Until the fall of last year, the biomass industry seemed to be on a fast track in Massachusetts.
The Patrick administration was bullish on biomass, promoting it as one of a number of promising alternative energy sources, encouraging the development of biomass plants within a broader effort to ignite a renewable energy industry in Massachusetts that responds to the challenges of global warming and U.S. dependence on foreign oil while creating lots of “green” jobs.
Then, in November, the state Department of Energy Resources (DOER) signaled a potentially dramatic change in the administration’s disposition toward biomass: the state was bringing in an environmental consultant, the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, to complete a “six-month study” of biomass energy. The thrust of the questions Manomet would answer: Is biomass—specifically, power produced from burning wood (and, in some cases, construction and demolition debris)—renewable, sustainable and carbon-neutral?
On December 3, 2009—a few weeks after DOER commissioned the Manomet study—the state called a time-out, formally suspending the review and permitting of proposed biomass power plants for approximately one year to allow time for the Manomet report and, as state Energy Commissioner Phillip Giudice put it, “subsequent regulatory processes to conclude.” The “subsequent regulatory processes” would likely focus on the issue of state financial incentives—subsidies in the form of renewable energy credits—for biomass plants, depending on Manomet’s findings.
As Ian Bowles, Secretary of the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, observed in a recent interview with the Advocate, “biomass has been designated [by the state] as renewable since 1997.”
Thirteen years after the state codified biomass as renewable, however, with several proposed biomass plants in the pipeline, including several slated for locations in the Pioneer Valley, Bowles and his boss, Gov. Deval Patrick, effectively set in motion a process that could deliver a serious blow to an industry they have consistently promoted.
The Manomet study is due to be released in the next few weeks. Whatever its findings, the fact that it was commissioned at all has changed the nature of the debate over biomass. Prior to last November, the public might have seen any questions about the environmental efficacy of biomass as de facto resolved, given its designation as renewable by the state. In hiring Manomet, the Patrick administration tacitly acknowledged that it didn’t have enough science to support its policies in favor of biomass.
The commissioning of the Manomet study also served, if only temporarily, to quiet some of the strong public opposition that had mounted steadily throughout most of 2009. Initially, the state’s sudden about-face gave biomass opponents a lot to talk about. Some opponents cheered the decision to hire Manomet, viewing it as a change of heart by the Patrick administration and an acknowledgement of public criticism; others sneered, calling the move to Manomet tactical, a way to buy some time and change the conversation. Some opponents even expressed doubt about the impartiality of Manomet, which they said was biased in favor of biomass.
But by early 2010, the opponents and proponents alike found themselves in a holding pattern, waiting for a team of scientists to weigh in.
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In an interview with the Advocate last month, Ian Bowles pointed out that a number of states have been quicker than Massachusetts to embrace biomass as an alternative means of making electric power. The Patrick administration, during much of the governor’s first term in office, has attempted to prod the state to the forefront of the movement toward renewable, “green” energy.
“Other states began looking ahead more than a decade ago, diversifying away from fossil fuels,” Bowles said, adding, “Biomass hasn’t been that controversial in other states.”
Yet biomass has become very controversial in Massachusetts in recent years and the issue remains charged, particularly in Western Mass., where five wood-burning power plants are currently seeking permission to operate.
Public opposition to the proposed plants—as individual projects and as part of a broader policy to push for and subsidize the development of alternative energy plants—has come from many directions, based on a variety of concerns. Building on several years of organized opposition to Russell Biomass, the first of the proposed companies to begin seeking permits, a loosely tied coalition of grassroots activists against biomass swelled quickly in ranks last year, turning out big numbers for protests and petition drives, pressing the case that biomass is not, as its proponents claim, sustainable.
Alexandra Dawson, a longtime activist in the Valley who writes a column on environmental issues for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, said that she’d never seen an environmental cause draw so many people so quickly into the fight.
“It was a genuine grassroots movement,” Dawson said in an interview in February. “They popped up out of nowhere, people who for one reason or another—air pollution and asthma, the impact on forests, the questions of carbon neutrality and sustainability—just didn’t think the case for biomass added up.”
For Dawson, there was little doubt that the strong public opposition forced the Patrick administration to at least slow down what many biomass opponents saw as a headlong rush to embrace wood burning as a green energy alternative. Dawson isn’t alone in that view.
State Rep. Stephen Kulik (D-Worthington) called the public opposition “a wake-up call” for Patrick and Bowles. Kulik criticized the governor and his secretary of energy and environment for not responding sooner to growing public concern about the proliferation of newly proposed power plants, particularly in the Valley.
“I haven’t seen a balanced energy plan from Deval Patrick or Ian Bowles,” Kulik said. “They seem to be shortchanging the value of conservation in addressing problems like global warming and foreign oil. They’ve focused too much on ways to make more [power] and not enough on ways to use less.” The Manomet study, Kulik added, represents an effort by the Patrick administration to rebuild credibility among voters who find its policies friendlier to power merchants than to the environment.
Rebuilding credibility will be next to impossible, Dawson said, no matter what the Manomet study says. Rather than Manomet, which Dawson said “comes with a good reputation,” reflecting well on Patrick and Bowles, she said the governor and his secretary of energy and environment may reflect poorly on Manomet, raising suspicions about the consultancy among environmental activists who no longer trust the administration. Patrick’s and Bowles’ boosterism, Dawson said, “poisoned the entire discussion about biomass. Now people don’t know who or what to trust.”
Chris Matera of Massachusetts Forest Watch has been one of the harshest critics of the Patrick administration’s energy and environmental agenda, particularly its support of biomass and of more aggressive logging in public and private forests. Matera has said he believes the state has tailored its logging policies to increase the supply of wood for biomass—in effect, risking oxygen-producing forests for a kind of power whose green bona fides are in serious question. When the state announced its decision to bring in Manomet and suspend its consideration of proposed biomass plants, Matera responded skeptically.
“We do not believe the Manomet study is credible,” Matera wrote in an email to the Advocate on Dec. 24, 2009, “and is just ‘shuck and jive’ until after the [2010] election&” Matera, who attended Manomet’s public meeting in Holyoke to kick off its study in mid-December, objected to the way Manomet was approaching the question of biomass. “The study,” he said, “has been framed as ‘how much’ to ‘sustainably’ burn rather than examining the wisdom of increased cutting and burning forests.”
Matera also questioned Manomet’s supposed impartiality: “The study is being performed by folks with a vested interest in biomass.” He said that three consultant groups that would contribute to the study—the Pinchot Institute, the Forest Guild and the Biomass Energy Resource Center—are all proponents of biomass. Matera also warned that Manomet had ties to Roger Milliken, Jr., who chairs the advisory board of the Manomet Forest Conservation Program and serves as CEO of one of Maine’s biggest timber companies.
“Even if burning forests was ‘sustainable,’ which it isn’t in the true sense of the word, that still wouldn’t make it a good idea,” Matera concluded. “At a time of polluted skies, a carbon overloaded atmosphere and stressed forests, it is pure folly to force taxpayers to subsidize more cutting and burning of forests.”
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Ian Bowles says the public input on biomass has been helpful, but it wasn’t what caused the administration to call on Manomet. The question of sustainability would have been taken up anyway as DOER “prepared new regulations to establish sustainability criteria biomass facilities must meet under the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standards.”
And why did it take the state more than a decade before it sought to verify claims that biomass was renewable?
“No one brought up the issue of sustainability,” Bowles said, echoing a similar comment from Mass. Audubon Senior Policy Analyst Heidi Ricci, whose organization didn’t raise serious concerns about biomass until after the state suspended consideration of biomass. (The sustainability issue, Ricci said, “wasn’t on anybody’s radar.”) As Bowles worked to advance the cause of renewable energy, he said, “the question of biomass and sustainability wasn’t seriously debated.”
Bowles concluded his Advocate interview by flatly dismissing assertions, like Matera’s, that the Manomet study is more about political tactics than credible science: “In terms of the allegation that [the Manomet study] is some kind of sham exercise, I’d say that’s absolutely not true.”
For John Hagan, the president of Manomet, the concerns raised about his firm’s credibility “come with the territory.” He said that he understands and respects the efforts of anti-biomass activists to keep a watchful eye on the process. “We’re going to get the brunt of criticism, but it doesn’t have anything to do with us,” Hagan said. “We’re scientists who are dedicated to conservation, not industry. That’s true of Pinchot and the Forest Guild. BERC (the Biomass Energy Resource Center) may be most questionable [of those helping Manomet with its study], but they don’t push biomass; they help communities that want biomass.”
Hagan warned that “the world has gotten really complicated and interconnected—you move one piece and the rest move.” As a result, the old model of environmentalism, in which activists generally pitted themselves against any kind of industrial development, is giving way to what he called “Third Generation environmentalism.” In the new paradigm, old stereotypes—that all logging executives are out to rape the woods, for example—must be challenged.
Hagan pointed to Roger Milliken, the timber company executive from Maine who inspired distrust among some anti-biomass activists. In addition to running the Baskahegan Company, which logs more than 100,000 acres of forestland in eastern Maine, Milliken serves as chairman of the Nature Conservancy, a global conservation organization.
“As much as I understand why advocates might be suspicious, I think they’re missing how important it is to have someone like Roger involved,” Hagan said. “If we all had Roger Milliken’s environmental record, we wouldn’t have a climate change problem.”
Whatever opinion he might have about Milliken or any of the other players, Hagan continued, Manomet would stick to the science and leave the politics to others. “No, we don’t have a biomass bias,” he said. “We’re neither for nor against biomass. We’re neutral.”
