2010 Nov. 16: FL Gainesville: Biomass plant to use ancient technology

Posted: Tuesday, November 16, 2010 12:02 am

Tommy Maple, Alligator Columnist | 2 comments

Just like they do with old newspapers and aluminum cans, Gainesville residents should start to recycle their logic into something more eco-friendly.
Maybe everyone who opposes the idea of burning wood to help save the environment can turn their old, venerated logic into GreenSpeak we can use to fertilize local gardens.

Turning facts into fertilizer is almost as eco-friendly as burning wood to clean the air.
The production of thousands of metric tons of Gainesville GreenSpeak holds as much promise as the biomass power plant, and it will cost hundreds of millions of dollars less than planning a way to power the future using caveman technology.
Local politicians and the leadership at Gainesville Regional Utilities have already been working on the widespread production of all the GreenSpeak they can reasonably spew forth, setting an excellent example for the rest of us.
GRU leased 131 acres and the operation of a taxpayer-built billion dollar wood-burning power plant to a private company from the Northeast at the bargain-basement price of $100 a year.
In the contract our local politicians approved, most of the details were blacked out, getting rid of all that messy “accountability” stuff GRU is always trying to sidestep.
Even the rosiest estimates have our utility rates skyrocketing once we build this.
The only way this won’t be the single worst financial decision Gainesville has ever made will be if federal regulations change in the future to punish coal-burning power plants.
The GreenSpeak coming from our elected officials, though, is all the information we will need in order to make a sound decision.
Pumping an average of 1.4 million gallons a day from the Lower Santa Fe River for the plant’s cooling tower is fine. We have an ironclad promise that “some” of the water used will be reclaimed water after seven years or so.
Having 130 diesel trucks barreling down the road every day an average of 52 miles away (and back) filled with tons of wood is actually the most sustainable thing we could do.
Since we are relying on Stone Age technology, anyway, maybe we can equip all the trucks with Flintstones-style foot brakes.
The air around town will be full of particulates and other toxic crap, but who doesn’t love the nostalgic and woodsy smell of a campfire?
Plenty of jobs will be created from the hundreds of workers emptying forest floors to the small armada of public relations flacks we’ll need in order to keep convincing everyone a power plant built in the 21st century should use technology developed when the woolly mammoth was still around.
The options for clean energy are all imperfect in their own way, and we all have to do our part to conserve and simply live differently in order to construct a cleaner future.
Tommy Maple is an international communications graduate student. His column appears every Tuesday.