Excerpts from:
Critics turn up heat on Seattle wood burner
By Gary Chittim
Critics turn up heat on Seattle wood burner
By Gary Chittim
SEATTLE -- Concerned residents and business owners are worried about the effects of a major wood burning operation in downtown Seattle.
Seattle Steam, which supplies steam to heat most buildings in the downtown core, began burning clean waste wood along with natural gas at its facility two years ago.
Seattle Steam CEO Stan Gent said the wood burning emissions are thoroughly scrubbed to meet federal and local clean air standards. He said the company is using wood to offset its burning of natural gas.
"It's well under the standards that are well understood and issued by the EPA," Gent said, "and we've got the best equipment and cleanest biomass plant, we believe, in North America."
But organizers of a group of in the Pike Place Market claim some people are getting sick from the wood smoke. They want the company to revert to burning 100 percent natural gas.
Gent said the company is continuing plans to increase wood burning to about 70 percent of its fuel.
Gent attended a meeting Tuesday afternoon with the Pike Place group to answer questions from concerned people in Pike Place Market.
Link to complete article:
http://www.king5.com/news/environment/Critics-Turn-Up-Heat-On-Seattle-Wood-Burner-127330208.html
It is my understanding that the US has plenty of natural gas for some time to come; why would they replace the cleaner natural gas with 70% highly polluting biomass incineration?
ReplyDeleteFederal subsidies? Are they getting federal subsidies for burning wood....? Gawd, what a thought! Well, everybody is doing it... why shouldn't they?
What freaking caveman decided it would be a good idea to burn wood? And this "clean" waste wood... please. What is released in the burning of wood is a greater health threat than burning coal for the same amount of energy.
"It's well under the standards that are well understood and issued by the EPA," Gent said, "and we've got the best equipment and cleanest biomass plant, we believe, in North America."
Really. The cleanest biomass plant? Can you say oxymoron?
A "clean" biomass plant?
How do they catch the particulate 2.5 and the even smaller particles... the most deadly of pollutants coming from these biomass plants are the smallest, and no biomass plant in North America or the world has a way to capture the small deadly pollutants.
Seattle, don't believe this crap.
You are being poisoned; if they burn 24/7/365, and have been burning wood for two years... your health has already been compromised. What breathing problems are the people around you experiencing; do your eyes burn when you go to the market?
This is not renewable green energy. The forest floors are being stripped of important nutrients to feed a whole new industry which has sprung up around the collecting and burning of forest "waste." If the forest could speak it would tell you that nothing in the forest goes to waste.