Wendy Ring, Guest Contributor
If you read EcoNews there’s a pretty good chance you belong to the Humboldt Coalition for Clean Energy. The coalition is a consortium of 16 local faith, environmental, health, political, and women’s organizations and two statewide physician and nursing organizations which have joined forces to get Redwood Coast Energy Authority to keep its promise to provide 100 percent clean energy by 2025 and remove biomass from its renewable portfolio. This would free up $60,000,000 for RCEA to spend on new clean energy over the next 10 years.
Forty percent of RCEA’s renewable energy and one of every 5 megawatt hours provided to customers comes from an aging biomass plant in Scotia which is the county’s largest stationary emitter of air pollution and greenhouse gas. RCEA’s power content label claims 49 pounds of CO2 per megawatt hour for its default energy mix. This does not include the more than 5000 pounds of CO2e per megawatt hour generated at the biomass plant since biomass carbon is counted in the forestry, not the energy, sector. If all the greenhouse gas emissions that warm the planet over the next few decades were included in RCEA’s label, customers would see a carbon intensity 20 times higher than currently reported and significantly higher than the power provided by PG&E. Switching to RCEA’s biomass free Repower Plus plan doesn’t change this because the amount of biomass energy RCEA buys is fixed by a contract that runs until mid-2031.
Ordinarily, we’d be stuck heating the planet for the next seven years, but the biomass plant’s multiple Clean Air and Water Act violations and a provision in RCEA’s contract allowing termination for that reason presents a chance for RCEA to clean up its dirty renewable portfolio.
The biomass plant has a pollution problem. Even though the EPA allows biomass plants to emit more pollution than coal plants, the Scotia plant has not been able to keep within those liberal limits. In its 7 years under contract with RCEA, Humboldt Sawmill has been cited with nearly 300 violations of the Clean Air Act. Humboldt’s other power plant, the PGE gas plant has zero violations for the same period, and none of the six biomass plants in Shasta County have anywhere near the number of violations as the plant in Scotia.
While researching Clean Air Act violations it also became apparent that the air district has not been fully enforcing state and federal rules at the biomass plant. One example is the failure to require annual performance testing of pollution monitors, which led to high levels of particulate emissions from broken pollution control equipment going undetected, possibly for as long as 2 years. Another is the failure to do state mandated evaluations of community health risk from the plant’s air toxics.
A third example of the air district bending the rules for the plant, going on right now, is allowing the plant to operate without a permit when it doesn’t qualify to do so. . The Clean Air Act and the district’s own rules only allow a facility to keep operating after its permit expires, if it has submitted a “timely and complete” renewal application, with “timely” defined as no less than 6 months before the expiration. The biomass plant submitted its renewal application 4 months late but when their permit expired in July, but the air district allowed them to keep operating. The air district’s Air Pollution Control Officer, Brian Wilson, says he can exercise discretion and doesn’t have to enforce every aspect of the Clean Air Act. We consulted Will Brieger, former attorney for Cal EPA and the California Air Resource Board, and he has a different opinion. “It is crystal clear under District Rule 502 (b)(1) and the CFR that 6 months is the minimum lead time for the application. Any interpretation that says 2 months is OK… is an abuse of discretion and a clear violation of law.”
All of these violations give RCEA the ability to end its contract with the biomass plant by 2025, but consideration of this option has never been on the RCEA board’s agenda. When the Humboldt Coalition for Clean Energy approached the City of Arcata to ask their RCEA representative to introduce such a resolution, Wilson spoke to the city council, characterizing the plant’s nearly 300 violations as “parking tickets, not DUI’s”, ignoring the obvious difference between parking, which doesn’t cause bodily harm, and inhaling particulates and air toxics, which does. Wilson also failed to mention that the district recently submitted more than one hundred High Priority Violations (HPV) to the EPA. An HPV is EPA’s version of a DUI.
Arcata City Council members also heard from Arcata’s Forest Management Committee that withdrawing RCEA funding from the biomass plant would increase the risk of forest fires, a puzzling claim, since only three percent of the biomass plant’s fuel comes from fuel reduction.
Richard Engels, RCEA’s Director of Energy Procurement spoke about the advantageous price of the biomass in the contract. This price does not include externalized costs, like the 7-8 ER visits per month for respiratory conditions from residents of Rio Dell and Scotia, or the loss of life predicted by EPA modeling of the impact of the plant’s emissions. Engels told the council that the plant would not shut down if RCEA dropped the contract, since others would be eager to buy its power. Perhaps confounded by these conflicting assertions, the council decided to take no action.
What all these carbon emissions, Clean Air Act violations and health costs make clear is that biomass is not clean energy. RCEA cannot meet its commitment for 100% clean energy in 2025 with biomass still in its portfolio. Nor can it hide behind a poorly functioning air district and obsolete carbon accounting methods to escape responsibility for spending ratepayers’ renewable energy dollars on a major air and climate polluter.
Keeping its promises to the community and terminating RCEA’s biomass contract will not immediately shut down the biomass plant but it will free up millions of our dollars to invest in clean energy and build the movement for climate and environmental justice. The reputational damage to Humboldt Sawmill Company as an environmental law breaker, will lower the price it can get for its dirty power and hasten the day its multi billionaire owners invest in cleaner uses for their mill waste.
The Coalition is holding online workshops to educate community members and prepare them to speak out at RCEA meetings. Interested people can sign up online at our website humboldtcleanenergy.org