AGH Testimony on biomass heat in Maryland's renewable energy portfolio standard

The Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard – Tier 1 Renewable Source – Alterations (Reclaim Renewable Energy Act of 2022)

March 3, 2022

Position: Oppose HB 11.  Support HB 1085.

House Economic Matters Committee

 

Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My name is John Ackerly and I am the President of the Alliance for Green Heat, a Maryland based non-profit that promotes cleaner and more efficient wood and pellet heating. We strive to represent consumers and the environment – not the forest industry, or the wood and pellet stove and boiler industry. We support all renewable heating options – from geothermal to solar thermal to biomass thermal – because we need to aggressively deploy all these technologies to meet the global challenge of climate change.

Including thermal biomass as a Tier One renewable in Maryland’s Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard should not be ideological. Let’s follow the science. A few points that are important to consider.


1. Maryland has hardly any market for thermal biomass RECs and that is not likely to change. But we should not prevent good projects from getting built. If an institution can pencil out a project to use wood pellets or wood chips to heat their facility, we should support them, just as we would with other renewables.

2. A lot, if not most wood used in biomass thermal projects is waste wood, residuals that will be produced anyway. In my Takoma Park neighborhood, as in all Maryland towns and cities, we chip hundreds of tons of trees that fall down in storms or are taken down for one reason or another. They can go to make mulch for homeowners or other uses, but I believe they are best used to replace fossil fuel.

3. Larger wood heating systems have modern controls and produce little particulate matter. Otherwise, they would not be permitted by the Maryland Department of the Environment.

4. Compared to other renewables, making heat with wood chips or pellets is extremely low carbon. Remember, technologies like geothermal, for example, usually use a lot of fossil fuels to pump the heat out the ground or air. In fact, 30% or more of the energy created comes from the electricity needed to transfer heat. All technologies should be held to same standards, use the same carbon accounting method, based on science, not ideology.

Increasingly, stakeholders opposing biomass are more likely to have the science on biomass to electricity, and they then apply it to biomass for heat. We continually hear arguments, including from some members of this committee, who have read about the harvesting of trees in the US south to produce industrial wood pellets to ship to Europe to make electricity. This is what is in the news lately and if you don’t have much background on the issue, its easy to conflate the environmental issues with this energy pathway, with local, small-scale, high efficiency heating projects. Pellets made for massive electric utilities are from whole trees cut specifically to make pellets. They are then used at about 33% efficiency to make electricity, and the other 67% of the tree is lost as waste heat.

With local heating projects, trees are rarely cut solely to make heat. In Maryland the amount of residual

Waste wood at Baltimore's urban
waste wood lot

biomass is enormous. I would encourage each of you to read a January story from the Baltimore Sun about urban waste wood in Baltimore. It says “In a city with roughly 4,000 acres of woodland and many miles of streets lined with trees, about 9,000 tons of waste are cleared annually. It cost the city to dispose of that scrap wood and brush.”

A few comments on waste wood. A lot of domestical woody biomass is treated, for better or worse, as a waste product. The EPA documented that in 2018, landfills received 12.2 million tons of wood. This was 8.3 percent of all municipal solid waste landfilled that year.[1]

The US Forest Service estimates that urban waste wood amounts to be 46 million tons based on annual mortality rates.[2] With emerald ash borer, more frequent storms and natural mortality, cities and states struggle with disposing of wood and instead to produce revenue from it and use it as a renewable resource.

Let’s take my town of Takoma Park as an example. I served as co-chair of the Environment Committee that explored quickly reducing fossil fuels. However, the city is nonchalant about heating its buildings with gas, year after year. Often, officials brag that the city uses 100% renewable energy because its electric supply is renewable, forgetting that heat also uses energy. So, we take gas off the grid, gas that is likely made by fracking shale in Pennsylvania, but that gas could have even worse environmental implications and come from far further away. Meanwhile, arborists remove 100s of tons of waste wood from the city, much of it paid for by the city, so that it can be thrown away. Remember, wood is a very clean fuel compared to fossil fuels if you can combust it at a high enough temperature and use electrostatic precipitators and baghouses to reduce the particulates. Takoma Park’s municipal buildings are not ideal to be heated with wood chips, but municipal buildings in many of Maryland’s more rural areas could be.

Mike Tidwell, who led a
residential corn heating co-op

At the residential level, Takoma Park has been a national leader in biomass heat. The city subsidized a silo for corn that residents could use to heat their homes with corn stoves. This initiative was led by Mike Tidwell, who you all know well I assume. Mike still supports using biomass for local heating uses in his own home, in our community, our state and our country. He understands the carbon equation and how different it is from using biomass to ship to Europe to make electricity. While we believe wood pellets are a far better fuel than feed corn, there are many similarities between the two.

I would urge you to let local officials, local architects and planner and local economics in Western and Eastern Maryland make the decision about which renewables work best to heat buildings in their communities. The legislature in Annapolis should not do that for them.


Thank you for your consideration.

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[1] https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/wood-material-specific-data

[2] https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/59115