QUESTION: I just read about President Haeger's commitment to reversing climate change. Good article. However, at the end of the article there is a suggestion that NAU might use biomass as an alternative fuel:
"Two biomass generators could burn wood particles to generate as much as 3 megawatts of electricity, which could meet one-third of NAU's electrical needs."
Any type of burning will produce carbon dioxide and that does not help reverse global warming. Burning also impacts air quality. I think a better alternative would be retrofitting NAU buildings for
solar or wind power. Is this being considered?
Patricia M. Ellsworth, Ph.D.
Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals
HUNGATE: Patricia is absolutely right about burning producing CO2. The idea with biomass is that if the material is sustainably harvested (restoration thinning, for a number of reasons, counts as sustainable harvest), then the CO2 is re-absorbed by regrowing vegetation, negating the emissions. Put another way, biomass energy relies on a fast carbon cycle, where CO2 released by burning is taken up again by vegetation.
The air quality issue is really important—while slash pile burning (which is typically done in forest thinning projects)—results in very poor combustion and thus high emissions of particulate (bad air), biomass energy generators are engineered to burn very efficiently, so the particulate emissions are far, far lower. With plants on campus, this would be a very high priority.
KOCH: The point about slash piles is important for a slightly different reason also. Given that restoration thinning is happening, and that it leaves piles of slash that are burned in the forest (producing the particulate-laden smoke), why not burn it cleanly AND generate usable energy from it? In this way, the use of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) is avoided. This approach of avoiding use of fossil fuels by extracting energy from wood waste that would be burned any way actually reduces total CO2 emitted.
All this said it would also be very nice to see the university explore the use of additional alternative energy sources.
BOWEN: As part of the President Haeger's climate change commitment, NAU will begin a
multipronged approach to making the campus carbon neutral by the year 2020. About 40 percent of our carbon impact can be reduced through investmenting in projects that improve the efficiency of our existing building systems, constructing future carbon neutral buildings like Applied Research and Development, reducing our overall energy usage and increasing the efficiency our vehicles, computers, lights and equipment.
We also plan to improve our use of mass transit, reduce travel through videoconferencing and many other straightforward changes.
The remaining 60 percent reduction of carbon impact reduction will be done by addition of non-carbon-producing renewable energy production, primarily wind and solar, including the development of large-scale wind and solar energy production projects off campus where the wind resource is greatest or where large acres of solar panels can be installed. We are fortunate to have the on-campus expertise and knowledge base to move relatively fast on these projects.
The university already has the large photovoltaic farm on south campus providing power for the ARD building which we can triple in size over the coming years. Also, we have a good start on identifying the first possible large-scale wind farm in conjunction with some private partners and APS.
I am in the process of forming an advisory board to oversee the climate change efforts and welcome continued input from campus.
