When Gainesville first announced it would meet future energy needs with a biomass electrical generating plant, the decision didn’t draw extensive concern. But the closer the plant gets to groundbreaking, the more controversial it becomes. Will the biomass plant be a boondoggle, or will it secure our energy future?

Wood.
It’s been a source of heat since the time of the caveman. But now, as Gainesville Regional Utilities moves closer to a biomass plant, wood is generating heat of a different type as people argue over the soundness of the plan to use wood waste and other biomass fuels to produce the electricity to run your computer and keep your milk cold.
The plant is not yet a sure thing. Josh Levine, director of project development for American Renewables, the company contracted to build the facility, says the Florida Public Service Commission has until March 1 to decide whether to approve the application. But all indications are the plant will move forward. And it is clear the city commission sees it as an important piece of its long-term strategy to meet the area’s energy needs with sustainable resources.
The question now is, will the plant truly deliver or will it end up an expensive experiment?

Do We Need Another Plant?
Energy consumption in Gainesville is continuing to grow, and the biomass plant should help the city meet electric power needs in an environmentally responsible way, say GRU officials.

According to GRU spokesman Dan Jesse, with the biomass plant online in late 2013, as much as 21 percent of GRU’s fuel supply will be renewable. That percentage includes biomass, plus 20-24 MW of electricity generated by solar panels, many of which residents and citizens have installed through the city’s “feed-in” tariff program.
“This will help Gainesville meet potential renewable portfolio standards that may require 20 percent renewable energy production,” he says.
The key word there is “potential.” At this time, those renewable energy goals are self-imposed, as neither the Florida legislature nor the U.S. Congress displays a particular appetite for additional energy regulation.
Lacking a state or national mandate, the city commission on its own pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 7 percent below 1990 levels. The biomass generator would be a big step toward meeting that pledge.
For that reason, city commissioners rejected a previous GRU proposal to build a coal-fired plant and, in May 2009, signed a 30-year contract with American Renewables for a 100-MW biomass electrical generating plant.
The plant, which has a 42-year design life, is to be built, owned and operated by American Renewables through its project company, Gainesville Renewable Energy Center. GRU will lease 130 acres at its 1,146-acre Deerhaven facility for this plant, and GRU is contractually obligated to purchase the generated electricity.

Can’t We Just Conserve?
Could the region meet renewable energy standards and eliminate the need for a new plant simply by ramping up conservation?
GRU’s current conservation programs have helped 10,000 customers upgrade to energy-efficient appliances in the past three years, lowering demand by 9 MW. But it’s not possible to meet all the area’s increased needs through conservation. But former Gainesville mayor commissioner Tom Bussing argues there’s a solid source of extra energy already available. All GRU needs to do is stop selling electricity to the City of Alachua—which gets 94 percent of its electricity from GRU—and Clay Electric Cooperative when the contracts with those entities end in a few years.
“This is a pig in a poke,” Bussing says. “We don’t need to supply people outside our service area. The cheapest power is the power you save and we’ve been successful with conservation and solar. That’s where we ought to concentrate.”
But even if it weren’t selling power to outside municipalities, GRU says it would still need new capacity to compensate for the planned retirement of old generators that supply 150 MW of peak summertime capacity.

Is There Enough Wood to Fuel the Plant?
In a sense, a biomass plant is little more than an enormous and efficient campfire. It uses wood to create steam to turn a generator, and it can burn anything from waste limbs and stumps from forestry operations, to broken pallets, your bagged oak leaves—even treated cow manure.
But it takes a lot of wood to generate that steam. The 100-MW biomass plant planned for Gainesville will require 3,250 tons of waste wood every day. Getting all that wood to the plant will take 130 tractor trailers a day. (A coal plant of similar size would require approximately 800 tons of coal or 32 diesel truck-loads a day.)
Another way to imagine this volume, says Dian Deevey, chairwoman of the Alachua County Environmental Protection Advisory Committee, is to consider that the yearly wood needed is equivalent to 880 square miles of timberland—an area slightly larger than all of Alachua County.
American Renewables reports that it will draw on an extensive area for the fuel: “The project will require approximately one million tons of fuel annually, which will be procured within a 75-mile radius of the project site.”
Thus, the biomass plant’s sourcing support area could be as much as 17,662 square miles, equivalent to the area, coast-to-coast, from Valdosta to Leesburg.
Dr. E. Dwight Adams, retired UF professor of physics and former member of the Alachua County Energy Committee, worries whether such a large mass of wood will be sustainable and, if it is, whether freighting it here is good for the environment.
“My main concern is that there may not be enough good fuels in the region. We’ll have to use wood trucked in after hurricanes and tornadoes,” Adam says, adding that he’s concerned about the impact of removing all that wood. “I wonder if we’re robbing the soil of nutrients,” he says.
A study commissioned by GRU and conducted by UF’s School of Forest Resources and Conservation in 2007 concluded that sufficient woody biomass does grow within the Gainesville region to supply a 100-MW generator. Currently, that debris is being burned on site or trucked to landfills.
“The primary fuels will be forest residue, mill residue, pre-commercial tree thinnings, used pallets and urban wood waste that are generated by landscaping contractors, power line clearance contractors and other non-forestry related sources of woody debris,” wrote Drs. Douglas Carter and Matthew Langholtz. “Supplementary fuels could include herbaceous plant matter, agricultural residues, diseased trees, woody storm debris, whole tree chips and pulpwood chips.”
Levin Gaston, chief operating officer at Wood Resource Recovery in Gainesville, a business that specializes in wood debris and yard waste recovery, recycling, composting and site management, scoffs at those who say we’ll run out of fuel. “There is plenty of biomass out there,” he says.
Gaston also argues that burning biomass significantly reduces the materials dumped in landfills, cuts greenhouse gas emissions and curbs our reliance on costly and unstable supplies of fuel, such as foreign oil.
To further ensure a sustainable supply, the city commission passed a forestry stewardship program in 2009. This program is designed to ensure that contractors will not simply clear-cut areas and that some debris will be left on the ground to prevent erosion and re-nourish the soil.
The forest stewardship initiative satisfied City Commissioner Jack Donovan, who initially had mixed opinions about the biomass plant. Nevertheless, foresters and plant ecologists such as Peter Nesmith of Water & Air Research in Gainesville are apprehensive about fuel supplies.
“I think the biomass idea is good,” Nesmith says, “but I wonder if there is enough biomass to support more than one plant in a region. I don’t think it’s going to be a good thing for every place.”
In the north central U.S., where many biomass plants are now in operation, some plant managers and non-governmental organizations are concerned that biomass can easily be stretched to the limit, especially in an economy with housing and pulp-and-paper manufacturing in a slump. If the biomass supply becomes scarce, the price for fuel will go up.

Is The Plant Too Big?
Even supporters question whether this area needs a 100-MW plant. Chris Fillie, of Vibrany Consulting and a member of the Alachua County Energy Committee, suggests a smaller plant might be better.
“Some biomass is good,” he says, “but we also should be thinking about power from anaerobic decomposition and more solar. It’s like an investment portfolio—diversify.”
Bussing asserts a 100-MW biomass plant  “is way too big for our needs, even projecting into the future and ensuring that we have the required 15-percent cushion for those abnormally hot summer days (or cold winter nights!) that stretch peak load capacity. I think advertising for this new plant has been misleading, perhaps deliberately.”
Josh Levine, director of project development for Gainesville Renewable Energy Center, says 100 MW may be too big for today, but no one plans an energy plant to satisfy today’s need. Because energy facilities are so expensive, take so long to go through the permitting process, and take so much time to construct, they are always built to meet the needs of the next generation of users.
Regarding the scale, Levine says that several size options were explored. They found that dropping down to a 50-MW plant “only saved 40 percent” of construction and operation costs and required the same number of people to operate as a 100-MW plant. Therefore, operating costs per megawatt would be much higher.
“There’s no magic number,” Levine says, “but an economy of scale comes into play with financing and ultimate output.”

Is Biomass Good for the Environment?
While many concerns still exist about a biomass plant, there seems to be little doubt it would improve air quality by reducing carbon emissions and other pollutants.
 “The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that electricity generated from coal produces about 50 times more sulfur dioxide emissions than biomass fuels,” Levine says, “and significantly more nitrogen oxide.” GRU currently burns 1,900 tons of coal a day.
Rob Brinkman, who founded Citizens for Affordable Renewable Energy to oppose the city’s previous plans for a coal-fired plant and who served two terms on the Gainesville Energy Advisory Committee, says the biomass pollution position is essentially sound.
“Our goal is to one day burn nothing, but we’re a long way from that.” he says.
Compared to coal or other traditional fossil fuels, emissions from burning biomass are significantly lower. Nitrous oxide emissions are 1/10th and sulfur dioxide, which can result in acid rain, less than 1/30th.
Also, using biomass fuels results in only 42 percent of the particulate pollution of comparable coal plants. And, burning wood wastes in the field, as is now done during logging and road building operations, releases 10 times more particulates than biomass electrical generation.
Biomass energy is essentially carbon neutral, Brinkman says. “It does not add new carbon to the active carbon cycle, unlike fossil fuels, which remove carbon from geologic storage.”

Will the Plant Drive Up Rates?
Electric rates are expected to increase 4.5 percent when the biomass comes on line because GRU’s contract with Gainesville Renewable Energy Center appears to specify it will buy the electricity at a guaranteed rate. (Electric rates would not have risen and might actually have fallen with a new coal plant.)
It is hard to say precisely how the plant will impact rates, however, because all financial data in the April 29, 2009 Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) the city signed is blacked out. This has led some to question the costs and the openness of the negotiations.
“GRU hid public information,” Deevey charges, “and the city commission didn’t have the wit to ask any critical questions because the mayor is very anxious to have this built.”
Levine from Gainesville Renewable Energy Center says the sections weren’t made public because his company was simply protecting trade secrets.
“Look,” he says, “we negotiated with GRU in good faith and worked over the details of this plan for a year before the PPA was signed. There aren’t many PPAs for biomass plants in the U.S., and that agreement is filled with information that I would not want our competition to have.”
There’s one other major financial concern: the penalties Gainesville will face if the plant isn’t built on time.
The biomass plant must start generating electricity by December 31 of 2013 to be eligible for federal stimulus funding.  If the deadline is missed, the out-of-pocket cost of the plant will increase, and Gainesville will end up paying an additional $8.10 per megawatt hour for the power the plant generates. That works out to roughly $6.4 million extra per year.
Could this be a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t?