Renewable Energy World has an article on converting coal fired power plants to biomass in Canada - Ontario: Replacing Coal with Biomass.

As part of an effort to phase out all coal plants in the Canadian province of Ontario by 2014, the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) is working with power-plant owners to close facilities down or transition them to burn biomass.

One such facility, the 211-MW Atikokan Generating Station, will be the first to move entirely to biomass. This week, the government of Ontario directed the OPA to draft a power purchase agreement with the plant's owner, Ontario Power Generation.

Ontario Power Generation owns three other coal plants in the Province, and has said it wants to convert all three by 2014. According to Biomass Magazine, the coal plant will require about 99,000 tons of wood pellets year.

As part of its “Green Energy Act” passed last year, the Ontario government set an ambitious target to phase out coal plants in 5 years. Many people have criticized the target, saying that it's not realistic and will de-stabilize the grid.

However, according to figures from the OPA, generation from Ontario's coal plants is already down more than 70 percent from 2003 – the lowest level in 45 years. Publicly, officials from the OPA and Ontario government have said they think the phase-out target is realistic.

In Europe, the “re-powering” of coal facilities has been underway for some years. In the U.S., a number of other companies are also experimenting with using biomass in place of coal. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, it would take about 1.6 billion tons of biomass to re-power all existing U.S. coal plants. The DOE reported that the U.S. could sustainably grow 1.3 billion tons of feedstock.

Of course, not every coal plant is going to convert to a biomass-burning facility. But theoretically, we have enough resources to transition a large portion of our coal fleet here in the U.S. The Wood Pellet Association of Canada has been trying to make a similar case.

Tyler Hamilton has an article at Technology Review on a new process using concentrated solar thermal power to convert biomass to biofuel - Gasifying Biomass with Sunlight.

Sundrop Fuels, a startup based in Louisville, CO, says it has developed a cleaner and more efficient way to turn biomass into synthetic fuels by harnessing the intense heat of the sun to vaporize wood and crop waste. Its process can produce twice the amount of gasoline or diesel per ton of biomass compared to conventional biomass gasification systems, the company claims.

Gasification occurs when dry biomass or other carbon-based materials are heated to above 700 ºC in the presence of steam. At those temperatures, most of the biomass is converted to a synthetic gas. This "syngas" is made up of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which are the chemical building blocks for higher-value fuels such as methanol, ethanol, and gasoline.

But the heat required for this process usually comes from a portion of the biomass being gasified. "You end up burning 30 to 35 percent of the biomass," says Alan Weimer, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

A few years ago, Weimer and his research team began looking at ways of using concentrated solar heat to drive the gasification process. It worked so well that Weimer and Chris Perkins, the graduate student who came up with the idea, went on to cofound Copernican Energy to commercialize the approach. Copernican was acquired by Sundrop Fuels in 2008, and its solar-reactor technology is now at the heart of a 1.5-megawatt thermal solar gasification demonstration facility in Colorado.

Todd Woddy has an article in the New York Times on solar thermal power plants using biomass to generate power around the clock - Solar and Biomass Plants to Work in Tandem in China. A longer version can be found at Grist.

China’s plans to build 2,000 megawatts of solar thermal power using technology from a California company, eSolar, will also include the construction of biomass power plants to generate electricity when the sun sets.

The solar and biomass plants will share turbines and other infrastructure, reducing the projects’ cost and allowing around-the-clock electricity production, according to Bill Gross, eSolar’s chairman.

“That supercharges the economics of solar,” said Mr. Gross in a telephone interview, noting that the addition of biomass generation will allow power plants to operate at 90 percent of capacity.

Under terms of the deal announced Saturday in Beijing, eSolar will license its “power tower” technology to Penglai Electric, which will manage the construction of the power plants over the next decade.

Another Chinese company, the China Shaanxi Yulin Huayang New Energy Company, will own and operate the first projects to be built in the 66-square-mile Yulin Energy Park in northern China.

A local shrub grown in the surrounding region to fight desertification, called the sand willow, will supply fuel for the biomass power plants, according to Penglai Electric.

“It’s an economical use of a resource that’s already in place,” said Nathaniel Bullard, a solar analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research and consulting firm. “That’s a very savvy move, rather than attach an energy storage system to the solar project.”

(A 107-megawatt project in California being developed by a Portuguese developer plans to use a similar biomass hybrid solar design.)

As The Times’ Keith Bradsher pointed out in his story, one issue with solar power plants in China is the large amount of land they require.

Eric Wang, a spokesman for Penglai Electric, wrote in an e-mail message that the relatively small footprint of an eSolar plant compared with other solar technologies proved attractive to the Chinese developer of the $5 billion project.

The Independent has a look at complaints that large scale power generation from biomass probably isn't a good idea ("Europe is going to cook the world's tropical forests to fight climate change; it's crazy") - Who says it's green to burn woodchips?.

The issue may yet prove just to be a panicky reaction to a radical expansion of wood energy, or it may be a portent of a deep problem. If so, it will echo the evolution of biofuels, initially embraced as a universal blessing before it was realised that native forests were being grubbed up to grow palm oil, and that US farmers would switch from food cereals to fuel cereals, thus causing a world food shortage.

Some campaigners are in no doubt. Almuth Ernsting from Biofuelwatch said: "It's almost unbelievable that we're creating vast areas of monoculture, mile after mile, just to be cut down as fast as they grow, to be shipped thousands of miles to be burned just for people's electricity. It just doesn't make sense. What about all the habitat that gets destroyed along the way?"

Simone Lovera, of the Global Forest Coalition in Paraguay, said: "Europe is going to cook the world's tropical forests to fight climate change; it's crazy." She said her group had obtained a report stating that Brazil is gearing up to meet the European woodchip demand, not by cutting down forests, but by expanding tree plantations by 27 million hectares, mostly of exotic species such as eucalyptus.

Last week, at the UN-sponsored World Forestry Congress in Buenos Aires, the agronomist engineer Hector Ginzo, an adviser to the Kyoto Protocol, stressed that plantations could not be classified as sustainable. He said UN rules "would never allow a plantation of eucalyptus or other fast-growing trees for use as pulp or wood to be considered a sustainable forestry project, because that kind of production favours monoculture forests and the carbon capture is lost when the trees are cut down".

The Global Forest Coalition said that, in South America, tree plantations have had devastating effects on people and the environment, and have nothing like the biodiversity or ecological function of natural forests, whether they are first or even second growth. These plantations, it said, are "green deserts" because of the amount of water they consume, and because of the lack of native wildlife.

Scientific American recently reported that Sweden uses a pretty strange source for some of its heating fuel: rabbits. Stockholm has an overabundance of the cotton-tailed critters, and the hungry bunnies are decimating city parks. To cut back on bunny populations and create a greener source of heating fuel for Swedes, city employees round up the rabbits, shoot them, freeze them and then ship them to a heating plant where they’re incinerated. And yes, the thought of it makes our soul hurt, too.

Tyler Hamilton at technology Review has a post on a study that shows that turning biomass into electricity is more beneficial than turning it into transportation fuels (though the same arguments surrounding food vs fuel and soil depletion apply obviously) - Biofuels vs. Biomass Electricity.

A study published today in Science concludes that, on average, using biomass to produce electricity is 80 percent more efficient than transforming the biomass into biofuel. In addition, the electricity option would be twice as effective at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The results imply that investment in an ethanol infrastructure, even if based on more efficient cellulosic processes, may prove misguided. The study was done by a collaboration between researchers at Stanford University, the Carnegie Institute of Science, and the University of California, Merced.

There's also the potential, according to the study, of capturing and storing the carbon dioxide emissions from power plants that use switchgrass, wood chips, and other biomass materials as fuel--an option that doesn't exist for burning ethanol. Biomass, even though it releases CO2 when burned, overall produces less carbon dioxide than do fossil fuels because plants grown to replenish the resource are assumed to reabsorb those emissions. Capture those combustion emissions instead and sequester them underground, and it would "result in a carbon-negative energy source that removes CO2 from the atmosphere," according to the study.

The researchers based their findings on scenarios developed under the Biofuel Analysis Meta-Model (EBAMM) created at the University of California, Berkeley. The analysis covered a range of harvested crops, including corn and switchgrass, and a number of different energy-conversion technologies. Data collected were applied to electric and combustion-engine versions of four vehicle types--small car, midsize car, small SUV, and large SUV--and their operating efficiencies during city and highway driving.

The study accounted for the energy required to convert the biomass into ethanol and electricity, as well as for the energy intensiveness of manufacturing and disposing of each vehicle type. Bioelectricity far outperformed ethanol under most scenarios, although the two did achieve similar distances when the electric vehicles--specifically the small car and large SUV--weren't designed for efficient highway driving.

The potential is even greater for the bioelectricity option because under the EBAMM model, "we did not account for heat as a [usable] by-product, which would make the electricity pathway even more advantageous," says Elliott Campbell, lead author on the study and an assistant professor at the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, part of the University of California, Merced.

Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, conducted a similar but much broader study released in December that focused more on the environmental effects of various energy options. He doesn't support using biomass for either electricity generation or ethanol production but says that he isn't surprised to find that the ethanol option performed worst.

Burning biomass, says Jacobson, "is not necessarily an efficient way of generating electricity, but it's more efficient than making biofuel." It just makes sense, he adds: "Electric vehicles are four to five times more efficient than combustion vehicles."

Cleantech.com reports that the new fruit of the loom in Georgia is biomass power - Underwear factory coverted to 17MW biomass plant.

Henry County, Va.-based Multitrade Biomass Holdings said it plans to build a $21.5 million biomass facility inside an abandoned underwear factory in Rabun Gap, Ga.

The former Fruit of the Loom factory is expected to be converted into a 17 megawatt plant producing energy from local forestry industry waste for Green Power EMC, a nonprofit group of 42 electricity corporations. Tucker, Ga.-based Green Power plans to derive renewable energy from sources such as biomass, solar, wind and hydro and sell it to customers of electricity co-ops.

The plant is expected to create 95 jobs and power 10,000 homes. It's expected to be operational in August 2009.

Biomass power is something I'm lukewarm about, but I'm still interested in tracking its (hopefully shortlived) growth as a response to rising energy prices. The New York Times has a report on developments in the US - As Biomass Power Rises, a Wood-Fired Plant Is Planned in Texas.

The city of Austin, Tex., approved plans on Thursday for a huge plant that will burn waste wood to make electricity, the latest sign of rising interest in a long-dormant form of renewable energy.

When completed in 2012, the East Texas plant will be able to generate 100 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 75,000 homes. That is small by the standards of coal-fired power plants, but plants fueled by wood chips, straw and the like — organic materials collectively known as biomass — have rarely achieved such scale.

Austin Energy, a city-owned utility, has struck a $2.3 billion, 20-year deal to be the sole purchaser of electricity from Nacogdoches Power, the company that will build the plant for an undisclosed sum. On Thursday, Austin’s City Council unanimously approved the deal, which would bring the Austin utility closer to its goal of getting 30 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2020.

“We saw this plant as very important because it gives us a diversity of fuels,” said Roger Duncan, general manager of Austin Energy. “Unlike solar and wind, we can run this plant night or day, summer or winter.”

More than 100 biomass power plants are connected to the electrical grid in the United States, according to Bill Carlson, former chairman of USA Biomass, an industry group. Most are in California or the Northeast, but some of the new ones are under development in the South, a region with a large wood pulp industry.

The last big wave of investment in the biomass industry came during the 1980s and early 1990s. Interest is rising again as states push to include more renewable power in their mix of electricity generation.

Last week, Georgia Power asked state regulators to approve the conversion of a coal plant into a 96-megawatt biomass plant. An additional 50-megawatt plant in East Texas is expected to be under construction by September.

Mike Whiting, chief executive of Decker Energy International, a developer and owner of four biomass plants around the country, estimates 15 to 20 new biomass plants are proposed in the Southeast, though not all will be built. The region is, he said, “the best part of the U.S. for growing trees.”

In California, which has the most biomass plants in the country, momentum is reviving after years of decline. The number of biomass plants has dropped to fewer than 30, from 48 in the early 1990s, because of the closing of many sawmills and the energy crisis early this decade, said Phil Reese of the California Biomass Energy Alliance. Six to eight of the mothballed plants are gearing up to restart, Mr. Reese said, helping California meet its renewable energy goals.

U.S. Senator Daniel Akaka and U.S. Representatives Neil Abercrombie and Mazie Hirono helped launch Hawaii's newest renewable energy project at a Hawaiian blessing ceremomy for the Hu Honua Bioenergy Facility in the community of Pepeekeo, on the Big Island's Hamakua Coast.

Financed, operated and majority-owned by MMA Renewable Ventures, the 24-megawatt (MW) power station will convert locally grown biomass into electricity, supporting the state’s target of 20% renewable energy by 2020.

Local union leader Rickard Baker, division director of ILWU 142 Hawaii, said that more than 95% of the area’s residents approached have signed a petition in support of converting the coal-fired plant into a biomass-to-energy facility.

Dave Roberts has come back from a trip to Austria brimming with enthusiasm about the human-scale, renewable, domestic power systems reviving rural Austrian economies that he discovered.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in Salzburg, we took a field trip to a few examples of biomass in rural Austria. The country is over 40 percent forested, and over half of the forest is owned by small farmers with less than 40 hectares (just under 100 acres), so the government has put a priority on encouraging biomass use as a substitute for fossil fuels. It's a stable domestic industry, carefully managed with an eye toward local economic development and, as with just about everything I laid eyes on in Austria, proper aesthetics.

The first place we stopped was a biomass district heating co-op run by 18 farmers. To the right is the enormous pile of wood chips we saw in a huge, beautifully wrought barn.

The chips are continuously and automatically fed into the hyper-efficient furnace to the left, where they are burned at high temperatures. The combustion heats water, which is then fed through a network of pipes underneath the village. A system of heat exchangers uses the water to heat each house.

Obviously the farmers make more money during the cold winters, but the co-op provides a stable, predictable supplemental income throughout the year.

The next place we visited was a biomass digester. Instead of burning pure wood, it feeds a mixture of wood, straw, and godknowswhat from that yellow bin in front (it was stinky!) into the huge tank to the left, where it ferments. The gases released by the fermentation are captured, fed into the building to the far right (not quite visible), and burned to create electricity, which is fed into the grid. The leftover sludgy stuff is distributed as mulch. The hot air created by the generator is piped into a building next door and used to dry wood chips, which are then shredded and used to make compact wood pellets.

Delightful! Both these facilities were so ... I don't want to say low-tech. Analog. They were like fantastic Rube Goldberg machines, squeezing every bit of useful energy out of local, renewable material. This stuff is heavily subsidized by the government, but it has helped (along with tourism) revive several local economies.

Let's keep going! ...

I was taken aback. There was no heat coming off it at all, no noise, not so much as a vibration. But he opened the gray door and sure enough, there was another porthole through which we could see dancing flames.

I came away from the day utterly charmed and impressed. Like so little in day-to-day American life, these systems are simple, resilient, and predictable, locally owned and run, and of appropriate scale and character. They fit.

PG&E's "Next 100" blog has an interesting post on a combined solar thermal / biomass power plant in California - This is Not Your Grandparents' Renewable Energy Project.

Chalk this up to the "only in California" file - the concepts of traditional renewables and emerging renewables. Thanks to California's natural heritage, PG&E has a long history of utilizing hydroelectric, geothermal and wind resources to meet energy demand.

In the early 1900s, real horse power moved a water wheel in the construction of PG&E's DeSabla hydroelectric power station.Well, as a sign of things to come, enter PG&E's newest renewable energy project with San Joaquin Solar LLC, a subsidiary of Martifer Renewables Electricity LLC.

Through our agreements with San Joaquin Solar, we're adding 106.8 megawatts (MW) of solar thermal-biofuel hybrid power to our energy mix. What's cool about this project is the combination of two renewable resources abundant in California - solar energy and biofuel from the Central Valley - to produce renewable energy around-the-clock, even at night.

Here's how it works: Martifer's hybrid projects combine Luz solar thermal trough technology and steam turbines powered by biomass to produce hybrid solar-biofuel renewable electricity 24/7. Each hybrid project will require 250,000 tons of biofuel annually, which will come from a combination of locally-produced agricultural wastes, green wastes and livestock manure.

Luz solar thermal trough technology. Photo by Luz InternationalThese projects will be located near Coalinga, CA. And for anyone who's driven the I-5 to L.A., you'll have experienced first-hand the abundance of biomass material.

IN A SIGNIFICANT milestone, the foundations for the world's largest solar dish were poured only 48 hours ago at an Australian National University site. Just in time for World Environment Day today, the project is being hailed by a group of renewable energy experts as the first step towards converting Australia's fossil-fuel based economy into a major exporter of "liquid sunshine" - that is methanol - a favourite with some racing car drivers.

A 500-square-metre parabolic dish - that's bigger than an average house block - consisting of 424 mirrored panels will be erected over coming months as a prototype for a solar farm planned for Whyalla, South Australia.

Private company Wizard Power has partnered with the solar thermal boffins at the ANU, led by Keith Lovegrove, to build what they say will be the first renewable energy power station capable of producing electricity around the clock by the end of next year.

Combined with an ammonia-based storage system, the solar thermal concentrator will not only create carbon emission-free base load power, its technology could also be used to one day solve the widening oil crisis and supplant high-earning coal exports, Prof Lovegrove said in Melbourne this week.

"The biggest risk for the Australian economy out of adapting to climate change is not reducing our own emissions, but losing our biggest export when the rest of the world stops buying our coal . . . that exposes us to more risk," Prof Lovegrove said. "It's dead obvious, we have to find a way of exporting energy in greater volumes than our gas resources can produce and with higher value than uranium can generate."

Prof Lovegrove's idea for a "fully sustainable future" would have farmers growing salt water algae - which he says produces about 40 times more biomass than food crops per hectare.

Once harvested the algae would be "gasified" at 700 degrees Celsius in massive pressure cookers powered by energy from solar dishes. The resulting methane gas would be put under another high-pressure industrial process and emerge as methanol.