State regulators to listen to 'green' firm eager to sell to Georgia Power
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution --Sep. 12
Sep. 12--Glenn Farris has the land, a plot next to a construction and demolition landfill in Forsyth County.
Farris also has a fuel supply -- it's sitting in that landfill -- for a plant
he doesn't have the money to build.
What he's missing is a customer, the kind that opens banks' pockets.
More specifically, he's missing a customer named Georgia Power.
Last week, Farris and his company, Biomass Gas & Electric, won a chance
to make an unusual case to the state Public Service Commission, against Georgia
Power.
Farris wants to build a clean power plant, fueled by renewable energy and
based on some of the hottest, most recognized new clean energy technology
around. He wants Georgia Power to be his customer. Georgia Power isn't
interested in his terms.
On Tuesday, the state PSC agreed to consider Farris' request that Georgia
Power be forced to buy electricity from his still-in-the-ether power plant, on
the grounds that it's good public policy.
Farris says his proposed power plant could move clean energy dreams forward
far faster -- and more cheaply -- than the Georgia Power green power program
launched in coordination with the PSC last year.
His single plant could provide four times as much clean, renewable power as
Georgia Power's entire program plans to buy under the current program.
And that's assuming Georgia Power gets its green power act together, which
hasn't happened to date.
With its program now entering its second year, Georgia Power has yet to sell,
or even locate, a single kilowatt-hour of green power. Georgia Power's program
essentially exists where Farris' nonexistent power plant does -- on paper.
On paper, Georgia Power and BG&E also appear made for each other. One
needs a buyer. The other needs a seller.
But Georgia Power doesn't want to sign a contract with Farris and BG&E.
The company says BG&E is trying to make its own rules, with a program that
doesn't fit existing state programs for encouraging the development of clean
power.
"What they're asking for," said Georgia Power spokesman John Sell,
"is special treatment."
Georgia Power also wants to see some hard numbers to back up BG&E's most
compelling claim -- that it can produce renewable energy that is not only
cleaner but as cheap or cheaper than traditionally produced power.
"That's his claim," said Sell of Farris. "He's never put up
any numbers, except these back-of-the-envelope kinds of numbers."
Farris said the PSC decision to hold hearings on his proposal will allow him
to put up those numbers. If his numbers don't hold up, Georgia Power should
welcome the chance to show that, he said. "I want to say to them, 'You keep
saying the facts are on your side. Well, I'll take my chances.'"
"If I were in the position they say they're in, I'd say, 'Bring it
on,'" he said.
Georgia Power isn't the only outfit opposing Farris.
Some would-be competitors, which have also tried and failed to sell green
power to Georgia Power, don't want to see the PSC step in and order a specific
purchase contract for Farris.
Unlike Georgia Power, though, they welcome the PSC's decision to hold
hearings on Farris' contract, said Gary Elliot, a consulting engineer with
International Applied Engineering, who has worked with Farris' competitors.
Although they don't want to see Farris walk away with his own
regulator-forced contract, they welcome a process that might expose what's been
holding up Georgia Power's green power program for so long, Elliot said.
The power plant Farris wants to build is a cutting-edge, new-technology
biomass plant.
Biomass is the cheapest source of renewable green energy, particularly in
states like Georgia with little likelihood of widely producing energy with wind.
Biomass plants use organic material like wood, grass or chicken droppings.
Farris wants to use wood from a construction and demolition landfill adjacent
to his proposed plant.
Wood-burning power plants are not new. Elliot, the Atlanta engineering
consultant, estimates there are more than 7,000 such plants around the country,
already providing power. They largely burn wood waste, like sawdust, bark and
wood chips. "It's the last stop before the dump," said Elliot.
A traditional wood-fired plant operates like a coal plant. Wood gets burned,
making steam and turning a turbine that creates power. Emissions are far cleaner
than those from a coal plant. Even traditional wood-fired plants produce
dramatically less of the emissions that create acid rain, haze, smog, mercury
contamination in lakes and fish, and global warming.
Farris' proposed plant would be even cleaner.
Farris' process produces a gas that can be burned in power plants. The gas
burns about half as efficiently as natural gas, which means plants would require
twice as much of it.
Even with that figured in, though, says Farris, the process creates power
more cheaply than burning clean but pricey natural gas. He says it's also
cheaper than cheap but dirty coal, once environmental compliance costs are
included -- although not all experts agree.
Farris' planned plant would produce 20 megawatts of power. It's not huge --
enough to power 20 Super Wal-Marts. But in the dollhouse scale of Georgia's
alternative energy world, it's a giant. Georgia Power's entire green power
program, if it ever gets off the ground, would add only five megawatts of green
power from all sources to the utility's portfolio of power supplies -- enough to
supply just five Super Wal-Marts.
The technology was developed with the help of the U.S. Department of Energy
and the Battelle Memorial Institute in Ohio, and piloted in Burlington, Vt.,
where it was considered a technological success story.
Commercial success is another story.
The company that first developed the technology, FERCO, filed for Chapter 11
bankruptcy in November 2002, and its assets were liquidated in March of last
year. According to Farris, that's because even ultra-green Vermont effectively
capped how much power the plant could sell to the local utility company.
Other observers speculate that the company's troubles began when federal
financial help ended, and private investors didn't pick up the slack. They say
the only "cap" on the plant's sales was the price of its energy, and
that the plant's output might not have been cheap enough to compete with power
from other sources, including a traditional wood-fired plant on the same site.
BG&E, formed with some of the same people who formed FERCO, acquired the
required patents, and had originally planned projects both here and in Indiana.
The company shelved its Indiana plans earlier this year, again because of a
shortfall in government assistance. That project relied on the continuing
existence of federal tax credits for renewable energy, said Farris. Those tax
credits expired in December. Legislation to renew the credits was part of the
federal energy bill that stalled out in Congress late last year.
BG&E's president concedes that Georgia may not be the most naturally
hospitable climate for his project.
It's not, for instance, among the 15 states that now require their utilities
to add a set percentage of renewable green power to their portfolios of power
supplies and spread the cost over all customers. Georgia's program is based on
demand. Only willing customers pay for it. The company's total megawatt goals
are so tiny because few customers are expected to participate in a program that
will nearly double their electric rates.
Farris says he wants to build here for two reasons. First, he's from here.
"I was born in downtown Atlanta."
And a successful, renewable power plant in a region with air as dirty as
Atlanta's, he said, has public relations and marketing value. It would help put
his company on the map.
Farris said he's negotiated with Georgia Power for months, trying to sell
power to the utility under the state's two existing alternative energy programs.
Whether Farris will prevail with the PSC remains to be seen. What has his
rivals salivating, though, is a chance for a public examination of how Georgia
Power is going about the business of finding -- or not finding -- acceptable
sources of green power.
Elliot, the Atlanta-based engineer, speculates that Georgia Power may cut a
deal with Farris simply to stop that discussion from happening.
A consultant for a number of projects that have vied for Georgia Power's
green business, Elliot said the utility is demanding unreasonably low prices
from suppliers. He said the utility is offering suppliers 2.5 to 3.5 cents per
kilowatt hour for energy that Georgia Power would then sell its own customers
for five times as much, through the premium-priced green program.
Although Elliot acknowledges that part of the difference will eventually help
pay for costlier green products, like solar power, he said Georgia Power's
insistent lowballing is keeping the program from starting up at all.
The PSC hearing isn't scheduled yet.
Georgia Power's Sell, meanwhile, has another suggestion for Farris.
If Farris doesn't want to tailor his product to the state's existing green
programs, and sell it in the amount Georgia Power will buy and a price Georgia
Power will pay, Farris should get in line with everybody else and bid to sell to
Georgia Power the old-fashioned way.
BG&E should bid against traditional, non-green suppliers, he said.
"If it's as cheap as he says it is, he'll win."
The problem: Georgia Power's in no hurry to buy new power from traditional
suppliers.
The company won't be buying power from new suppliers, in fact, until 2009.
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