many of its RECs, paid for by taxpayers, are going to waste management companies that do nothing more than mass burn municipal solid waste, producing electricity and enormous amounts of waste heat. These RECs even go to numerous paper mills for simply incinerating a paper pulping residue called black liquor when these very same mills have actually been burning this material since the 1930s. The economic remuneration to these companies, in the many millions of dollars, is so large that Goldman Sachs has called it “Black Gold”.
Black liquor is a sub-class of the poorly defined and qualified RPS category of biomass. It was once automatically accepted that any biomass replacement of fossil fuels was always an environmental benefit, but that assumption has been seriously challenged. The state of Massachusetts recently published an extraordinarily detailed and in-depth study of woody biomass harvested from the state’s forests. The study (The Manomet Study) revealed two very distinct carbon balance curves: one that offset, in a relatively short time frame, the immediate carbon deficit that is produced upon biomass combustion; and another with a much longer rotational cycle.
http://www.manomet.org/manomet-study-woody-biomass-energy
The latter was characteristic of ’round wood’ or trees harvested through forestry thinning. Based on analysis of the specific characteristics of soil and plants throughout the state, utilizing this type of biomass to produce electricity created a carbon deficit that was only balanced by sufficient regrowth carbon sequestration over the course of 100 years… very interesting research with more to be done.
Ann Pierce