The Suwannee/St Johns Sierra Group, which represents 14 counties in North Central Florida including Alachua county, has voted to oppose the GRU/GREC Biomass plant * A new power plant is not needed; GRU currently has 62% overcapacity * Competition for increasingly scarce biomass fuel will be too expensive and a burden on the ratepayers * We reject more massive air pollution and major water withdrawals * The City of Gainesville needs to expand their energy efficiency programs and aggressively help customers reduce energy consumption. This will create many new jobs that will benefity the community and region. For these reasons the Suwannee/St.John’s group opposes a new power plant.

Brack Barker Suwannee/St Johns Sierra Group Conservation Chair

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

The Shell Game

Gainesville Is Giving Away Its Energy Future

By Thomas Bussing

It defies belief that the biggest utility contract in our city’s history has been offered to an essentially empty paper entity whose principle activity is financial speculation, quick profit and quick sell-off.

We the people are committing to their 500 million dollar private contract to burn trees so that we can buy back electricity at more expensive rates.

Until now we were a municipal utility that built, owned and operated its system on behalf of the citizens. This deal transfers future ownership to shifting paper corporations who in turn sell off the rights they acquired from us.

Better hope it all works perfectly, because the bail-out leaves us bankrupt and in hock forever to outside private financiers.

We have been told that we cannot break this contract. We have been told it’s too late, that if it is stopped the city might incur a financial penalty for the default.

What we really worry about is the opposite: that going ahead with this plant may bring on the biggest financial disaster possible for a city. We who pay the rates are on the line to pay the half-billion dollar cost.

But there is hope.

A good start is simply agreeing that building this plant is a bad idea, and that therefore the agreement is against our interests. The facts tell us it would be better to not go ahead.

Many letters to this newspaper have presented various reasons why we would be better off if this plant is not built. Here are a few more.

The contractor, “Nacogdoches Power,” is a corporate entity created for a single project, a planned bio-burner in Nacogdoches, Texas, for which it was named. Quoting from their December 14, 2007 proposal to GRU: “Nacogdoches Power was formed in 2005. … the company has no permanent employees…”

They are not builders or operators of power plants. They are merely seekers of financial arrangements, which they re-sell. They have no visible balance sheet and no actual employees.

They recently sold their so-called “Texas Project” to another outfit, before even getting it constructed. “Nacogdoches Power” has rebranded into “American Renewables” in the process.

They will not be running whatever gets built here. They may not even construct it. But they expect to be lucratively rewarded for their short time in town.

GRU admits that when completed, this plant will command a premium (high) price for its output. Rates can be expected to rise. In the end, to solve such problems we may be forced to buy them out – and at a price that has not been disclosed.

Amazingly, such key terms have never been disclosed to the public, nor even our elected commissioners and mayor.

Five hundred million dollars is a lot of money to contract for, and it is we, the citizens who live here, who will have to pay unless it is stopped.

There is one thing we can all agree upon – that it would be far better for this contract to be voided than to take the enormous risk of bankrupting our utility and our city.

Not a brick has been laid, no equipment purchased for this proposed plant.

With that as our goal, we can proceed to explore mechanisms and any costs of extricating our City from this ill-advised and hastily-agreed-to contract.

In the long run, we will be much better off.

Dr. Thomas Bussing served as Mayor of Gainesville (2001-2004)