A perfect example of what is wrong with the energy picture on Oregon

The Energy Trust Of Oregon has a great thing going for it. Whenever rates are raised for electricity, the trust is guranteed an ever increasing percentage of the new rate increase. Oregonians who are unfortunate to have their power supplied by Pacific Power(we are a victim of PP) has had the misfortune to have had our rates raised 4 times in the last two years. It is a despicable thing that the legislators did to the citizens of Oregon when they created the Energy Trust. Here is what the Energy Trust does with the funds it collects: The Energy Trust, which uses the electricity tax revenue to fund energy conservation programs and subsidize renewable energy projects around Oregon and the Northwest. Pacific Power just hit us with another rate increase of almost 15%! PP is rationalizing this increase due to increased costs and for providing new infrastructure and providing future supplies of green energy. So the stinking environmentalists and econazis are partly to blame for this fiasco as they set the table for Oregonians for years to come. They ruined the timber industry, the fishing industry, ranching and farming has taken a hit and Oregon's economy is still in a tailspin. Now we get a double digit rate increase on top of spiking gasoline prices.


Before I forget, in this next post check out what the Bulletin exposes about the fees(taxes) we pay to remove some days that we never had a say in whether we wanted them removed. Makes me furious and almost rabid with rage.

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Your pain is the Energy Trust’s gain
Bend Bulletin
Published: January 26. 2011 4:00AM PST

Pacific Power customers scrambling to work this year’s double-digit rate increase into their electricity budgets should be sure to set aside a little extra for the tax man, better known as the Energy Trust of Oregon. Their pain is the Energy Trust’s gain.


Most people know the Energy Trust as the government-created nonprofit that conducts free home-energy audits. Of course, nothing the Energy Trust does is really free. But many of the people footing the bill know little about the trust or, we suspect, its claim on their hard-earned money. So here’s a little history.


Back in 1999, the Legislature told the state’s two big utilities (Portland General Electric and PacifiCorp, which operates in Oregon as Pacific Power) to apply a 3 percent charge to all retail electricity sales. This charge is merely a tax by another name, and the money it generates is used for a variety of purposes. Some goes to education service districts to make schools more energy-efficient. Some pays to weatherize low-income housing. But most, almost 75 percent, of the so-called “public purpose charge” goes to the Energy Trust, which uses the electricity tax revenue to fund energy conservation programs and subsidize renewable energy projects.


The tax revenue that flows through the Energy Trust’s hands is significant. During the 18-month period from January 2009 through June 2010, the trust’s portion of the electricity tax amounted to nearly $86 million, or roughly $57 million per year. Among the projects subsidized with that money, according to a December 2010 Energy Trust report, are numerous wind generation facilities, solar installations and, last but not least, a project that collects methane percolating through the Douglas County landfill.


The trust’s funding mechanism ensures that Oregonians will continue to pay for more of the same — lots more. When you receive a fixed percentage of an ever-rising number, as the trust and its electricity-tax partners do, you collect more and more money whether you need it or not. Thus, while Pacific Power had to make a case to the Public Utility Commission for the rate increases that kicked in last month, the Energy Trust automatically capitalizes on Pacific Power’s work. You know, kind of like a parasite.


PUC spokesman Bob Valdez acknowledges that “as retail bills go up, the share that goes to the Energy Trust for energy conservation ... goes up as well.” But he says the “Legislature did that so it would keep track with inflation and also accommodate a growing number of customers and ... be there for any emerging technology that might come up.”


Maybe so. But it’s hard to believe lawmakers back in 1999 supported the weirdness at work today. One of the justifications for Pacific Power’s recent hikes is the cost of “green” power, which Oregon’s renewable portfolio standards require utilities to provide. Thus is the high cost of Oregon’s renewable energy mandate forcing Oregonians to pay more money to a nonprofit that subsidizes ... renewable energy.


But it gets crazier still. Last September, the PUC allowed Pacific Power to apply a 1.7 percent surcharge to electricity bills in order to pay for the removal of several dams. The electricity tax applies to that portion of Oregonians’ electricity bills, too, says the PUC’s Valdez. Thus, must Oregonians pay the Trust more simply because they have to cough up money to help fish. One environmental tax begets another.


Fortunately, the burden imposed by Oregon’s electricity tax can also be a great opportunity. It all depends on the willingness of lawmakers to help taxpayers despite the certain objections of environmentalists and organizations that feed on electricity tax revenue. Lawmakers who do respect taxpayers should ask, first, whether the Energy Trust has become obsolete. It seems to us that the proliferation of subsidies and mandates supporting efficiency and renewable energy are quickly making it so.


Moreover, the trust’s funding mechanism forces Oregonians to pay an environmental tax on other environmental taxes. They must pay twice, for instance, for the state’s renewable portfolio standard. They pay once in the form of higher electricity costs and once again in the form of increased electricity-tax contributions.


Well, here’s an opportunity for lawmakers to prove that they can cut expensive programs that have outlived their usefulness. Better yet, by doing so they can pat themselves on the back — with justification — for doing something to moderate electricity costs that their own policies are driving skyward.

Original article is here.

New EPA regulation may kill biomass plant before it can start up in Oregon

Another big thanks and middle finger raised to obama, environazi's and the EPA. In his rush to push the United States into the green age of clean, alternative energy, a new EPA regulation may kill this biomass plant in John Day, Oregon. John Day is in Eastern Oregon where the economy has been severely crippled by the recession that was 'over' in June, 2009.The unemployment rate in this area is running at about 17%, or higher.


The new EPA regulation is to control emissions from ALL solid-fuel boilers regardless of their size, application and location. The regulation applies to this almost ready to start plant as it does to the huge coal fired power plants all across the country. The domino effect of this plant not starting up would be large. Not only would jobs at the plant be lost but also the jobs in transportation and the logging/timber jobs lost. This biomass plant has been designed to burn the debris left over from logging, thinning, slash piling of the timber industry. Timber and wood that would normally be burned in slash piles can now be burned to produce very, very clean energy to power this plant, which produces Wood pellets and bricks.


So to all you environazi's out there who have never worked an honest day in your collective lives it is time to climb out of that tree you have been sitting in and celebrate another stupid moment in environmental history. There is much to party about here! The lost jobs, the lost reduction of  woody fuels that can and does contribute to forest fires, the loss of tax revenues to John day and the surrounding area, the loss of more homes and people forced out of their homes, the waste of tax payers money to build this plant, the loss of fuel to help heat schools, hospitals, colleges, and yes, even homes. This may be such a cause to celebrate that all you earth muffins, tree huggers and prairie fairies may even want to shave you legs, armpits and take a bath in the closest stream or river and come party with the locals at the Employment office in John day. I will even buy you bums the disposable razors and soap. More dependence of the nanny state and letting the government decide what is best for all of us, not!

This is the stupidity of the environmental movement. This is just one small event, place that will cause a much larger harm than you green idiots realize. Multiply this by one hundred places, plants, etc and this is what cap and trade type legislation will do for our country, NOTHING but cause the above. There is a chance that the EPA will modify the regulation but will they do it for just this one biomass plant or retool the regulation for the benefit of the entire country? Time will tell and if there is an update I will post it here. From the Bend Bulletin.

New plant threatened by EPA rule

Federal money helped build John Day plant to turn biomass into wood pellets.

By Ed Merriman / The Bulletin

 JOHN DAY —A $6 million biomass processing plant built with the help of a $4.8 million federal stimulus grant may be put out of business before the switch is turned on due to a new environmental regulation.


During a tour Wednesday of the biomass plant being built by Malheur Lumber Co. in John Day, company officials expressed concern that a new Environmental Protection Agency standard imposing dramatically stricter limits on emissions from solid-fuel boilers could kill the market for wood pellets and wood bricks produced by the plant.


“I agree with the concept of trying to reduce air pollution, but virtually no commercial boiler currently operating in the country would meet the new EPA rule as currently written,” said John Shelk, managing director of Ochoco Lumber in Prineville, parent company of Malheur Lumber.


“Here we are doing something that is very positive. We are taking wood biomass from forest health thinning projects and we’re using it to manufacture a renewable energy product that replaces fossil fuels, and the EPA rule could kill it before it gets off the ground,” Shelk said.


As published in the Federal Register on June 4, the EPA’s new boiler emission standards appear to run counter to President Barack Obama’s stated goal to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, he said.


The EPA rules are currently scheduled to take effect in January.


Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA is charged with setting emission standards for hazardous pollutants based on the best performing, lowest-emitting technology available and in use. But Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has submitted three letters to the EPA over the past six months, urging the agency to use its flexibly to adopt different standards for different types of boilers, rather than using a one-size fits all approach.


“If the EPA does not utilize its flexibility in this area, I am concerned about the potential impact such regulations could have on boilers utilized by thousands of small and mid-size businesses already hit hard by the recession,” Wyden wrote. “I am especially concerned with the impact on the wood products industry, which has been dramatically affected by the downturn in the housing and construction markets.”


Mike Billman, timber manager at Malheur Lumber, told media and others invited to tour the plant Wednesday that its construction has kept 15 to 30 workers employed since last spring.


The construction jobs pay prevailing union scale wages, which range from around $22 per hour to nearly $30 per hour, under the Davis Bacon Act, said Rick Minster, business development officer with the Oregon Business Development Department, which submitted the grant request for funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.


Helping forests, heating buildings

Doug Gochnour, supervisor of the Malheur National Forest, said there’s such a backlog of thinning needed to reduce fuel loading and thin overstocked forests at high risk of massive fires that he originally supported two stimulus grant applications, but there wasn’t enough stimulus funds awarded to fund the second plant planned for Burns in Harney County.


“We have a 10-year strategy for thinning projects to improve forest health and reduce fuel loading,” Gochnour said. “We are currently planning several projects ranging from 15,000 acres to 40,000 acres each where some pretty large-scale thinning and prescribed burning is needed.”


He said much of the 1.7-million acre Malheur National Forest are so overstocked that the trees can’t get enough nourishment to grow health and strong enough to resist disease.


“Our forests are too overcrowded to do prescribed burning. We need to thin them first before we can reintroduce fire to play its proper role,” Gochnour said. “If we tried to introduce prescribed burning with the current level of fuel loading, instead of creeping along the ground like in a natural healthy stand, we’d have massive spreading through the canopy and burning out of control.”


He said the type of forest health thinning projects that remove smaller trees ideal for supplying biomass is similar to the thinning that originally created most of the giant old growth forests prior to European settlement, when nomadic aboriginal tribes cut and utilized the smaller trees for firewood, building huts and teepees and other uses.


Under terms of the federal grant received for the John Day biomass plant, Billman said the plant is expected to create 10 to 12 long-term jobs, but that won’t be possible if the EPA rules kill the market for wood pellets and wood bricks.


Billman told tourgoers the plant is designed to grind up small logs from forest health and fire mitigation thinning projects and turn the sawdust into wood pellets and wood bricks for burning in wood stoves, pellet stoves and solid-fuel boilers used to heat schools, hospitals, airport terminals, prisons and government buildings.


He said the John Day airport has already installed one of the most efficient and cleanest boilers fired with wood pellets to support the biomass plant being built by Malheur Lumber, and the hospital in John Day is converting to a wood-pellet boiler as well.


“The boiler at the Burns hospital has already been converted to a pellet boiler, and we are working with the Prairie City School District to get pellet boilers in the schools,” Billman said.


About the boilers

Boyd Britton, a member of the Malheur County Board of Commissioners, said biomass projects like the plant under construction in John Day can bring back at least some of the thousands of timber sector jobs lost over the past 20 years in rural counties across the state.


“If we don’t do more things like this, we are never going to rebuild the rural economies,” Britton said.


Unfortunately, he said the EPA’s new boiler emission standards are dampening those hopes.


“We are familiar with the new EPA rule. I am just hoping it gets derailed, and most of the folks I know are hoping it gets derailed,” Britton said.


He said the government ought to support more innovative ideas like biomass plants that can help rebuild rural economies and help break the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.


Andrew Haden, vice president of A3 Energy Partners of Portland, who is a boiler expert and consultant on the Malheur Lumber biomass plant, said the German-made wood pellet-burning boilers installed at the Malheur airport and Burns hospital are the cleanest, most efficient boilers in the world.


“These boilers are 23 times cleaner than an EPA-certified wood stove,” Haden said. “These are very, very clean boilers, but the EPA standards they are proposing would mandate 50 times cleaner emissions than wood stoves.”


“These boilers burn so clean you can’t seen anything coming out of the smokestack. Compare that to the clouds of smoke that fill the sky when they burn slash piles, which is the alternative,” he added.


He said the problem with the EPA rules is that the agency has put small boilers that heat buildings like schools and hospitals under the same regulations targeting massive coal-fired power plants like the one in Boardman.


Haden said woody biomass industries are booming in other countries like Germany, Sweden, Australia and Finland because the governments are working with industry.


“(Governments) help them achieve the target together. It is not an adversarial situation like you have here, with the regulations going into effect in six months,” Haden said.


Appealing to the EPA

Earlier this month, Wyden and a number of other senators and representatives signed a letter urging the EPA to apply different standards to the smaller wood-fired boilers.


“We have heard positive signals that the EPA has gotten the message from all the senators who have spoken out on this,” Haden said.


Shelk said if the EPA rules are implemented as written, they would shut down most remaining lumber mills and disrupt the supply of kiln-dried lumber that is produced with steam heat from wood-fired boilers.


“You’d see a devastating ripple effect throughout the economy,” Shelk said. “The effect would be disproportionate in rural areas where most of the lumber mills and secondary wood products companies are that manufacture wood window frames, doors, paneling, wood cabinets, furniture and other products made with kiln-dried lumber,” Shelk said.


Original article is here.

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Environazis want to ban lead from bullets and fishing weights

My disdain for the environmentalists grows worse with each report, petition or suit that is filed, costing this country jobs, and much more. I am all for saving some old growth forests, cleaning up our water, air and soil but these far left environazis keep on taking one little piece after another. We cannot even drill, dam, or mine anymore, it seems. The seeds that were planted in the late 1950s and during the 1960s, 1970s have sprouted into evil organizations, lobbyists and domestic terrorist groups like Earth First!


Now comes this petition to ban lead in bullets and fishing weights. The two groups that submitted this petition state they are not anti-fishing or anti-hunting. Yeah, sure, and I am liberal who voted for the mullah in the White House, wants open borders, amnesty and all 2nd amendment rights made against the law. This is another attempt by this administration to strip away out 2nd amendment rights. I live about 15 miles away from the Nosler Manufacturing  Company.  Nosler produces some of the best ammunition and guns in the world. After hearing about this they went on record against these petitions and warned that they would result in lost jobs, increased costs for ammunition and guns. As to the petitions themselves? There has been no direct scientific evidence that lead from bullets and fishing weights is causing an environmental problem anywhere. From Chattanoogan.com. They want to take our guns away, and the demosocialistacrats will do this any way they can.

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Groups Petition EPA to Remove Lead from Hunting, Fishing

A coalition of groups lead by the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) and the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) has petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to ban "Lead Shot, Bullets and Fishing Sinkers" under the Toxic Substances Control Act.

Their formal petition gives the EPA 90 days to decide whether or not to ban the "manufacture, professing and distribution in commerce of lead shot, bullets and fishing sinkers." The petition says that while the government has implemented regulations to reduce exposure of human beings to lead in a variety of applications, lead ammunition and lost lead fishing tackle are "uncontrolled and lead remains widely encountered and distributed in the environment from these sources." The petition lists "significant" amounts of lead that end up in aquatic environments from lost or discarded fishing tackle, including lures, sinkers, lead core fishing line, downrigger cannonballs, weights, and a variety of fishing traps and nets that employ the use of lead.

With the wide variety of non-lead, nontoxic replacements for fishing tackle and firearms projectiles, the petition asks that the EPA mandate the removal of lead from those applications.

In a teleconference regarding their petition yesterday, representatives from the two groups stressed that their petition was not anti-hunting or fishing. Rather, they characterized their action as purely environmental.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation has taken exception with that characterization, calling the petition another assault on traditional ammo and fishing tackle.

You can read the petition to the EPA in its entirety by clicking here.

Original article can be found here

Environazis score a big win in New York. So how about 30% LESS electricity for New Yorkers?

So if the Indian Point Power plant gets shut down or even goes off line for updating, where will New York make up that 30% loss of electricity? Wind power, No. Solar energy, No. Hydroelectric, No. Wave energy, No. Raise rates and buy from out of state or Canada? Most likely. Welcome to the real Obama future for energy in America. "We will shut down our exisitng power plants whether they be nuclear, coal or natural gas, charge the rate payers more and then figure out what we will do to generate more energy." Can't you just hear Obama saying those words in some closed door meeting? So much for dope, change and a transparent administration. It is all about the lies!

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New York Denies Indian Point a Water Permit

NYT, In a major victory for environmental advocates, New York State has ruled that outmoded cooling technology at the Indian Point nuclear power plant kills so many Hudson River fish, and consumes and contaminates so much water, that it violates the federal Clean Water Act.

The decision is a blow to the plant’s owner, the Entergy Corporation, which now faces the prospect of having to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build stadium-size cooling towers, or risk that Indian Point’s two operating reactors — which supply 30 percent of the electricity used by New York City and Westchester County — could be forced to shut down.

Entergy officials said that they were “disappointed” in the ruling and that they might fight it in court. The original federal licenses for the two 1970s-era reactors expire in 2013 and 2015, and a water quality certificate is a prerequisite for a 20-year renewal by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But a prolonged appeal in New York could delay a shutdown, Diane Screnci, a spokeswoman for the commission, said late Saturday.

An Entergy spokesman said that converting Indian Point’s cooling system would cost $1.1 billion and would require shutting both reactors down entirely for 42 weeks.

The ruling in New York comes after President Obama pressed for the construction of new nuclear plants in his State of the Union address. But it is the second instance since of a state asserting its power to threaten an existing nuclear plant. In Vermont, the State Senate voted overwhelmingly in February to block operation of Entergy’s Vermont Yankee plant after 2012, citing leaks of radioactive tritium, inaccurate testimony by company officials and other problems.

Nuclear proponents said they hoped that the federal government would determine that the nation’s energy needs should take precedence over such state-level actions. “The N.R.C. may decide this is not a policy they’re going to give credence to,” said Arthur J. Kremer, chairman of the New York Affordable Reliable Electricity Alliance, of which Entergy is a member. “It’s bad news for investors in new power facilities and in upgrading old ones.”

The battle over Indian Point, which is in Buchanan, about 35 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, has been raging for decades, and the latest decision will not soon end that fight. Continue reading

Hat tip: Astute Bloggers