Greenco president Tim Lesco and his family break ground for the new plant with local city and county officials.
Georgia cities green with envy as Piedmont Green Power and Greenco Environmental move in
Green is the new black - or so they say anyway.
In other words, green is the fashion of the day. Everyone is trying to live in a more sustainable fashion. Everyone is eco-conscious. Almost everyone is recycling. Cities and local governments are no different and if that is the case then Barnesville is the haute couture of middle Georgia's runway. The community has recently added two new businesses to our economic development; Piedmont Green Power and Greenco Environmental. Both are eco-friendly and both are incredible additions to our community.
Piedmont Green Power, a $160 million investment on 50 acres, will produce electrical energy from biomass. The plant will create energy by utilizing waste materials from logging areas and land clearings, materials that would otherwise end up in landfills or left to rot. In fact, Piedmont will produce enough energy to serve 40,000 homes and will begin full operations in 2011. It will create clean, sustainable energy without carbon dioxide emissions, a greenhouse gas, believed to contribute to climate change.
Greenco Environmental is Georgia's first food waste composting facility. By combining large quantities of food, yard and wood waste, the company creates high quality organic compost with zero landfill contribution. Greenco also provides an economic waste hauling and disposal option to many of Greater Atlanta's food processing and landscape companies.
The raw materials are trucked to the 32-acre facility and after 90 days, the waste has been transformed into organic compost which is sold in bulk to farmers and manufacturers of bagged garden products.
It is an exciting time for economic and sustainable development in Barnesville and – to keep with the fashion analogy – the city has never looked so beautiful.
Piedmont Green Power, a $160 million investment on 50 acres, will produce electrical energy from biomass. The plant will create energy by utilizing waste materials from logging areas and land clearings, materials that would otherwise end up in landfills or left to rot. In fact, Piedmont will produce enough energy to serve 40,000 homes and will begin full operations in 2011. It will create clean, sustainable energy without carbon dioxide emissions, a greenhouse gas, believed to contribute to climate change.
Greenco Environmental is Georgia's first food waste composting facility. By combining large quantities of food, yard and wood waste, the company creates high quality organic compost with zero landfill contribution. Greenco also provides an economic waste hauling and disposal option to many of Greater Atlanta's food processing and landscape companies.
The raw materials are trucked to the 32-acre facility and after 90 days, the waste has been transformed into organic compost which is sold in bulk to farmers and manufacturers of bagged garden products.
It is an exciting time for economic and sustainable development in Barnesville and – to keep with the fashion analogy – the city has never looked so beautiful.
Shame on you!!!!
The statement the power plant "will create clean, sustainable energy without carbon dioxide emissions, a greenhouse gas, believed to contribute to climate change." is an outright lie. It is totally false, and any research at all would show it to be false.
Wood has carbon. It is a carbon fuel in the sense that the heat produced all comes from combining carbon with oxygen. The carbond dioxide produced by that plant will be identical to the carbon dioxide produced if it burned coal, oil, or any other cabon fuel.
As a matter of fact because our government wants to encourage such plants to reduce use of other fuels, they relax the emissions restrictions on such plants. This plant will be allowed to emit anything under 250 tons of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxygen compounds a year along with all the cabon dioxide.
If it was a coal or oil plant, they would be restricted to under 100 tons for the same license class.
I know you are (or were) on the IDA Walter, but shame on you for misleading the people in Lamar county. The statement in the article that the proposed plant will not emit carbon dioxide as part of the process is a bald-faced lie. It will emit, within a very small percentage, as much carbon dioxide as a coal plant producing the same energy output would. It will emit MORE toxic carbon monoxide and more harmful nitrogen-oxygen compounds than a coal palnt would for the same minor license class.
That is an undisputable fact. The statement " It will create clean, sustainable energy without carbon dioxide emissions, a greenhouse gas, believed to contribute to climate change" is a lie.
Shame on you, Kenny Roberts, the Mayor, Gene Hardwick, Missy and her $100K paycheck, and all the other IDA members for bringing something like this into Lamar county!
Tom Rauch
You are right in that if oil were being burned the regulations would be different. Perhaps the best wording is "without carbon dioxide emissions over 250 tons." They are creating sustainable energy though by filtering carbon dioxide and by not using oil and coal products.
There is no dispute here Mr. Rauch. I do not however agree that it will emit MORE toxic carbon monoxide and I would challenge you to defend your statement with facts and/or figures by an accredited source.
We must all remember as well that there are a number of reasons the IDA and individuals would be in support of business entering Lamar county and we cannot be sure of its success until we start to see some real production.
You might be the best-intentioned "greenie" in the whole world, but intent alone does not make up for a total lack of research into facts. Getting caught up in the green-hysteria is pretty easy; we all want a better world. We have to be careful however to not repeat “green lies” that are told to sell certain agendas.
The supposition of the government and those using government funds is that all that wood laying around rotting would produce the same net weight of carbon dioxide as it would release if burned for fuel. That actually is correct, except the high temperatures of combustion form nitrogen-oxygen compounds and carbon-oxygen compounds in quantities not produced by slow natural decay over years.
It is an irrefutable fact that the net tons of carbon dioxide produced by any fossil fuel plant is the same as that produced by wood because they all combine carbon and oxygen to produce heat. The chemical reaction is identical.
What has misled you (and others) is the fact that to the world releasing the CO2 from wood would be no worse than letting it rot, toxic and health hazards like CO and N-Ox compounds excluded if we look at it over many years. This is because the wood, as it grows, uses CO and breaks it down into carbon and oxygen. So if we grow enough new wood to replace the wood we burned it will, through photosynthesis, capture energy from the sun and lock it in the plant as carbon while releasing oxygen.
To the perspective of Lamar County, it is entirely different. What we have done with this power plant is brought all those miles and miles of space and years and years of time to one concentrated place in space and time. We have created a point source of local pollution where the decay that normally would have taken place of many years and many hundreds of square miles will be concentrated. The sad fact is the CO2 output of that plant, as well as the noxious N-Ox and deadly CO output of that plant is the same as thousands of motor vehicles all running at one location would produce.
My facts are indeed accurate undeniable truths. It is simple basic Physics, not something we can change. The rules are also documented rules. In order to encourage plants like this the Government has relaxed the restriction on CO, and on N-Ox compounds. If you take the time to call the proper people in the EPD, you will learn what I say is exactly true and factual. For a minor pollution license, the wood plant is allowed to release up to 250 tons of poisonous carbon dioxide and 250 tons of harmful nitrogen-oxygen compounds per year.
If the same plant burned coal or oil, and if it had the same power output and same minor pollution license, it would only be allowed 100 tons of carbon monoxide and 100 tons of nitrogen-oxygen compounds per year.
If you took the time to look up operating statistics on plants like this, instead of getting sucked deep into the green hyperbole, you would have found that indeed plants like this run close to the emissions limits, and that those limits are actually relaxed from the limits that would be set from fossil fuel plants.
Your statement that there are “no carbon diode emissions” is an outright lie. If you read this link
http://www.barnesvillega.net/price_of_jobs.htm
you will see what communities actually pay for plants like this. It is shameful that the people we depend on for facts and truth and good decisions did something like this to our community.
Tom Rauch
Until then I will keep living in my green oblivion.
I prefer facts and science and truth over any type of oblivion, be it green for the color of money or green for the color of plants.
Let's do all we can to bring good industry that creates jobs and pays taxes into our community, not things that in only a handful of jobs along with the pollution of 17,290 cars driving 9 miles round trip per day....seven days a week.
If the IDA won't take the time to research what they bring us, at least we can work together to keep them on course and not buy into the big tall tales they spin.
Tom Rauch
I would be happy to have you guest post on the Barnesville Green blog anytime you like.
It has been my pleasure hearing your thoughts.
I don't begrudge anyone for making money or gaining fame so long as the taxpayers are not getting stiffed in the process.
The primary goal of a politician or political appointee is to stay in office. That runs contrary to telling the whole story.
Tom