Is there enough residual biomass in Ontario to fuel a converted coal plant?
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009Ontario Power Generation, the province’s power utility, issued today a “call for expressions of interest” to potential suppliers of biomass fuel, which could include agricultural residues, dedicated non-food crops, and forest waste. Read the story here. The company said it wants to find out if there’s enough biomass in the province for it to convert several of its coal-fired generating units in Ontario so they can burn 100 per cent biomass instead of coal. They also want to get a sense of how it would be collected and delivered and how much all that would cost. To assist the effort, the Ministry of Natural Resources put out its own call for interest to see what companies would be interested in harvesting biofibre — tree branches and tops, diseased and fire-damaged trees, etc. — from sustainably managed crown forests.
I wrote about the government’s coal-to-biomass power generation strategy last fall and it appears to be gaining some momentum. It’s an ambitious project. Not just from a technical perspective, in terms of the actual plant conversion, but perhaps even more so from a logistical perspective. (more…)
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
