Published with permission of Dian Deevey, Chair, Alachua County Environmental Protection Advisory Committee, Gainesville, Florida
Gainesville Sun Letters to the Editor – Published: Wednesday, December 30, 2009
In his Dec. 20 column, Ron Cunningham listed some of the reasons wood for GRU’s biomass generator may be too expensive for us to buy when that unit is ready to produce electricity. He suggests the local community could buy a forest to supply fuel for the plant “just in case” prices reach a level we cannot afford.
He says we might even persuade the state to allow harvesting fuel wood on the forest land it owns in the county.
It’s a good thought, except that there isn’t enough available forest land in the county to help us ratepayers much. The plant will burn nearly 2 tons of wood a minute, and it takes over an acre of productive Florida timberland to grow that much wood in a year.
The county owns and manages 6,100 acres of productive timberland, while the state owns about 5,500 acres outside Payne’s Prairie. Together, state and county-owned forests might fuel about seven and a half days of biomass generator operation each year, assuming they were sustainably managed and produced as much wood per acre as the commercial timberlands in the county do.
Even if we clear cut the whole 11,700 acres of county and local state forestland to fire the plant in an emergency, the total harvest would supply the generator for only about nine months.
It would take about 880 square miles of sustainably managed Florida timberland land to supply all the wood GRU will burn in its generator in a year. There are only 874 square miles of dry land in the entire county.
Few people understand how much wood electricity generation requires, and how slowly it grows. It would take 850 square miles of sustainably managed Florida forest land to supply all the wood GRU will burn in its generator in a year. That’s one of the reasons many of us have opposed it since the idea first surfaced.
Dian Deevey,
Chair,
Alachua County
Environmental Protection
Advisory Committee,
Gainesville
gainesvilleflorida