Partnership For Policy Integrity

The Massachusetts rules will require for first time anywhere in the world that renewable energy credits for biomass energy be granted based on a common sense, life cycle assessment of the carbon emissions of burning forest wood to generate electricity.

Only in the la la land of biomass energy would burning trees be considered pollution control. But that’s where renewable energy policy is headed if the industry has its way.

By delaying regulation of biomass carbon, EPA is greenlighting biomass emissions of 350 million tons of unregulated CO2 a year, equivalent to all the coal fired power plants in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio.

The environmental impact assessment from the Department of Energy reads like a biomass industry talking points memo, with whole chunks of text lifted straight from documents submitted by the developer.

NAFO’s strategy to convince EPA that biomass carbon emissions shouldn’t count relies on outsourcing carbon pollution to forests somewhere else.

EPA does not need to wait three years to assess the greenhouse gas implications of burning biomass for energy, and doing so will create a fleet of permanently unregulated plants that are huge greenhouse gas emitters.

When the dust settles from the public hearing on the Palmer Renewable Energy biomass plant in Springfield, MA, Hampden country will still be out of compliance with pollution standards for ozone, Springfield’s kids will still have asthma and elevated blood lead levels at twice the state average, and the city will still be experiencing high particle pollution. And that’s if they don’t build the plant.

The Hu Honua plant, an old coal burner which is being converted to burn wood, will emit 20 to 30 tons per year of toxic chemicals like formaldehyde, benzene, and hydrochloric acid, dangerous metals like arsenic and mercury, and harmful combustion byproducts including dioxin.

Carbon dioxide emissions from the biomass boiler will be 3,120 pounds per megawatt-hour, more than six times the 510 pounds per megawatt-hour allowed for the facility’s new natural gas burner.

The only independent, multi-stakeholder study of the carbon impacts of burning trees to generate electricity found that it would take 40 years of forest regrowth just to get to parity in carbon pollution with burning coal for those same four decades. To get to parity with natural gas would take almost a century.

The current boom in biomass energy depends entirely on the mutually reinforcing myths of renewability and carbon neutrality. But in practice, biomass energy is far carbon neutral and actually looks a lot more like coal and oil.