Is the biomass plant friendly to the environment?
BY JENNIFER CABRERA / SEPTEMBER 28, 2019
GRU has been bragging that it produces more energy from renewable sources than any other utility in the state. In fact, about 36% of the energy it produced from January through July of this year was from the Deerhaven Renewables (biomass) plant. But what does that mean for the people who live near the biomass plant?
Julie O’Brien showed this video at the September 26 Gainesville City Commission special meeting:
This amount of traffic doesn’t appear to be unusual because GRU used 78,498 tons of wood in July alone (and 80,082 tons in June). That’s a lot of trucks.
What about emissions? The latest operational update from GRU includes these graphs:
The biomass plant (DHR) produces 1.37 tons of CO2 per MWh, while DH1 (natural gas) produces 0.72, DH2 (coal) produces 0.94, and JRKCC1 (natural gas) produces 0.53. GRU is on track to emit 2.05 millions tons of CO2 in 2019.
Your materials should have a link or source to GRU showing that they have been derived from information provided by GRU, and are in the public domain, which anyone can confirm for themselves. I believe that is the case because I have seen such formats in the tables and graphs used by GRU, but, unfortunately, nothing so identifies the information is from GRU for comparison. If GRU did not supply the numbers, you should provide a citation for where the tables and graphs did come from.
The CO2 emitted by the trucks that are arriving, have their carbon footprints been added in? Since there is no mention of a truck contribution, I suspect not.
It is useful to provide how you generated the numbers that are compared and the logic of what is compared. The logic is to divide the tons of CO2 by the amount of electrical energy produced to get a proper comparison of the amount of CO2 per MWh from the table. The number of tons of CO2 generated is not a proper comparison because it does not include how long the electricity plant was operating. An MWh is a Mega Watt hour, which means that the electrical power generated, the number of Mega Watts, is common to all electrical generating plants as one hour of operation. Generating a ton of CO2 in a day is much worse than generating a ton of CO2 in a year, as most people can confirm for themselves.
A nit pick Typically, one should use the same number of digits after the decimal point to present comparisons of numbers like ones you’ve stated. Under this normal usage DH1’s number is 0.72, not 0.7, tons of CO2 per MWh, one uses standard rounding rules.
I added the link, as suggested, and changed the .7 to .72. Thanks.
Greta Thunberg is Watching Us. She says we don’t have time to regrow biomass to make up for what is being released now. With the Amazon forests and the rest of the world on fire, the carbon sink opportunities are disappearing faster than a smoker can extinguish a toxic vape.