Power Plant
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Power Plant
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Power Plant Agreement: The “Green Power” Plant (also known as “project brown”)
Lamar County has a history of making poor agreements with businesses. For example, Lamar County granted an automotive service facility on Highway 36 under the verbal stipulation there would be no big trucks ever. Because of poor or non-existent wording and blind trust in the business owner, that facility now primarily services big trucks. There isn’t a thing we can do about it now. This is what a business verbally promised to be a "small car only, no big trucks" place looks like today:
Poor agreements not only cost the taxpayers money for lawsuits, poor agreements prevent us from preserving our environment the way we intend to preserve it. False or Misleading StatementsThe IDA and the press releases of the IDA appear to be designed to mislead the public. For an example look at the recent Herald-Gazette article on businesses brought to Lamar County by the IDA. Link The IDA has claimed there are no tax abatements. The IDA Memorandum of Understanding signed by Barnesville Mayor Peter Banks and City Manager and IDA Chairman Kenny Roberts directly contradicts IDA claims. The IDA has agreed in writing to clear everything possible with plant owners. This limits the openness of the agreements and how accurately and timely all agreements are presented to our community. Members of the IDA and anyone representing the IDA have essentially agreed in writing to put a positive spin on everything.
IDA Members: Let’s assume this plant burns woodchips. This is a 50 megawatt (50,000,000) output plant. This calculation is based on:
3400 BTU=one kilowatt hour ( a kilowatt hour is a measure of work) one pound of woodchips = 4500 BTU or 1.324 kilowatt hours one truckload of chip=40 tons plant output= 50,000 kilowatt hours per hour 50,000/1.324 = 37764.35 pounds of wood per hour at 100% efficiency 37764.35/2000= 18.882 tons of wood per hour at 100% efficiency 18.882/40=.472 trucks per hour at 100% efficiency .472/.25= 1.888 trucks per hour at typical truck-weight to plant-output efficiency 24*1.888 = about 45 trucks per 24 hours My calculations, including a reasonable estimate of wood chip-to-electric energy conversion efficiency, indicates this plant will burn about forty-five 40-ton truckloads of woodchips per day when running at capacity. If trucks unload every day in an eight hour unloading window, that's about one truck every ten minutes seven days a week every day of the year to produce 50 megawatts output. Why Are These Plants Called “Green” or “Clean”?We have to be careful in this day and age of buzz-words and environmental hyperbole. For example electric cars are often promoted as "pollution free" vehicles. Let's look at that. The electric car has to be charged from something. That something is generally a coal fired power plant. The emissions-free electric car actually only shifts emissions from the car's tailpipe to a polluter that might be located hundreds of miles away. There is still pollution and waste all through the process of building, charging, and operating the car. When the batteries wear out they become a source of pollution. The environmental impact from building, using, and eventually disposing of parts from an electric car certainly isn't "zero emissions" but that's what the public largely assumes. No matter how warm and fuzzy we feel inside, the electric vehicle simply moves tailpipe pollution to different locations. People in Los Angeles or Atlanta might think electric cars are the solution to all the world's problems, but a knowledgeable person in a rural area downwind of a coal-fired power plant wouldn't agree. To understand the electric car and decide if it is really a good value overall we must have the entire unbiased picture. We must know the total cost (including hidden costs) and the real benefits. We have a similar problem with oil. Our Government funds operations that convert low-energy yield food into fuel!! It not only costs more to convert corn to ethanol than we recover, the process also drives up the price of food. We want to drill offshore, but all of the oil offshore is a small fraction of what we actually need. We never look at the big picture. It is interesting to see where the oil really is. Canada holds second to the largest supply, while the USA has very few reserves. Even if we drill everywhere in the USA we only have a few years of oil. We certainly do need more energy sources, and corn isn't one of them. It's a dumb idea when we think of it. We would use up every last drop of recoverable oil in a few years, and then we would be totally at the mercy of the rest of the world. For a few cents savings today, we would have no reserves at all. Some in our community would let the very same Government that makes terrible decisions about oil and corn, and a corporation formed in Delaware on May 15, 2008, determine how much pollution we allow into our community. Now some pollution is fine, we need energy. We also need a solid agreement that this plant stays green. We need to know what to expect. What about Green power from wood-chip fired power plants? First we have to look at the reason they are called "green". Woodchip plants are called Green plants or “clean energy” plants because burning woodchips does not release any more harmful gasses into the atmosphere than the same amount of decaying wood would produce with a natural decay. They do not bring trapped carbon stored in coal or oil into the carbon cycle when burning clean waste wood. That's all a good thing. This does not mean they don’t “smell” or they don’t emit noxious gasses. A typical 50 Megawatt “Green” plant emits about 800 tons of gasses per year, most of which are carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide. The very fact they have to be licensed means they are considered air polluters. Business people are happy, although environmental groups seem to have other opinions. Hard-core environmentalists don't want anything. Someplace between the two extremes there is a balance between benefits (profit) and cost. The only source of information on the balance we have between cost and benefit is controlled by the people who want to build the plant. Our own IDA and local Government does a historically poor job of writing and enforcing agreements and following the law. As a matter of fact listen to what illegal IDA member and County Commissioner Gene Hardwick thinks of the law. Another former IDA member with significant control or influence in past IDA real estate deals, the very first time I met him, offered to buy land from me for cash and write a false sales agreement to avoid taxes. This is why any group handling public money needs independent outside supervision. IDA members visited a similar plant in Cadillac, Michigan as part of the environmental sales-pitch to sell them on the idea how good plants like this are. One IDA member told me they could not even see the smoke or smell anything from that plant, but here is the MDEQ permit the Michigan plant operates under. I find it difficult to believe an IDA Member who tells me how great the air is in Cadillac, Michigan is when I read articles like this. It may be tough to tell what smell a plant gives off when it is near an existing superfund site, the area already has bad air, and the plant knew someone was going to visit. What about our local electric power suppliers? Why doesn't Southern Rivers build a plant with our help? What about Georgia Power? Why not let someone build the plant that will use the energy to cut out electric rates, instead of shipping the profit out of state? What is in it for us? TOTAL STATIONARY SOURCE EMISSIONS Cadillac Michigan Wood Clean Energy Plant, Pollutants Tons per Year Carbon Monoxide (CO) 358 Lead (Pb) 0.01 Nitrogen Oxides (NOx) 245 Particulate Matter (PM10) 46 Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) 1 Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) 4 358 tons of carbon monoxide, 20 pounds of lead, 245 tons of Nitrogen Oxides, 46 tons of particulates, one ton of sulfur dioxide, and 4 tons of volatile organic compounds per year are released into the air at 38 MW of advertised power at the Cadillac wood burning plant. We will have a 50 megawatt output plant (about 31% larger).
Assuming they are limited to woodchips, plants like this are a good thing to the overall environment over time. One important thing often left out is plants like this take wood from a large area that would decay over years, and release the pollution all at once at one point. They become a point source of emissions. While the same (or even less) net pollution is released into the ecosystem of the world as would be naturally released, it happens all at once in one place. This also assumes they do not burn other materials. Besides the emissions from burning fuel, it is necessary to process, turn, and dry any wood that arrives. There will be odor, fumes, and emissions in this process. This particular plant will also evaporate approximately 650,000 gallons of sewerage “gray water” from the Barnesville sewerage treatment plant into the air. I'm not, at this point, sure if that will smell or not. Reports from the area of the Michigan plant indicate they mix demolition wood containing arsenic and lead in with the fresh wood. They did want to burn tires, but a large protest stopped that. there are also reports the plant has about 20 "events" a year where it exceeds licensed emission limits. Some people complain of an occasional rotten egg smell from wood piles. It isn't all perfect, it isn't all bad. The question is will the monetary benefits outweigh the costs, and do most people in the community want the plant? What will the real effect be and who will guarantee promises are kept? Tax AbatementThe IDA publicly claims they did not offer abatements, but they clearly included Tax Abatements in the memorandum of Understanding. The following is taken directly from the Memorandum of Understanding that was signed by Kenny Roberts for the IDA and Peter Banks for the City of Barnesville: 
Note the definition of abatement. Abatement is a “property tax savings as may result from the bond-financed sale-leaseback structure described herein”. The IDA claims there are no tax abatements, but the agreement they signed clearly includes local tax abatements:
 The IDA very clearly agreed to issue bonds and offered to own the property and equipment, which means there would be no local tax on the portion of land, buildings, machinery, equipment, and other property purchased or constructed with the revenue Bonds and held by the IDA. Look at this link to see how much property the IDA already excludes from our tax base.
No TiresThe IDA claims they have protection against burning of tires. This is what they claim is a protective clause:  Reading the agreement we find the IDA actually does not have an agreement limiting any future use of the plant. This does not restrict what they burn. It simply says “the permit they HAVE applied for…prohibits tires and fossil fuels”. There is nothing that prevents changing the permit or fuels later. More important, here is what the IDA also agreed to:  The IDA agreed the developer has control of the Site and can change it to anything it wants. If the Developer wants to change the Site to “anything other than a non-fossil biomass fueled power facility” all it has to do is ask in writing. The IDA agreed to go along with anything they want to do, and to not “unreasonably condition, withhold, or delay” the IDA’s consent for any change in what they burn or what they construct the plant to do. If we don't carefully and legally word our agreements with this plant, we will depend only on the State and federal Governments to set emission limits. You can see how this works for Michigan at this link.
The Story We Will HearThe IDA has agreed to support the project, to be as secretive as possible within the limits of the law, and to clear everything through the Developer:
 Mayor Peter Banks and the City of Barnesville have already broken Sunshine Laws by withholding information on the agreement. Barnesville (which has been sued in the past for violating sunshine laws) had a secret meeting to discuss and approve the agreement. Some of the latest IDA spin, besides the tall tales about prohibiting tires and not offering bonds or abatements, is the power plant will add about 200 related jobs for cutting and hauling wood chips. The problem is very few if any of those imagined jobs will be in Lamar County. It's just more deceptive spin. |
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