Opinion: Much worse than your woodstove

The proposed biomass plant in North Springfield would be an environmental, economic calamity.
http://www.commonsnews.org/site/site05/story.php?articleno=7273&page=1#.UWYJUt1Ge69

Much worse than your woodstove Proposed biomass plant in North Springfield would be an environmental, economic calamity JAN AMEEN is a member of the North Springfield Action Group, which is working to prevent construction of the North Springfield Sustainable Energy Project. Share on print Share on blogger Share on facebook Share on linkedin More Sharing Services 1 Originally published in The Commons issue #198 (Wednesday, April 10, 2013). Westminster WE SEE a lot of division in Vermont these days about the proliferation of wind turbines on our ridgelines. However, we don’t hear so much public discussion about the impacts of two proposed industrial biomass plants, one in Fair Haven and the other, the North Springfield Sustainable Energy Project (NSSEP), in North Springfield. Why? Because many Vermonters burn wood for heat and assume that burning wood chips for electricity (and sometimes heat) is not much worse than their woodstove. Unfortunately, this is simply not true. When I first learned last September about the proposed 36-megawatt industrial biomass plant in North Springfield, I did a lot of research. This facility is being proposed by Adam Winstanley, a Massachusetts developer, in conjunction with Weston Solutions. The senior technical director for Weston Solutions is Dan Ingold, a Vernon resident. While Winstanley has successfully redeveloped brownfields sites, this appears to be his first foray into building a large-scale electricity generating plant. I am somewhat surprised that he would gamble his money and his family’s business reputation on such an obvious environmental and economic calamity. * * * WHAT I LEARNED was distressing, yet also obvious. There is a big difference between burning a few cords of dry firewood in your woodstove and burning hundreds of cords of green wood per day, every day, as is proposed for the North Springfield plant. According to public documents filed by NSSEP, the facility would burn 550 cords of green wood a day with only 26-percent efficiency. It would generate 1,176 tons of greenhouse gas emissions at the same time. In a year, the facility would release 429,000 tons of greenhouse gases into Vermont’s air. (This is half of what Efficiency Vermont saves each year through energy-efficiency programs.) This number does not include the emissions from the 50 to 120 diesel trucks that will deliver wood five days a week, nor the trucks that would remove ash. The Air Pollution Control Division of the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation considers this facility to be “a major source of air pollution and a major source of acid rain.” Emissions from woody biomass facilities can create ground-level ozone (smog). In addition, these facilities would release a significant amount of particulate matter. Particulate matter is known to exacerbate asthma and to cause respiratory illnesses. People most at risk from particulate pollution have heart and respiratory illnesses, or they are among the young, the elderly, and those who are pregnant. Vermont — and the rest of New England — already has high rates of asthma. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in 2008 Vermont’s rate of asthma in adults and in children exceeded the national rate. The CDC estimated that more than 60,000 Vermonters were diagnosed with asthma four years ago, and the federal agency expects that the number is much higher at present. The American Lung Association, American Heart Association, and American Cancer Society all oppose biomass because of the negative impacts on human health caused by biomass combustion. According to the American Lung Association, “Black carbon, or diesel soot, and ozone not only significantly impact global warming but also endanger public health. Black carbon from diesel, a mixture of 40 different toxic substances, increases the risk of developing lung cancer. Ozone, the most commonly encountered pollutant in America’s cities, damages lung capacity and aggravates asthma. Both pollutants send people with asthma and other chronic lung diseases to the hospital and emergency room. Both cut short the lives of thousands of people every year.” To add to the injury of siting this plant in a residential neighborhood, the developers lowered the exhaust stack from the facility’s engineered height by half, from 290 feet to 140 feet, because of the Springfield airport’s limit on the stack height.