Traverse City Utility Takes Another Step Toward Wood-based Power

Questions still linger over health and environmental concerns

The Traverse City Light and Power Board voted last week to pursue developing a wood-burning power plant.

The vote by the Board of the municipal utility was 5-2, with City Commissioners Jim Carruthers and Ralph Soffredine — the board’s two elected officials — voting against the resolution to move ahead with the biomass plan. Both asked that the board allow more time for dialog with residents that are concerned about the plan to generate a portion of the city’s electricity by burning wood from area forests at a plant planned for the city’s east side.

Traverse City, which has one of the few municipally-owned power plants in the state, has only around 11,000 customers and currently gets more than 90 percent of its power from downstate coal plants. Utility officials say that they are responsible for ensuring that the city has continuous access to a power supply of 78 megawatts.

In response to local desires for less polluting electricity, the city set a goal of getting 30 percent if its power from renewable sources by 2020 and invested in wind projects and landfill gas recovery, but with contracts for 50 percent of the city’s base load coal power set to expire at the end of this year, the utility is under pressure to identify a new and reliable source of power.

Light & Power officials say that biomass is the only reasonable, renewable source for new base load power and they hired a communications consultant to lead a campaign to convince the ratepayers of this. But the public forums and other outreach by the utility only seemed to increase concerns about biomass among the local citizenry.

As the TCLP board prepared to vote on whether to pursue biomass, locals, including doctors, criticized them for not researching the potential health impacts of air pollution from a wood burning plant.

“You have studies on fuel and on costs,” said Lee Sprague of the Sierra Club. “What about health impacts? If you are looking for cheap energy, consider that the costs may be in health. You need to start looking at what the medical doctors are saying about this.”

The impact of a biomass plant on the areas forests appears to be the most widespread concern.

In a letter to the TCLP board the Watershed Center warned that building a biomass plant would be a large investment and that the city would be under pressure to operate the plant for as long as possible.

“Our concern is that it will not be possible to derive 60 years worth of fuel from the region’s watersheds without reductions in forest cover that negatively impact water quality.”

In public presentations local and state officials have emphasized that current state forest program is sustainable and that biomass power development would have no effect on management of public forests.

However, much of the state forest around Traverse City is already in poor health and heavily harvested, and a Republican budget proposal under consideration in the state House calls for increasing timber harvest in the state forest by an additional 50 percent.

Lynne Boyd, chief of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment Forestry Division, has warned that this little discussed proposal would compromise the sustainability of state owned forests and conflict with recreation programs, hunting and wildlife management.

State Rep. Wayne Schmidt (R-Traverse City) told Michigan Messenger that he supports increasing timber harvest from the state forest and he said he was unaware that Boyd had deemed the GOP plan unsustainable.

If construction of a new biomass plant requires the city to issue bonds, those bonds would have to be approved by the city commission. Opponents of wood-burning power say that they are considering more public meetings, litigation, a ballot measure and other strategies to prevent development of biomass plant in Traverse City.