Critics of large, utility-scale solar power plants like the one that recently landed a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) loan guarantee in southern Colorado say the feds need to better vet energy technology before putting so many taxpayer dollars on the line.

“There’s tremendous speculative energy driving new solar technologies,” Ceal Smith of the Alamosa-based Renewable Communities Alliance told the Colorado Independent in reaction to a $90 million loan guarantee for the 30-megawatt Alamosa Solar Generating Project.

“DOE does need to do a better job of assessing renewable energy technologies and business models rather than succumbing to the Wall Street bubble machine that often drives fancy, expensive behemoths — like Stirling dish, parabolic trough and power tower technologies — that have little to no chance of competing on its own,” Smith added. “If a technology is big with a lot of moving parts, be suspicious.”

The DOE is getting heat of late for loan guarantees made to failed Silicon Valley-based solar panel maker Solyndra, including from Colorado U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Denver.

On Friday, the DOE announced a $90.6 million loan guarantee to Cogentrix of Alamosa, LLC, for the Alamosa Solar Generating Project, a 30-megawatt High Concentration Photovoltaic (HCPV) power generation facility.

The DOE, in a press release, touted the project as “one of the first utility-scale, high concentration photovoltaic energy generation facilities in the nation and, when completed, the largest of its kind in the world. Cogentrix estimates the project will support up to 100 construction jobs.”

Xcel Energy will buy the power from the new facility – expected to generate enough energy per year to power 6,500 homes – for the next 20 years. Xcel and Tri-State Generation and Transmission are embroiled in controversial efforts to increase power line transmission between the San Luis Valley surrounding Alamosa and Colorado’s Front Range.

“On Thursday, President Obama spoke about the need to continue creating the jobs of the future,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said last week, referring to Obama’s jobs speech. “And that’s exactly what today’s [Alamosa solar] investment does – putting Americans to work right away and helping position us to win the global race for the clean energy industries of tomorrow.”

Smith, however, is a proponent of more distributed, roof-top solar projects.

“In the case of Cogentrix, taxpayers will pay $3 million a megawatt for remotely generated solar energy that will incur 8 to 15 percent transmission losses between Alamosa and the point of use and create very few jobs,” Smith said. “Compare that to ‘Project Amp’ that will cost taxpayers $2 million a megawatt of onsite distributed electricity and generate more than 10,000 new green jobs in 28 states. Which is the better deal for the American people?”

Cogentrix recently saw many of its claims to develop solar facilities in the Nevada desert rejected by federal officials.

Photo: Bob Spencer

Co-sponsored by Republican U.S. Sen. James Risch of Idaho — whose state also has been hit hard by the rice-sized bugs — the National Forest Insect and Disease Emergency Act would provide tax and other incentives for companies harvesting beetle-killed dead trees for biofuel or biopower.

“[The bill] pays people to use biofuels in productive ways, which is already allowed in the Farm Act, and then those biofuels can be credited under the Clean Air Act, interestingly enough,” Udall said in a conference call with reporters Monday. “The biofuel credit is not being used to the extent it could be right now. That would be an important development for the Forest Service as they encourage potential harvesters who would want to turn that biomass into biofuel.”

Calling the epidemic that has killed millions of acres of lodgepole pines across the state “one of the biggest natural disasters we face in the West,” Udall outlined a bill that doesn’t inject much cash into the equation but instead aims to provide public land managers with better regulatory tools for dealing with the pine beetle fallout.

The bill would authorize creation of “insect emergency areas” that the Forest Service can prioritize for treatment to reduce fuel loads and therefore fire risks; expedite environmental analysis by encouraging use of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act; expand throughout the West the “good neighbor authority” used in Colorado and Utah to treat public lands adjacent to private property and homes; and provide some funding for stewardship contracts to clear out beetle kill.

Foresters and other user groups such as ski resorts trying to cope with the decade-old outbreak have for years complained that rules dictating timber sales have hampered thinning efforts near mountain towns and other tourist attractions, putting key segments of the state’s economy at risk of catastrophic wildfires. Time-consuming environmental analysis requirements and the price per tree for harvesting low-value beetle kill have made widespread thinning difficult, they claim.

But environmentalists don’t want to see longstanding environmental review policies tossed aside so quickly, particularly given the ongoing debate about the effectiveness of thinning efforts deep into forests. While they agree with aggressive thinning and clearing dead trees near communities — the so-called Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) — conservationists say there isn’t much benefit in working too deeply into the national forests.

“My belief has always been that when you put the right policies in place and you make the right policy proposals, the politics follow along appropriately,” Udall said. “There is a public safety concern here, there is an economic concern, there’s also an environmental concern, and they’re all linked together.”

Udall talked about the state’s largest wildfire in 2002, the Hayman blaze, which consumed more than 138,000 acres of national forest near the Front Range. That fire caused erosion that adversely impacted Denver’s drinking water supplies. He also acknowledged the threat to hundreds of miles of power lines crisscrossing federal lands hit hard by beetles.

Biopower advocates have long argued that existing technology widely used in Europe and increasingly in other parts of the United States would allow companies to chip up dead trees no longer suitable for commercial lumber, gasify the chips at high heat and convert the biomass into heat or electricity.

The process is virtually carbon-neutral when factoring in decomposition if the trees are left to rot or wildfire if they’re left to burn. Stewardship contracts are viewed as key in providing long-term feedstock. Udall has sent a letter of support to the Department of Energy for a biomass power plant Vail is seeking a grant to build.

But on Monday Udall talked about converting beetle-kill trees, which are already being turned into pellets for wood stoves in Kremmling, into other forms of biofuel.

“There’s been a lot of conversations among a lot of us about how do you create markets for this potential biofuel,” he said. “You can only make so many fence posts and so many pencils and so many bark-beetle belt buckles.

“And when you put into the mix that much of this timber is not particularly well-suited for middle- or even high-end lumber markets, then there’s a natural inclination to consider whether, with the new technologies we have, could you turn this biomass into biofuels, particularly ethanols. And the Farm Act, the Ag Credit Act and the Clean Air Act all provide opportunities to provide additional incentives to see if this is a real and sustainable operation or economic activity.”

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Beetle kill pines against power lines (U.S. Rep. John Salazar)

The largest power outage in North American history left more than 50 million people in the Midwest and Northeastern United States, as well as parts of Canada, without electricity for up to two days beginning on Aug. 14, 2003. It’s estimated the blackout cost up to $6 billion and at least 11 lives.

And it all started with untrimmed trees coming into contact with a power line in rural Ohio.

Conditions are more than ripe for a repeat in Colorado, where officials say hundreds of miles of major transmission and distribution lines crisscross devastated national forest land on their way to supplying the power needs of Front Range communities.

“Most of the major transmission lines for the Front Range cross the Continental Divide,” said Cal Wettstein, commander of the U.S. Forest Service’s Bark Beetle Incident Management Team. “There are three or four big, main lines and the majority of them go through some kind of beetle kill, so that’s the big concern.”

A fire the size of the 2002 Hayman blaze — the largest in Colorado history at about 138,000 acres — could take out a number of key transmission or distribution lines. Or a beetle-killed tree could easily topple onto a line, causing it to either arc and set fire to the surrounding forest or set off a domino effect that would overload line after line, which is what happened with the Northeast Blackout.

“There are a number of concerns, but the first one is the trees contacting the lines and actually knocking out the grid. Then there’s the fire aspect,” Wettstein said. “And fire going both ways — starting from a power line and then the effects on the power lines of a wildfire that starts somewhere else.”

Heading off disaster

The Forest Service just finished taking public comment on its Emergency Power Line Clearing Project, which would allow up to 15 different utilities and power companies to clear trees from swaths of national forest land surrounding 625 miles of power lines (.pdf) on the White River, Roosevelt and Medicine Bow-Routt national forests.

Wettstein said the Forest Service is allowed to expedite the decision-making process under the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003, and that utilities are compelled to pay for and undertake clearing of hazard trees under the Energy Policy Act of 2005. That legislation was in direct response to the Northeast Blackout.

The Forest Service hopes to wrap up the National Environmental Policy Act process on the project by January so utilities can start clearing next summer.

But there are some critics of the proposal. Wettstein said the two biggest concerns coming out of the public scoping process were the width of the treatment areas (up to 400 feet for major lines) and the impacts on roadless areas (75 of the 625 miles are in designated roadless areas).

If it’s not economically viable to remove downed timber, power companies can simply masticate (cut up into small amounts) trees and spread them across the forest floor so they’re no longer a threat to the lines and present less of a fire hazard.

Such an approach wastes a valuable forest product, some experts say, and fails to recognize the potentially harmful carbon-dioxide emissions from rotting trees, as well as the CO2 potential form forest fires.

A green approach

Phil Kastelic, CEO of Colorado Forest and Energy, a company that distributes portable bio-energy machines that produce virtually carbon neutral power and heat by gasifying chipped wood, says Littleton-based Community Power Corporation’s BioMax systems should be part of the plan.

“Our BioMax technology could be installed in local communities close to power line clearing efforts or installed along the transmission and distribution lines plugging in parallel directly into the grid,” Kastelic wrote in a comment letter to the Forest Service. “This transforms a dangerous and expensive problem into a leading renewable story, highlighting Colorado technology.”

Kastelic suggests certain incentives be included in the plan to discourage utilities from leaving too much slash and too many fallen trees along the miles and miles of power lines. Renewable energy credits could be offered for the power that’s produced, and utilities could set up community drop zones so wood could be collected, chipped and consumed in bio-power generators.

Large-scale, multi-megawatt biomass power plants are common in Europe where forest products are cultivated to provide a consistent fuel load, and similar facilities are operating in the United States or have been proposed in Colorado. But portable 50- and 100-kilowatt systems about the size of tractor trailers have yet to catch on commercially in Colorado despite the beetle-kill epidemic.

Recognizing a renewable energy

Democratic State Rep. Christine Scanlan of Dillon, whose legislative district includes beetle devastated Summit and Eagle counties, said she’s talked to biomass companies, pellet producers for wood stoves and other forest product companies about getting a seat at the table. She said U.S. Sen. Mark Udall’s proposed National Forest Insect and Disease Emergency Act of 2009 would recognize beetle-killed forest products as a renewable energy source that fits within the parameters of the Clean Air Act.

“I’ve talked to those folks [biomass proponents] a little bit, and I do think they need to be part of the equation, and if Udall gets through what he’s proposing, then that opens the door. That could potentially incentivize new business opportunities, so that’s why we need all of those voices to help us come up with a plan. Frankly, we need the forest products folks there, because this problem’s too big for even the feds to handle in a really holistic way.”

Scanlan said she’s spoken about the problem with former Colorado Department of Natural Resources director Harris Sherman, who last month was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for natural resources and environment, which oversees the Forest Service. She plans to meet with him again in Washington in the coming weeks to push for a more comprehensive approach.

“The power lines are a huge issue, of course, with the grid, but there is another way to look at this,” Scanlan said. “You can just clear that right of way 150 feet or you can apply fire science to it so that in some places it can be narrower and in some places it can be wider.

“I’m glad they’re doing something, but doing a lawnmower strip maybe isn’t the smartest thing we could do,” she added. “The right-of-way clearing idea was based on flat-land transmission lines, so they don’t really take into account dealing with the elevations and grades that we have in the mountains, so I think it calls for a different strategy.”

But Wettstein said the proposal goes for maximum clearance (200 feet on either side of major transmission lines) in case that’s what’s needed in serious hazard areas. He doesn’t really expect to see that much area cleared by the power companies.

“They will vary that width to what their local needs are, because the bottom line is it’s going to be very expensive to do and they’re not going to clear any more than they absolutely have to to get those lines protected,” Wettstein said.

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