After intense public pressure, Traverse City Light & Power axes new plans to build a biomass plant in town. . .
from Michigan Messenger:
Traverse City’s municipal utility has decided to step away from plans to build a wood-fired power plant as part of an effort to reach a goal of 30 percent renewable energy by 2020. Traverse City Light & Power executive director Ed Rice said that the TCLP board has decided to “curtail any detailed analysis” of biomass options and instead explore meeting the city’s power needs with natural gas. He cited community opposition to biomass power and lowered costs for natural gas as the main reasons for tabling the plan.
“As a public utility we need to be connected to the citizens,” Rice said. “We tried public forums, open meetings, more public forums. We somehow could not connect to the overall community on biomass.”
Since December opponents of the proposed biomass plant have insisted that burning wood for power will damage the region’s forests and contribute to air pollution, and recently the local effort against biomass has been bolstered by some national developments.
In May the U.S. EPA ruled that emissions from biomass plants would not be exempt from greenhouse gas permitting rules when the agency begins regulating carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act next year.
This month the state of Massachusetts announced it would reconsider renewable energy incentives for biomass after a study it commissioned showed wood-burning releases more greenhouse gases than coal.
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