Sunday, January 31, 2010

Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining


This is an online 20 minute video produced by Yale Environment 360 in cooperation with Mediastorm. It's well worth watching to become better educated about this environmentally destructive practice.

From the Yale Environment 360 blog post:

"During the last two decades, mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia has destroyed or severely damaged more than a million acres of forest and buried nearly 2,000 miles of streams. Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining, a video report produced by Yale Environment 360 in collaboration with MediaStorm, focuses on the environmental and social impacts of this practice and examines the long-term effects on the region’s forests and waterways."

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Coal-Burning Campuses Face Increased Pressure to Find Alternative Fuels

From the January 10, 2010 Chronicle of Higher Education (read the full article)

"activist groups such as the Sierra Club, which has organized a prominent campaign against coal on campuses, might make trouble for colleges that continue to burn coal. In late 2007, the group successfully sued the University of Wisconsin at Madison, showing that it had violated the federal Clean Air Act when it did not install pollution-control technology during maintenance on its 50-year-old coal plant.

Bruce Nilles, a lawyer who directs the Sierra Club's national coal campaign, believes that other colleges have similarly extended the lives of their coal plants without installing legally required pollution controls.

The group is now scrutinizing coal plants on four other University of Wisconsin campuses, and plans over the coming year to broaden its investigations into coal plants on dozens of other campuses. "Based on our analyses of the campus coal plants in Wisconsin, we expect to find compliance problems at many of the existing campus coal plants," Mr. Nilles says."

"The University of Wisconsin at Madison is taking on an alternative-energy project that might have rewards for the state, but with considerable challenges for the institution. After the university lost its legal tussle with the Sierra Club, it agreed to a series of concessions to reduce the environmental impact of its Charter Street heating plant, built in 1959, which burns more than 100,000 tons of coal a year.

Alan Fish, associate vice chancellor for facilities planning and management, says the university could have met the letter of the agreement with $60-million in upgrades. Instead, Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, announced that the campus facility—by far the largest state-owned coal plant in Wisconsin—would give up coal entirely and switch to biomass by 2013 to help develop a renewable-fuels market within the state.

The $250-million plan has its risks. In a report released last May, consultants hired by the state determined that there probably would not be sufficient biomass supplies in Wisconsin when the plant is scheduled to reopen. The consultants also cited significant uncertainties about the future prices of biomass and argued the change in fuel would lead to infrastructural challenges, like increased traffic of trains and trucks carrying biomass to the plant.

Gary Radloff, an energy-policy specialist with the Wisconsin Bioenergy Institute, which advises state officials on the Charter Street project, acknowledges those challenges. But he believes the state has great potential for growing biomass products on fallow and underutilized land. He sees the Wisconsin biomass market operating something like the state's dairy businesses, in which products from scattered farmers compose a major, vibrant industry.

For now, university officials hope to burn waste wood from the forestry and paper industries. Initially, though, the renovated plant may have to rely primarily on natural gas.

"We may pay a premium on the front end to create a market," Mr. Fish says. "But in the long run, … the bet we're taking is that this is going to be less expensive­, and more sustainable.""

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Paper in the Journal Science Raises Serious Concerns About Mountain Top Removal/Valley Fill Coal Mining

From Science
Science 8 January 2010:
Vol. 327. no. 5962, pp. 148 - 149

"Clearly, current attempts to regulate MTM/VF (Mountain Top Mining/Valley Fill) practices are inadequate. Mining permits are being issued despite the preponderance of scientific evidence that impacts are pervasive and irreversible and that mitigation cannot compensate for losses. Considering environmental impacts of MTM/VF, in combination with evidence that the health of people living in surface-mining regions of the central Appalachians is compromised by mining activities, we conclude that MTM/VF permits should not be granted unless new methods can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems. Regulators should no longer ignore rigorous science. The United States should take leadership on these issues, particularly since surface mining in many developing countries is expected to grow extensively."

Read the entire article here.

University of Wisconsin Biomass Power Plant Update

From the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel Online

"A state-funded, $250 million project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison aims to convert a coal-fired power plant on campus to one that primarily burns biomass such as tree trimmings and crops, ideally becoming a model for how the state can reduce its carbon output and its dependence on fossil fuels.

But the massive venture - accounting for nearly one-fifth of the state's capital budget during the 2009-'11 budget period - faces considerable hurdles."

Read the entire article here.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Free Webinar: Scouting for Residential Electricity Savings

Live webinar | Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010 | 1:00-2:30 p.m. (includes live Q&A)
from the Energy Center of Wisconsin

REGISTER HERE     Clean Energy Webinar Website

Presented by Scott Pigg, Principal Project Manager and Ingo Bensch, Senior Project Manager; Energy Center of Wisconsin

U.S. households are plugged in—there are now about 25 consumer electronic products in every household, compared with just three in 1980. A year-long field study in Minnesota sheds new light on the make-up of this growing electrical load and behavioral opportunities to curb the growth.

In this webinar, co-principal investigators Scott Pigg and Ingo Bensch present results from "Plugging into savings," a field research project funded by the Minnesota Office of Energy Security and Minnesota Power Company. Scott and Ingo will share results on:

  • in-home metering data on active-mode and standby power draws and electricity consumption for more than 700 devices in 50 homes;
  • prevalence of opportunities to reduce electricity waste (such as enabling computer power management), with estimated savings;
  • interview results about what consumers are willing (and unwilling) to undertake in the way of in-home savings strategies; and,
  • implications for energy efficiency programs.

Gain insights to help residential energy consumers manage their plugged-in electronics and slay their energy vampires.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Scientists Call for End to Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining

From Yale Environment 360:

"Mountaintop removal coal mining is causing “pervasive and irreversible damage” to Appalachian forests and streams and the federal government should stop issuing permits for new mines, according to a report issued by 12 environmental scientists. The report, published in the journal Science, reviewed recent studies of the damage caused by mountaintop removal mining and found that the practice releases large amounts of toxic chemicals into streams, harming fish and birds and contaminating human drinking water supplies. The scientists said state and federal regulators have been paying surprisingly little attention to the damage caused by mountaintop removal mining, which involves blasting the tops off mountains to mine coal seams below, then dumping mining debris into streams." Read the entire post.