The Big Bend Climate Action Team (BBCAT) formed in May, 2005 before any mention of a coal plant for Tallahassee had been made. Its mission was to engage Tallahassee in the worldwide effort to abate climate change by planning a clean energy future for the City. BBCAT stated its intent to maximize the use of conservation and renewable energy sources in Tallahassee’s energy resource mix in two ways:

A.  By participating with both staff and commissioners in planning the City’s future energy resource mix.     

B.  By supporting the City’s climate-friendly initiatives, for example by helping to promote efficiency and renewable-energy programs.

To that end, we connected with staff of the City Electric Department, which was working on its 20-year plan for meeting Tallahassee’s energy needs (the “Integrated Resource Plan”). Staff welcomed our input and we formed two committees. One was to work on a renewable-energy part of the department’s efforts. The other was to work on the Integrated Resource Plan.

Within a few days after adopting these goals, we learned that Tallahassee had been invited to join as one-fifth partner with more than a dozen other Florida utilities to build an 800-megawatt coal-burning power plant, the North Florida Power Project, probably in Taylor County east of the City. Coal emits more global-warming carbon dioxide per unit of energy than any other fuel and is a major contributor to climate change, so BBCAT added to its mission statement:

C.  By opposing the City’s climate-hostile initiatives, for example its proposed partnership in a big coal plant in nearby Taylor County. Since then, throughout the summer and into the fall, BBCAT has found it necessary repeatedly to turn from its main goal of working to develop a clean energy plan for the City and instead to become engaged in opposing the coal plant plan per se.

It became one of our goals to insist upon holding a city-wide referendum to permit citizens to vote yes or no on the coal plant. The City Commission agreed in July to hold a referendum by mail-in ballot in the fall, with ballots going out on October 27 and due back in by November 17.

The City Commission also voted, however, to spend $3.6 million to “keep a place at the table” by taking the first, tentative step towards becoming a partner in the NFPP. (That investment has since almost doubled.) At the same time, at the urging of BBCAT, the Commission instructed Staff to “collaborate with the Big Bend Climate Action Team” in developing the Integrated Resource Plan for the City and allocated $250,000 to involve clean-energy consultants in the process.

BBCAT continued meeting with staff through the summer and made some progress both in learning how the planning process works and in proposing some modifications to the plan to reduce expenditures and shift the City’s energy resource plan toward alternative energy resources that are cleaner than coal. By fall, however, the effort to work together was faltering. Both Staff and BBCAT had become very busy. Meetings had become difficult to arrange. Discussions of alternatives were inadequate and BBCAT went ahead on its own to develop a clean energy plan for the City.

It seems important, now, to release our plan. It is important to let citizens and staff and commissioners see that it is, indeed, possible to develop an energy resource plan for the City of Tallahassee that involves no coal and greatly enhances development of alternative energy sources. With further discussion and research, and with renewed cooperation among citizens, staff, and commissioners, it should become possible to reach agreement on an energy plan for the City’s future that everyone can support with confidence and pride.

Caveats: First, it is the City’s job to plan to meet Tallahassee’s future energy needs. Our purpose is to ensure that the City adopts these two guiding principles in planning:

Fully identify and first target all the efficiency that will meet the City’s energy needs at a cost that is less than the cost of generating and delivering energy; and  

Increase the renewable energy resources in the City’s plan year by year so as to reach at least 12% of total energy resources by 2025

Our intent in this paper is to show one way in which this can be done.

Second, we are releasing this plan before it is altogether mature. We expect to keep modifying it in small ways as time permits us to refine the calculations and enter new, more current information. We do not, however, expectit to change in any substantial way.

Meeting Tallahassee’s Energy Needs

Quality. Any energy plan must first and foremost supply energy reliably and safely. Second, it must do so at a reasonable, and maximally stable, cost. To support both reliability and cost stability, diversity of energy resources is key.

Quantity. If no energy resources were added to the City’s resource mix, the City projects that it would, within 20 years, fall short of meeting demand plus the required 17% planning margin by 282 megawatts (MW), as shown in the graph that follows. One benchmark is the first year in which energy supply falls short of demand (plus margin). That year is 2011, and the shortfall is 12 MW. Another benchmark is the year in which the City falls short by more than 150 MW, the energy the proposed coal plant would deliver. That year is 2016, the 11th year of the 20-year plan. The year-by-year shortfalls are shown below:

Coal Plant Plan. As a one-fifth partner in the proposed 800-MW coal plant, the City would be entitled to 160 MW of its power, of which 10 MW would be needed to generate the energy and 150 MW would flow to Tallahassee along about 60 miles of transmission lines. Of the $360,000,000 to be spent by the City, the breakdown is:

            Cost to build transmission lines                  $60,000,000     

            Construction cost                                        $200,000,000

            Pollution controls                                        $100,000,000

These amounts would not be paid off in 20 years, because most likely the City would finance the coal plant over a 30-year span of time. At the end of 20 years, the City would have paid $390 million in principal and interest, and there would be $162 million still to pay.

A quality energy-supply plan has to be, above all, reliable and reasonable in cost, and to achieve these characteristics it should rely on a diversity of energy resources. It should also be environmentally clean. Advocates of the coal plant plan say that the plant would be reliable, providing electricity for the City for decades to come. Regarding cost, coal prices are lower than those of natural gas at present, and natural gas prices have risen dramatically in recent years. Coal would lower fuel costs and would also add diversity to the City’s fuel mix, helping to stabilize electric rates. Moreover, the coal plant would be one of the cleanest of its kind, meeting all federal and state emissions standards.

Concerns about the Coal Plant Plan. Those who oppose the coal plant do so for many reasons. The reliability of the supply is not guaranteed, given that disruptions of both delivery and transmission can occur due to hurricanes and sabotage. Its safety is not guaranteed, because this coal plant entails significant pollution problems. Current emissions standards are weak for three major pollutants (sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter), are completely inadequate for mercury, and are nonexistent for carbon dioxide. The cost of coal compares favorably with natural gas now, but the city’s own projections show that natural gas prices are presently at a peak and will drop through 2015. Similarly, the U.S. Department of Energy’s projections show natural gas prices at a peak, dropping through 2010. And while it is true that coal would add diversity to the City’s fuel mix, it is just another fossil fuel like natural gas, and does nothing to reduce reliance on fossil fuels in general. At the end of 20 years, the City would still be 97% percent dependent on fossil fuels and would be burning more of them than it is doing now.

TIME Plan, A Clean-Energy Alternative. “TIME” stands for “Tallahassee Initiative for Managing Energy.” We urge that Tallahassee take a leadership role in managing its own energy locally, rather than relying on a power plant that is sixty miles away and mostly under the control of other utilities. Our plan also offers reliability. It is a much cleaner and safer alternative than burning coal, and it will reduce the costs of electricity increasingly, year by year. All fossil fuel prices are expected to rise for the foreseeable future, whereas many clean energy prices are falling. The TIME plan introduces true diversity into the City’s energy resource mix by adding significant quantities of two other kinds of resources: energy efficiency, and renewable energy. At the end of 20 years, Tallahassee would be only 67% dependent on fossil fuels.

The TIME plan has five parts, and all can be launched immediately:

            1. Energy efficiency and conservation

            2. Clean biomass

            3. Distributed generation (using natural gas)

            4. Solar water-heating program

            5. Solar electricity

Energy efficiency and conservation are the cleanest and least costly of the energy resources that are available to reliably meet the City’s growing needs. In any energy plan, these resources should always be evaluated first and all resources should be selected that cost less to save a watt or watt-hour than it would cost to generate a watt or watt-hour.

Energy efficiency gets the same, or more, electrical work done using less electricity. Motors that run more smoothly, light bulbs that burn brighter and at the same time cooler, buildings that are more comfortable and require less air conditioning are examples of energy efficiency at work. Conservation means a slightly different thing, simply not wasting energy. Turning off unneeded lights or turning off the air conditioner when no one is at home are examples of conservation. From here on, we will refer to both energy efficiency and conservation simply as “efficiency.”

We are impressed with the example of the Texas utility, Austin Energy. Austin Energy has made its citizens aware that efficiency is a resource, just as natural gas or coal is, because like a penny, a watt saved is a watt earned. The use of efficiency to meet energy needs, therefore, is a means of generating energy.

Using a broad range of efficiency devices and programs, Austin Energy has, over the past twenty years, “built” a “conservation power plant” with a 600 MW capacity. If Tallahassee were to match Austin’s level of achievement for its size, our city could, in the next twenty years, build an “efficiency power plant” of its own. This power plant would have a capacity of 150 MW, the same number of megawatts intended for the proposed coal plant. Of this, about 26 MW would be available by 2012, the year the projected coal plant might begin to operate. It would take longer to ramp the efficiency program up to full capacity but the other four parts of the TIME plan would cover all energy shortfalls meanwhile.

Few people have any idea how tremendous is the potential for making a city’s energy use more efficient. The principles can be applied to enterprises of every size, from installing efficient little light bulbs to building whole industrial parks and apartment complexes. The ingredients of efficiency programs include not only devices and services but loans, rebates, community education, builder training, assistance in marketing, and more.

The Big Bend Climate Action Team has proposed numerous efficiency initiatives to the City. If adopted, an aggressive efficiency program would cost less to create, and save more on fuel, than would the proposed coal plant. Here is a summary of our calculations for the two alternatives over the 20-year planning period (details of our assumptions and calculations are in the Appendix, Part A):

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            Efficiency program:

                       Cost of program                         $120 million

                       Fuel costs avoided                    $250 million

            Coal plant plan:

                       Cost to build                               $390 million*

                       Fuel costs avoided                    $114 million

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*This $390 million represents the principal and interest paid over the first

20 years of a 30-year loan for $360 million at 3.5%. At the end of the 20

years, a balance of $162 million would still remain to be paid.

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To a considerable extent, energy generated by efficiency tends to “stick,” although there is some slippage. Insulation, once installed, remains and does its job with little decline in performance. Efficient light bulbs have long lives and most remain in place for many years, but when replacing them, users may backslide and install incandescent bulbs again, losing the earlier efficiency gain. Efficiency programs whose benefits do persist deliver energy savings year after year without requiring the burning of any additional fuel.

While saving more than $250 million from the TIME program’s efficiency program alone, Tallahassee could also be saving millions more from its other programs.

The term biomass refers to organic materials of all kinds, from cornstalks and tree trimmings to garbage. Clean biomass includes only clean organic materials such as wood. Leon County is one of the top-rated counties in the southeast for potential power generation from clean, woody biomass. (A reason this biomass is considered clean is that it emits no sulfur, 70% less nitrogen oxide, and 91% less mercury than coal per unit of electricity produced.)

Among possible sources of woody biomass supply are roadside wood waste, tree trimmings, trees thinned from forest land, scrap untreated lumber, and trees cleared from development sites. Supplemented by a constantly replanted crop of fast-growing trees, these sources could produce a reliable supply of biomass that could flow in a steady stream to two or three or more biomass plants.

Because it is continuously supplied from new growing matter, biomass counts as a renewable energy resource. Biomass “burning” is pollution-controlled, unlike open wood burning, and technologies for extracting energy from biomass also have developed that involve still cleaner chemical methods such as anaerobic fermentation or pyrolysis. These processes yield useful byproducts such as dry ice and fertilizer.

Our estimates indicate that Tallahassee could realistically have a 20-MW biomass generating capacity by 2012 and 50 MW by 2025, the end of the 20-year planning period. Costs of energy generated from biomass are lower than from any fossil fuel, even coal (see Appendix, Part B)

This element of the TIME plan relies on a fossil fuel, natural gas, but uses it as efficiently as possible. Distributed generation entails building appropriately sized power plants physically close to sites of high demand. Plants at such sites can deliver considerably more energy to end users than can distant power plants, particularly if there is a need for heating and/or cooling of nearby buildings. Energy is delivered to points of use with few or no losses in transmission. Distributed generation plants can be run during the day to serve daytime needs, and during the night, when demand is less, to make heat or ice for the next day’s climate control, refrigeration, and other purposes. Because more of the energy generated is used to do work, big fuel savings are achieved. Fuel costs may be halved by distributed generation. (A 10-MW distributed generation plant relieves the central power plant from having to produce 20 MW.)

Many places around Tallahassee are suitable for distributed generation: Innovation Park, Florida State and Florida A&M universities, Tallahassee Community College, Governors Square Mall, Tallahassee Mall, and the downtown and edge-of-town government centers. If all of these sites were to be served this way, Tallahassee could reduce its energy demand by 160 MW or more. Because, however, planning time is needed to coordinate with partners and to accommodate their timing, we estimate the City’s potential savings from distributed generation may be as low as 10 MW by 2012 and 30 by 2025.