The idea of turning thousands of tons of forest waste into heat for South Tahoe High School is a step closer to reality thanks to a $243,500 grant from the U.S. Forest Service.
The grant would pay for half the cost of a biomass boiler at the school, which can convert chipped forest material into heat and energy. If implemented for the 2007-08 school year, the biomass boiler would be the first for a California public school - and proponents of the idea say it would help reduce the threat of a catastrophic wildfire in the Lake Tahoe Basin.
“No one has done a project like this in California,” said Steve Morales, district facilities manager for Lake Tahoe Unified School District.
With an annual 25,000 tons of forest waste in the basin, including debris such as branches and pine needles, the fuel is there to propel a wildfire. Politicians including Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Harry Reid, D-Nev., have pushed for the reduction of forest fuels with environmental agencies signing on.
“There is a lot of interest in this and the facts are Tahoe is going to save a bunch of money putting this in,” said Bruce Goines, U.S. Forest Service biomass utilization coordinator for the Pacific Southwest region.
Morales said a biomass facility could consume as much as 2,200 tons of chipped material from forest waste each year. Although it represents only 9 percent of total annual forest waste, many say it’s better than nothing in protecting a pristine lake and communities with few evacuation routes out of the basin.
Hurdles remain. Permits from El Dorado County Air Quality Management Board and Tahoe Regional Planning Agency must be obtained, followed by a bidding process. Lastly, a supplier has to be found to deliver the forest waste in bulk. And that’s what worries Rex Norman of the U.S. Forest Service.
“The technology of biomass is doing great, but it’s the supply chain, the system, that has to be built,” said Norman, a spokesman for the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit.
“We’ve got the fuel. We’ve got the technology. It’s what’s in between that’s the problem,” Norman said. “It’s the access to the material and a reliable supply chain.” … [more]
Important Note: this news report is from May, 2006.
January 8, 2008 | Topic: Latest Forest News
January 20th, 2008 at 12:37 am
How soon they forget. There were two biomass electrical generation plants in the Redding area, the only two in California, without one stick of wood, one log, one load of chips, all during that period Enron and other electrical power brokers were gaming the system and drastically raising electricity prices.
The reason: environmental lawsuits had the totality of Region 5 shut down to any resource use. Not one stick was moving. Not one watt of electricity was produced. The good people of Nevada would be well served to have a coal or natural gas back up, but Feinstein and Reid are no match for George Miller, Nick Rahal, or any of their ilk in the House of Representatives or their minders in the BINGOs of Eco-Advocacy.
The eco-freaks would rather freeze a school kid than cut a tree, and have extensive track records to back that statement up. Tens of thousands of school kids in the West are going without because those politicians are complicit in the demise of public land resource use.
The spots on those leopards are not about to change. Even if they were defeated at the polls, those types end up at Interior or USDA-USFS as deputy asst. sec of Ag or some such title, and continue to wreak havoc on public lands by pushing preservationist nonsense.