It’s a good thing George Fitch was never elected governor. He’s doing a lot more good as mayor of Warrenton, a locality small enough where he can act as entrepreneurial change-agent, than he could do sitting atop Virginia’s unwieldy bureaucracy. In this week’s edition of the e-zine, “One Man’s Trash…”, I profile Fitch and his crusade to make the 5,000 inhabitants of the town of Warrenton “energy independent.”
Besides implementing “green” conservation policies like those seen in Arlington County, Fitch wants to build a biomass plant capable of netting 5,000 megawatts a year of electricity, about enough for 5,000 households, plus 10 million gallons of ethanol. The main feedstock would be the garbage dumped into the town landfill, although he would employ any organic material that comes to hand — tree clippings, corn husks, old tires, wooden construction debris, cow manure, sewer sludge. The coolness factor is very high. But to make it happen, Fitch needs to find $300,000 for engineering and design work, and then line up federal loan guarantees to reassure investors backing a gasification technology that works in the lab but has never been tested in the field.
If Fitch can raise the capital and prove the concept, he thinks converting landfill biomass into energy will prove so lucrative that the idea will sweep across municipalities across the country. Next to hydro power, biomass is already the top form of renewable energy in the United States. Fitch’s idea could make small-scale energy production from biomass downright ubiquitous.
Which brings us to the topic of my second story, “Voltage Hogs,” the effort to implement a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) in Virginia. A proposed RPS bill, which has been sidetracked by the move to electricity re-regulation, would require electric utilities in Virginia to derive 12 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Unless Gov. Timothy M. Kaine insists upon major modifications to the re-regulation legislation, RPS is likely to die on the vine.
I don’t normally favor government mandates in the marketplace. But a few points are in order. First, a re-regulated electric utility industry is not a “free market” to begin with. Second, there is no level playing field: The re-regulation bill passed by the General Assembly biases Virginia energy policy towards continued expansion of big power plants using traditional fuels — coal and nukes — and connected by big transmission lines. It offers only meager incentives to invest in conservation, energy-efficiency and renewable fuels.
Third, and I found this to be astounding, Virginia’s economy is considerably more electricity-intensive than the American economy as a whole, which means that Virginia has one of the most electricity-intensive economies in the world. If we were an independent country, we’d rank No. 8 in electricity consumption per capita, right behind the United Arab Emirates, Arab sheikdoms that just happen to be sitting on, or near to, the largest supply of oil and natural gas on the globe. We’ve barely begun to explore the potential for conservation, efficiency and renewables. There are potentially hundreds of small-scale projects that offer rate payers more bang for the buck than the traditional Big Grid approach.
I still worry that a goal of generating 12 percent of Virginia’s electricity with renewables might be unrealistic and unachievable except at great expense to rate payers. So, it all comes back to George Fitch and Warrenton. If every community in Virginia could find a way within the next 13 years to convert its waste stream into energy, we’d have no trouble whatsoever making that 12-percent goal.
Virginians are bleating passively as the electric power companies herd us quietly toward our sheep shearing. The politicians, pundits, journalists and other supposed guardians of the public interest are asleep… as usual. It’s up to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, who has expressed an interest in renewables, to bring some balance back to the re-regulation bill.