Editorial to the North Lake Tahoe Bonanza

A recently written piece to the Bonanza by David McClure.

Basin Biomass Plant Examined
Placer County proposes to construct a Biomass power plant in Kings Beach. Their reasons are as follows: it’s a cleaner option than open burning, it reduces transportation costs (compared to locations outside the Basin), and furthers California’s goals of using renewable, green energy.
How can such reasons justify the combustion of 25-75 tons of woody biomass daily (1MW to 3MW) in the Lake Tahoe Basin? Some material would originate outside the Tahoe Basin, and trucked in and burned next to an Outstanding National Resource Water. Closer examination of the context for each reason reveals the faulty logic and half truths.
Controlled combustion emits less air pollution than open burning. Obviously. (TRPA banned open fireplaces in new construction years ago and placed restrictions to change out old woodstoves with new ones that meet Phase II emission requirements.) To assume this fact justifies a combustion power plant in the Basin ignores the comparison of duration and location of the two combustion options.
Do prescribed burns at Tahoe occur 24/7 at the same location for thirty years (the life of a Biomass incinerator)? A biomass plant, by definition, is stationary and burns constantly year round. Open burning is seasonal, lasts only for a matter of days, and occurs at sporadic locations around the Basin. Open burning is permitted only under favorable meteorological conditions. The Forest Service admits that prescribed burns will likely continue on slopes greater than 30% and for ecological purposes.
The choice is not between open burning versus controlled incineration in the Tahoe Basin. It’s between open burning and the harvesting (cutting, collection, chipping, transporting, and drying ) of forest material into a usable fuel. Open burning is the least expensive way to remove forest debris, whereas harvesting forest debris from fuels reduction (thinning) is very expensive and must be heavily subsidized. The current market for fuel grade biomass is about $30-50 per dry ton, while the cost of harvesting is four to seven times greater.
Biomass plants are viable when utilizing a ready-to-burn waste product such as from a sawmill. Logging operations may pile tree tops and branches for later utilization, but log sales revenue carries this cost. Forest thinning for fire fuels reduction is a costly process, dependent on public funds to carry the work in the forest along with the costs of conversion to fuel.
In general, transportation costs can be a significant portion of biomass conversion costs, but the proposed Kings Beach power plant has a different context. In the North and West shore areas of the Basin green material must first be transported to Cabin Creek (Eastern Regional Landfill) on Hwy 89 a few miles south of Truckee, well outside the Tahoe Basin. There the material has historically been stored, dried, and processed. About half the weight of green material is water, so a 25 ton van load contains only 13 tons of “Bone Dry” ready-to-burn fuel. A biomass plant at Cabin Creek would eliminate any further transportation costs.
If no plant is built at Cabin Creek the choice is to either continue hauling the final product 42 miles to the existing Loyalton Biomass plant (as Placer County has done for 16 years), or haul the material 17 miles back into the Tahoe Basin for burning in Kings Beach. The difference of 25 miles bears little on the cost of transportation for a 25 ton load of ready-to-burn fuel.