Ok, so your company operates in the shade all day and there’s never a breeze. Renewable energy could still be in your future.

How? With biomass systems that capture methane gas as waste decomposes. This is not a limited-action kind of fuel source. It’s about converting pollution into a useful product, and there’s plenty of organic waste to use as a renewable resource.

For example, EPA just ordered an entire coal-fired power plant to run totally on biomass fuels.  Ohio Edison Co. will repower the two boiler systems at its R.E. Burger facility in Shadyside, OH, to run on renewable biomass fuels.

The company’s not doing this for altruistic reasons. It was ordered to convert as part of a major EPA penalty for violating Clean Air Act regulations. But the point is that there’s plenty of biomass capacity to replace coal as the fuel for electricity.

The changeover will will reduce the plant’s carbon dioxide emissions by more than 1.3 million tons a year. It will also reduce other air pollutants, such as nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide.

The EPA and Justice Department order is here.

But there are real business advantages of using biomass fuels to reduce GHG releases.

Example: San Francisco’s Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) is using biomass-supplied energy from a dairy farm to reduce the utility’s GHG emissions. PG&E has signed a deal with California Bioenergy to buy renewable energy and in return recieve verifiable credit for reducing 75,000 metric tons of GHG.

California Bioenergy makes the arrangements to sell methane gas generated from the biomass fuel — livestock manure — from a dairy farm in Bakersfield, CA.  PG&E then sells the biomass-produced electricity to its business and residential customers, who get a share of the GHG reduction credits through the utility’s Climatesmart program.

More details on the PG&E announcement are here.

Tags: California Bioenergy, Climatesmart, Ohio Edison Co., PG&E