The scale the data centers want to operate at maybe way out of spec. to the existing infrastructure.
https://www.iberkshires.com/story/84456/Town-Residents-Conce...
we're honestly screwed as a country, funny to see.
The prevalence of dirt roads in VT is an intentional policy decision.
The snow plow as two axles
Didn't describe that population at all. EMT, Nurses, college professors, generational farmers, trades people. The main point is why should the town be burdened with the cost. The road satisfies the community needs. Vermont gave up on their side of the road when the commercial roads were developed 3/4 of mile over. The forest service should budget for the impact on the local roads.
Sure sounds like a service economy that feeds upon retirement and tourism money to me....(I know what they look like, I grew up in one)
>The main point is why should the town be burdened with the cost. The road satisfies the community needs. Vermont gave up on their side of the road when the commercial roads were developed 3/4 of mile over. The forest service should budget for the impact on the local roads.
I don't care exactly who winds up holding the bag but when you drive from literally anywhere bordering Vermont into Vermont it's pretty clear what the level of investment in transportation infrastructure is. And this infighting over how some petty amount of truck traffic is gonna destroy a dirt road is exactly what's downhill of that under-investment.
And both are much easier than getting permits for a high voltage transmission line to another region of the country where it might make more sense to build a wind or solar farm.
The UK's largest CO₂ emitter is an ex-coal now-biomass powerplant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drax_Power_Station
Wind turbines and hydroelectric dams don't do much for enhancing biodiversity either, which is fine because their purpose is to generate electricity.
> The UK's largest CO₂ emitter is an ex-coal now-biomass powerplant
Only by counting burning biomass as emitting new CO2 while not counting the CO2 it removed from the air from being grown.
Coal isn't part of the active carbon cycle. It would stay locked in the ground indefinitely if you didn't dig it up.
Moreover, that plant appears to get getting biomass as compressed pellets from sawmill scrap wood and sawdust, i.e. it's the refuse from trees that were already being logged to make lumber. If they didn't burn it then it would go into a landfill to rot and release the carbon anyway.
Sure they will get sawmill scraps if they can, but if built this will be by far the largest biomass reactor in the country. When I did the math there’s not enough available scrap in the entire country to power this thing.
They’ve explicitly stated that they need 5.5 million tons of timber from the surround 250 miles of forest annually.
>Burning them does the same thing as the second one, which was going to happen on its own.
Over 50-100 years for short lived species. And much longer for longer lived species.
So yes better than coal but over the lifetime of anyone alive today it’s essentially the same thing, so it’s only really better than coal if you are looking 100 years into the future and if you stop doing cutting down existing trees at some point.
Which tracks since it's in England and they're getting pellets from the US, Canada and Europe.
> Over 50-100 years for short lived species. And much longer for longer lived species.
But who is logging old growth trees for biomass?
In if someone is cutting down a tree in a first world country it's generally either because the tree was grown intending to cut it down and they immediately start growing new trees there, or because it's going to be cut down regardless of what you do with the tree because they're removing it in order to make some other use of the land.
Moreover, you can always find that one asshat doing something ridiculous, but the world also generates a lot of scrap wood or cuts down a lot of trees just to clear the land. Burning them to generate electricity is never going to be large proportion of world power generation, but doing it to the extent that the trees were just going to rot anyway seems pretty hard to object to.
That’s not all that much unused wood scrap, so if you’re building a large biomass plant you’re going to end up harvesting timber.
> In if someone is cutting down a tree in a first world country it's generally either because the tree was grown intending to cut it down and they immediately start growing new trees there, or because it's going to be cut down regardless of what you do with the tree because they're removing it in order to make some other use of the land.
In Europe maybe. In the US and Canada it’s very common to harvest timber from naturally grown forests (vs managed plantations) that are being cut primarily for the timber.
A biomass plant harvesting existing timber would only be better if the alternative were building a new coal plant.
This isn’t replacing anything though. We don’t need an extra 1.5GW, so if this project doesn’t go through the alternative will be that we continue moving towards more solar and wind.
There is more excess data center power demand than there is capability to build plants over the next 10 years, so if this plant isn’t built the likely result is 1 less data center and not releasing carbon from 5.5 million tons of timber per year.
If this is an example of the kind of buildout we want to streamline, I say no thanks.