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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (680)	6/28/2005 11:56:31 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24235

The other natural gas Vermont supporting landfill energy plants By DAVID GRAM The Associated Press -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- June 26. 2005 10:56PM Several Northeastern states have passed legislation providing credits to utilities that buy or produce renewable energy. Avram Patt is the first to tell you it doesn't look like much. "Just a big concrete box sitting in the middle of a landfill." But inside the new 7,000-square-foot concrete block building at the Casella Waste Systems Inc. landfill sits three big yellow Caterpillar engines with attached electrical generators that will turn methane gas from the landfill's decomposing garbage into electricity. Washington Electric Cooperative, of which Patt is general manager, is set to fire up the generators next month. They will make about a third of the power needed by the co-op's roughly 10,000 members in 41 rural central Vermont towns. Even better for those members, for at least the first couple of years of the new power plant's operations, the electricity won't cost the co-op a dime. On the contrary, the generators actually will make money for Washington Electric. Thanks to a big difference between Vermont's new renewable energy law and those of nearby states, the power station will supply the co-op with all the energy it produces. At the same time, it will sell renewable energy credits to a Massachusetts utility for more than the initial cost of making the power. Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York are among a growing number of states nationwide that have renewable portfolio standards. Under those laws, utilities must either get a set percentage of their power from renewable sources or they must buy credits supporting renewable projects elsewhere. Money paid for the credits sometimes makes the difference between a renewable project being economically viable or not. For the co-op, the slightly more than $8 million it will pay for the building, generators and other project costs, combined the 0.33 cents per kilowatt-hour it will pay to Casella for the landfill gas, will result in a starting power cost of 4 cents per kwh, with an average price of 5 cents over the project's 25-year life, Patt said. Those prices already are below current and projected market costs for wholesale power. But what makes the Coventry project a real winner is that WEC will be able to sell the renewable credits. It has signed a two-year contract, with an option for a third year, to sell the credits for 4.8 cents per kwh to the Cape Light Compact, a municipal and county-owned retail utility on Cape Cod. That means the co-op will both get to use the power and make a 0.8 cents per kwh margin at the same time. It's not as if the co-op soon will be sending its members monthly checks instead of bills. But Patt said the income from the credits will allow the co-op to bank millions of dollars to forestall future rate increases. The result is that the co-op's members, who haven't seen their rates jump since 1999, won't at least until 2012, he said. The bill passed by a Democratic Legislature and signed into law this past week by Republican Gov. James Douglas is designed to encourage just the sort of investment Washington Electric has made in Coventry - homegrown energy from an environmentally friendly renewable resource. But Vermont won't adopt a renewable portfolio standard unless the state's utilities fail to meet a key goal of the new law: The companies must meet their customers' increasing demand for electricity during the next six years with renewables, energy efficiency and combined heat and power systems, which use the same energy for both purposes. That may be a tall order. Dorothy Schnure, spokeswoman for Green Mountain Power Corp., the state's fastest-growing power company, said to meet its projected 10 percent demand growth with renewables, GMP would need to build the equivalent of 15 Searsburg wind projects. The company currently gets six megawatts of power from 11 wind turbines on the mountain there. Patt is rooting for the utilities to make the goal. If they don't, and Vermont moves to a renewable portfolio standard, WEC would have to keep some of its renewable credits for itself, reducing the annual income from selling them by an estimated $300,000. As for Casella, vice president John Fusco said the income the company will get from selling the co-op its methane was only a minor consideration. The real purpose for the Rutland-based company is to be "as innovative as possible because that's what makes a good company, a company people want to do business with," Fusco said. "We've got to figure out where's the waste industry going to be in 20 or 30 years, and we've got to run like hell to get there first." Burning methane is actually good for the environment. Methane, a gas that results from the decomposition of organic matter, is about 40 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, Patt said. Landfills are generally required to burn off their methane, but it usually goes to waste. Just a few yards from the nearly completed power station, where construction workers were toiling one day this past week to complete and check an estimated 9,000 plumbing and electrical connections, stood a smoke stack sticking out of the ground that could be seen giving off puffs of flame against the overcast sky. "We're basically just taking that pipe and sticking it into our building and burning it there instead of just flaring if off," Patt said. It all makes sense to the co-op manager, whose East Montpelier office looks out on Vermont Route 14, a regular route for many of the Casella trucks heading for Coventry and Vermont's largest landfill. "Half the trucks that go up there go right by my office," Patt said. Knowing that they're carrying fuel that will be turned into electricity for his co-op's members will make the noise easier to take. ------ End of article By DAVID GRAM concordmonitor.com