TOP HOMES

Dairyland Power Cooperative should redirect use of a $350 million rural Utilities Services loan toward installation of coal/biomass gasification retrofit at the Genoa No. 3 plant, instead of installing an Olstom Scrubber that requires huge imports of processed lime and a 600-acre landfill somewhere in Vernon County.

In Somerset, Mass., a 120 MGW plant is being retrofit to gasification for $180 million. It has four plasma torch cupolas that use coal or a variety of biomass feedstocks. It is being done by Alter NRG from Calgary, Alberta, and is due operable by January 2010.

According to the 2007 report by PSC of Wisconsin, anticipated efficiency gains indicate that gasification will use less coal and out perform conventional pulverized coal plants. Emissions from gasification easily meet or go below requirements for NO, SO2 and Hg (nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and mercury). The solid waste produced is a glass-like slag that is non-leachable and can be sold for road construction.

The long-term liabilities of installing the scrubber have not been properly quantified. The truck fuel costs and exhaust (CO2) produced to make round trips to a lime quarry (200 miles away) to the landfill for 30 years are huge. When CO2 emissions become regulated these operating costs will become unsustainable. In Europe, the allowance for CO2 is currently $30/ton. For calculations, WPSC uses $15/ton. CO2 emissions are also produced by quarry processing where CO2 is removed from the limestone.

CO2 capture, done in gasification before combustion, is easier to do and costs less than conventional “scrubbing.” Other liabilities include increased road maintenance and hazard potential and litigation costs, surrounding eminent domain siting issues of the landfill and damages from its potential to fail. Finally, is it wise to usurp good farmland to site a landfill over the “karst geology” of Vernon County? Do co-op members want to effect the dislocation of other members from their homes and farms?

Gasification is by far the cleanest coal conversion technology according to the Alberta Energy Research Institute.

Urge Dairyland Power Co-op to convert to coal/biomass gasification. Learn about it on the Internet. Call your co-op representative on Dairyland’s board (Dan Korn).

Call friends at other co-ops who buy Dairyland Power. Call legislators, Lee Nerison and Dan Kapanke, and ask them to enact “securitized financing” for gasification in Wisconsin.

There is a better way. Let’s do it.

Chuck Doerr

Town of Viroqua

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