Energy policy needs to consider more than just wind and solar
Without the right backing and that includes legislation national, statewide and local, green technology like waste conversion to energy, will have difficulty gaining a foothold. Why should we care? Well four billion tons of waste a year has to go somewhere and without technologies that convert at least some of it to energy, the waste is simply going to keep taking up land as it grows.
As Martin LaMonica of CNET’s Green Tech blog writes,
The incumbent technology has a long, well understood track record, which means that breaking into the business with an alternative process–be it electricity from solar cells or heat from biomass–is tough because the incumbent technology has the benefits of scale and cost.
La Monica was writing about the tireless lobbying conducted by Ze-gen’s, president and CEO Bill Davis. Davis has been lobbying in Washington, in Massachusetts and in New Bedford. He is educating the policy makers about gasification technology. His company Ze-Gen has a demonstration facility that uses molten copper to turn construction waste in to carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Both gases can then be used to generate energy. The process is called gasification.
Although the Department of Energy is pro green technology that doesn’t mean that gasification plants like Ze-gen can expect favorable legislation or regulations to support this niche of the clean energy sector. Gasification plants currently don’t generate the amount of energy that large wind or solar farms can and that is where the DOE’s focus is at the moment.
Ze-gen has had better results from the Massachusetts and New Bedford policy makers but not enough to feel at ease. Although municipalities are looking to move from merely incinerating waste in an effort to control the volume, to gasification of the waste into energy, it still requires a great deal of finesse to actually get a plant through the regulation process and open.
Companies like Ze-gen fill a niche and a need in the energy field. They reduce waste to a useable form of energy killing two birds with one stone. Although the amount of energy generated is on a relatively small scale, the plan is to move to full scale plants that can generate considerably more energy. In order to get there, energy policy has to at least get out of the way.
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