Oct 15 - Athens Banner-Herald

Athens residents Beth and Gary Hedrick, along with more than 670 other Jackson Electric Membership Cooperative customers, pay a little extra on their monthly power bill to boost renewable energy use, research and education.

The additional payment supports Green Power EMC, a nonprofit corporation that Jackson EMC and more than 30 other member-owned electric cooperatives around the state have joined to develop and expand sources of clean energy.

The program allows EMC customers to pay a little extra to cover costs of electric power generated by alternative energy sources such as methane gas from landfills, low-impact hydroelectric dams and solar panels at schools.

"I'd love to find some way to support green power in a meaningful way, and this sounds like a pretty good way to encourage a move toward renewable energy," Beth Hedrick said. "This is one way to offset some of the carbon pollution I create every day commuting to work and taking plane trips." Green Power EMC, billed as the first renewable energy program in Georgia, has grown to be one of the largest such programs in the Southeast, said Katrice Bryant, a public relations executive with Jackson EMC.

"Green power has generated over 112 million kilowatt hours (based on July figures) since everything went on line a little over three years ago," Bryant said.

That amount of renewable energy equates to taking 100,000 cars off the road or planting 135,000 trees, the Green Power EMC Web site states.

EMC customers pay $4.50 extra for a block of 150 kilowatt hours of renewable energy, which is used to offset the total amount of electric power used by the EMC network, said Alan Shedd, an engineer with Jackson EMC's commercial and industrial marketing program.

In other words, a particular Jackson EMC customer won't necessarily have 150 kilowatts of green power sent to his or her home.

"You're paying for putting electricity in the grid from green power in one location, but it's all going in to fill up the tank, so to speak," Shedd said. "Green power is displacing power that would have come from a nonrenewable source." That arrangement is fine with Hedrick, who said she simply wants to do what she can to support renewable energy.

"I don't care whether it goes into my house, but I want (Jackson EMC) to have the ability to invest in this because I know it takes lots of money, and I think it's important." "We've got to invest to get (to) the point where it's not expensive," Hedrick said.

Still, less than 1 percent of Jackson EMC's 167,000 customers in a 10-county area in Northeast Georgia participate in the program, partly because limited sources of renewable energy mean the EMCs only can sell an allotted number of power blocks.

The 35 EMCs that comprise Green Power EMC serve 3 million customers, but EMC officials have not seen the numbers they expected in overall enrollment, said Terri Statham, media relations coordinator with Georgia EMC, the statewide trade organization representing the EMCs.

"Each EMC tracks its own numbers, so there is no collective number for the total number of people participating in Green Power," Statham said. "It's been a little disappointing in terms of enrollment numbers." Customers initially indicated strong interest in the program when it was first announced, but when enrollment began, EMCs reported that fewer customers than expected signed up, Statham said. She guessed that about 1 percent of all the EMC customers eligible for the Green Power program have signed on.

The majority of the green power in the EMC program comes from two "biomass" stations that convert methane gas from landfills to electricity.

"Landfill gas, which provides most of our renewable electricity, is a great source, a constant supply," Shedd said. "That garbage is rotting 24?7." The two biomass sites, one in Taylor County and one in Fayette County, have generated more than 106 million kilowatt hours of electricity since coming on line in 2003. The two sites generate a combined 5 million megawatts of power, enough to cover 3,000 homes.

Other renewable energy sources are less predictable, Shedd said.

The Tallassee Shoals low-impact hydroelectric dam located on the Middle Oconee River near the border of Jackson and Clarke counties, accounts for about 6 million kilowatt hours produced since it became operational in 2005.

Low-impact hydropower uses turbine systems installed on small rivers and streams and have less environmental effects than larger dams.

The Tallassee Shoals Hydroelectric Project produces 2.3 megawatts of power, and Green Power EMC purchases the electricity from the project's owner. Fall Line Hydro Co. Inc. owns and operates the small power generating facility, which is licensed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Certified by the Low Impact Hydro Institute, the Tallassee Shoals power plant met certification criteria covering areas such as river flows, water quality, fish passage and protection, watershed protection and several other categories involving environmental impact.

The hydropower generators are subject to the river's flow, however, and the recent drought has curtailed power generation at the Tallassee Shoals facility, said Bob Davis, project manager with Lawrenceville-based Fall Line Hydro. Davis said his company uses the time when the generator is not operational to conduct maintenance on the facility and equipment.

If the Middle Oconee River had good stream flow all year, the Tallassee Shoals plant could produce about 7.5 million kilowatt hours of energy, Davis said.

The Tallassee Shoals dam and power generator are located on the site where another dam and power facility generated power for Athens and its street trolleys in the early 1900s, Davis said.

Hydro and biomass power represent Green Power EMC's current renewable energy sources, but sometime next year the corporation expects to begin buying power from Earth Resources Inc., a Franklin County operation that will burn chicken litter and wood scraps to produce 20 megawatts of electricity a year through steam-driven turbines.

A little more than two years ago, Green Power EMC began testing the potential for using wind power. Renewable Generation Inc. installed a wind assessment tower on top of Oglethorpe Power Corp.'s Rocky Mountain Pumped Storage Hydroelectric Plant in Floyd County.

The tower has been collecting data on wind currents.

Another Green Power initiative in which data is collected related to power usage is the Sun Power for Schools program. EMCs installed solar voltaic cell panels at selected middle and high schools for students to learn about solar energy, Shedd said. Fourteen schools are participating, including Mill Creek High School in Hoschton and Oconee County High School.

A seven-panel solar grid is connected to a school's electrical system and produces about 1 kilowatt of electricity when the sun is bright, Shedd said.

By comparison, a house needs four to six times that energy level.

The real advantage to the Sun Power for Schools program, however, is the information available through the system, Shedd said.

The system is equipped to monitor data about how much energy is being generated, and the information is available online.

"We can gather data from our solar voltaic cells but also from around the world to compare the efficiency of our cells to that of others," said Suzanne Roginski, an advanced placement biology teacher at Mill Creek.

Mill Creek's panel, in use since January 2006, is between 7 percent and 10 percent efficient, and can generate enough energy to power a refrigerator, Roginski said.

The Internet availability of the data means a school does not have to have the panels on its campus to take advantage of the educational material, Roginski said.

Using the solar voltaic cell system also inspired part of the students' final exam, which required them to conduct an energy audit of their homes and figure out how much power their families used, Roginski said.

"They had to figure out how large a cell they would need to offset the traditional energy they used," she said.

The online data also tells how much carbon dioxide the school avoided using because of the solar energy.

"We have reduced a significant amount of carbon dioxide, so it shows that every little bit does make a difference," Roginski said.

At Oconee County High, which has not had its solar panel as long as Mill Creek, science teacher Vicki Soutar said she plans to incorporate the solar cells as part of a meteorology study to see how cloudy days and seasonal changes affect the power generation.

"The (solar power panel) is mainly a device for students and teachers to test their hypotheses about things such as how the input from the panel would vary with season, etc.," Soutar wrote in an e-mail.

"The objective is to teach how the systems work and to see how each differs," Shedd said. "More importantly, it's helping to educate a generation of consumers." Meanwhile, EMC customers are helping fund Sun Power for Schools through that extra $4.50 a month. The fee breaks down to about 3 cents per kilowatt, and half a cent for each kilowatt is spent on research and development of renewable energy, including the Sun Power for Schools program, Shedd said.

The other 2 1/2 cents per kilowatt covers operational costs for producing the green power.

When the Green Power program began, Jackson EMC's involvement in the initiative thrilled Hedrick, who thought the relative small size of the cooperative would prevent it from offering renewable energy sources.

"I was really excited, because I had no idea Jackson EMC would be able to do something like that," Hedrick said.

Hedrick also liked the idea of Green Power's plan to buy power produced by burning chicken waste.

"What better way to (generate power) here in Georgia than with a chicken manure plant... it solves two problems at once," Hedrick said. "That's definitely renewable."

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