After Gutenberg

Renewable Portfolio Standards are lacking in the Southeastern United States. Southern utilities recently were successful in preventing energy policy in the Senate that would establish 15% renewable energy as a federal standard.

Via Climate Progress, Daniel Cusick,writing for Greenwire, says the fingerprints of TVA (the Tennessee Valley Authority) were all over the candlestick lobbying that did in the RPS (Renewable energy Portfolio Standard). TVA had accomplices, sp., Southern and Duke Energy, to name two other Southern utilities that played key roles in the successful effort last week to undermine energy policy making by the Senate.

These major Southeastern utilities pressed the message to lawmakers that a nationwide mandate, to require power companies to generate at least 15 percent of their electricity from renewable energy, would undermine their electricity market.

Their message became a mantra for mostly Republican senators from the South. “Forcing Tennesseans to either build 40-story wind turbines on our pristine mountaintops or to pay billions in penalty taxes to the federal government amounts to a judge giving a defendant the choice to be hanged or shot,” warned Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.).

The problem is that wind and solar power are more viable in other regions of the country, whereas it would be infeasible for utilities in the South to generate enough power from solar, wind or other renewable power sources to meet the RPS goal.

Proponents of the RPS proposal say the region’s lawmakers missed a prime opportunity to expand the South’s renewable energy base, which they say has far more potential than the utilities and their allies suggest.

“We think that’s very unfortunate,” said Stephen Smith of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, a Knoxville-based advocacy group. “And we are going to let the customers in TVA’s service area know that their energy providers were actively working against clean energy.”

The issue is not dead, says Cusick. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) hopes to revive the proposal, and there could be an effort to add an RPS when the House assembles its energy bill next month.

Heavy lobbying came from the 158 distributors of TVA power who buy wholesale electricity from the utility and resell it under retail sale agreements with municipalities and cooperatives. Jack Simmons, president and CEO of the Tennessee Valley Public Power Association, which represents TVA’s retail distributors, said his organization believes the RPS plan sponsored by Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) would impose an untenable mandate upon TVA retailers, forcing them to spend tens of millions of dollars to buy wind and solar power from outside sources.

Specifically, Simmons said, six of the valley’s largest power providers — in areas such as Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville and Chattanooga — have to buy additional renewable power from outside the region at a cost of 2 cents per kilowatt-hour to meet the standard. He and other critics of the proposal likened the mandate to an energy tax on the region’s homeowners and businesses, and a transfer of wealth from the South to other regions.

“Right off the bat, it didn’t seem fair for us to have to pay a 2-cent-per-kilowatt-hour tax when we didn’t have any control over whether we made green power or not,” Simmons said in a telephone interview last week.

Southern Co. officials said the measure would have driven up annual costs by as much as $745 million by 2020, and much of that increase would have been borne by its 4.32 million customers in Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi.

“We believe it would be very difficult to comply with a 15 percent RPS from resources here in the Southeast,” said Leonard Haynes, Southern’s executive vice president for supply technologies, renewables and demand side planning.

Even if wind and solar power are not viable in the Southeast, observed George Sterzinger, executive director of the Washington, D.C.,-based Renewable Energy Policy Project, the region has high potential to develop renewable energy resources from biomass.

There was particular appeal to consideration of two feedstock sources — forestry waste and municipal solid waste — because of the cost associated with disposal.

This blog previously mentioned development of electric power from forestry waste. Sterzinger noted that switchgrass, a high-yield lignocellulosic crop, grows well in the Southern climate. Southern Co., for example, is already co-firing switchgrass as part of its voluntary “green power” purchase program in Alabama. And, Southern subsidiary Georgia Power Co. included a biomass provision in its latest filings for additional power supply before the state public service commission.

Sterzinger said utilities wanting to get serious about biomass energy need to invest more heavily in research geared toward burning woody debris and grasses more efficiently, including processes that would gasify biomass materials. The executive director of the Renewable Energy Policy Project omitted mention of the environmental consequences of such technology. The source and amount of energy used in conversion, plus the source and amount of energy required in ensuring that the biomass is suitable feedstock (to include cultivation in the case of energy crops), effects EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested) and emissions profiles.