From: Rita Schenck [rita@iere.org]
Sent: Wednesday, August 18, 2004 11:11 AM
To: rita@iere.org
Subject: Energy Update #14

Dear Friends:

We are continuing our efforts studying the energy and economics of renewable and conservation technology on the island. The team at UW is nearly through with its investigations into wind and biomass technologies. Some interesting things have come up.

In our last study, we estimated that perhaps 3 Megawatts of power could be derived from the combined biomass produced on the island. That biomass included wood waste, septage, yard waste, food waste and solid waste. Our new estimates agree well with the old ones, however a detailed look at the available technologies gives a quite different take on the topic.

A few years ago, many technologies were being developed or tested to use biomass, especially wood waste. Since then, nearly every one of those test systems has failed due to either technical difficulties, or more commonly due to funding problems. The one exception is co-firing in coal-fired power plants, where the addition of wood waste actually decreases the pollution coming from the stack. There is only one coal-fired power plant in the State of Washington (at Centralia) so this technology does not look promising for us.

Thanks to an introduction from islander Sean Crotty, we have been speaking with a company called Energy Answers, which builds and operates waste-to-energy plants, some of which have been in operation for decades, with good community support. It turns out that the amount of solid waste we generate on Vashon is too small to be cost-effective, but Energy Answers is developing technology that will allow co-firing of all the biomass sources we have on the island. This would permit a cost-effective plant to be built. Although such a plant would be a type of incineration technology, preliminary estimates indicate that the emissions from the plant would be less than the emissions we currently produce by trucking solid waste to the King County Landfill. We will be looking more closely at this technology over the course of our study.

The wind potential on the island is low, but probably adequate to supply our electricity needs. We have run into a hiccough in getting our anemometer tower installed. The King County Department of Development and Environmental Services has ruled that we need a commercial permit for it. This causes delays and significant cost, but we are moving ahead with this effort.

One potential barrier to the development of wind power on the island is the shipping necessary to get the parts here. Some of the parts of the installation weigh as much as 250 tons, and would have to be barged to the island. We are in discussions with the Washington State Ferries (who own the only commercial-size dock on the island) to see what is possible.

Another potential barrier is potential opposition to the project from off-islanders who would see the wind turbines. We have developed artists conceptions of how the island would look with wind turbines on it, and have begun surveying people to identify any opposition.

In the meantime, per Puget Sound Energy, the island electricity usage has dropped a significant amount: 9% in the last 2 years. A preliminary assessment indicates that this drop is not due to warmer weather leading to less heating. Thanks to all the people who have taken conservation actions! The energy use of the ferries has dropped, too, but this is due to decreased ferry service rather than increased efficiency.

We are nearly complete with our survey of the Vashon Cohousing neighborhood energy usage. Some of these households are amazingly low users of energy-- a tribute to their commitment to the environment. Cohousing will be a great opportunity to move to energy independence.

At the request of several of you, I am including information in this irregular newsletter, to cover some of the other activities we do here at IERE. Do let me know if this is not to your liking.

Last weekend, we celebrated Clean Start, a start of a phytoremediation field study here at the Beall. A study we performed a few years ago showed that foxglove and other native and naturalized plants were concentrating cadmium from the soils, making them good candidates to remediate the soils contaminated by heavy metals from the ASARCO smelter. The smelter spewed arsenic, cadmium and lead all over the Puget Sound region for almost 100 years. We hope to find ways for landowners to clean up their own soils. Five different varieties of foxglove and two varieties of medicinal yarrow will be tested-- the study will take almost three years to be complete.

At our Clean Start Celebration, we enjoyed a wonderful presentation about Foxglove from professional storyteller Allison Cox, and Ken Larsen's guitar helped to get us all going. About 30 attendees learned how to sample soils for heavy metals, and about how to protect themselves from heavy metals while working with contaminated soils. Thanks go to the many volunteers that made this event possible, including Public Health Seattle King County, for supplying educational material on personal hygiene and soil contamination.

We have begun a study on the environmental impacts of conventional cotton growing. This crop typically uses many different pesticides, some of which have been implicated in deaths in Africa and Southeast Asia. Our initial estimate is that in the USA, enough pesticides are used on cotton to poison the Great Lakes 5 times over. This study should prove very interesting.

In July, we hosted our 4th international conference on Life Cycle Assessment and Life Cycle Management (InLCA/LCM). This conference took place via the internet. As has become the norm for these conferences, papers were presented from every continent. You can see the papers at www.lcacenter.org

In July and august, we had booths at the Vashon Strawberry festival and the Island Earth Fair. These events were largely made possible by Marian Whited, who has been working on contract with us for some time, and is now a full time employee, as director of development for IERE.

We are continuing to seek funding for projects that will help demonstrate more sustainable approaches to living here on the island and around the globe.

We have submitted a proposal to the Bonneville Environmental Foundation and Puget Sound Energy to install solar demonstrations and provide training on Vashon so that homeowners can install their own grid-linked solar systems.

We have submitted a proposal to Washington Mutual to fund a demonstration of solar powered, very low low-income housing.

We have submitted a proposal to the Island Remediation and Public Participation Center to provide regular training sessions on gardening with heavy metals, expanding on the session we developed for the Clean Start event.

We invite you to share this note with anyone you believe would be interested. We will gladly add the names of anyone who requests it to this mail list. Likewise, if you wish to be removed, send me a note and I'll remove your name.

Rita Schenck

Institute for Environmental Research and Education
PO Box 2449
Vashon, WA 98070

Phone 206-463-7430
Fax 206-279-1570
www.iere.org