PACHA Sees Red Over Green Energy Plant

By 250 News

Proposed site for the Community Energy Plant, 5th Ave & Scotia   (Opinion250 file photo)

Prince George, B.C. -  Last week’s announcement of an $8.3-million dollar Community Energy System that will use hot water to heat a number of downtown city buildings, is not sitting well with a local watchdog group.  But the City hopes to allay concerns.

The People’s Action Committee for Healthy Air, or PACHA, is calling for an environmental impact assessment to look at the potential increase in fine particulate matter that will result from the proposed plant, which will burn biomass waste to fuel the hot water heating system.

PACHA says current PM2.5 levels need to be reduced in the city, and the group questions why City officials would seemingly go against recommendations just presented in the Mayor’s Task Force on Air Quality Improvement. 

The City’s Environmental Coordinator, Gina Layte Liston, the project will have to go through the federal Canadian Environmental Assessment  (CEA) process as a condition of funding from Ottawa.

"We don’t get a contract, or money, or anything until our project has been approved through that process," says Layte Liston.  "The other process that we have to go through, provincially, is a waste discharge permit (air permit)."

She says there are several different levels to the CEA process and the City won’t know for two or three weeks just what type of screening and review the community energy system will be subject to -- it can take three months, or six months, but Layte Liston assures, all of the processes have a public consultation process.

As for the impact on PM2.5 emissions, the Environmental Coordinator says keeping a lid on fine particulate matter was paramount in planning the project.  Layte Liston says a plant of this size would generally produce between five- and six-tonnes of particulate matter, but the City told its consultants PM2.5 emissions had to be below one-tonne.  To achieve that goal, the plant will double up on the best air pollution control technology available at this point, electrostatic precipitators.

Layte Liston offers some examples to put the proposed PM2.5 emissions into perspective:

• permits for some of the local sawmills are at about 270-tonnes, the community energy plant would be one-tonne
• "A woodstove produced before the 1990s, which we have a lot of those in homes in Prince George, creates about 2.5-kilograms over three to four days.  The Community Energy System is going to produce 2.5-kg in a day."
• "Our system is going to use about 4,000-tones of biomass a year.  If that same amount, which in a lot of cases happens, is open burned in Prince George or in the region, it produces about 56-tonnes."

PACHA is also concerned about any corresponding increase in truck traffic to the facility and, while Layte Liston says there are no specific numbers in terms of emissions right now, she says it has been looked at and it’s expected to be a minimal amount.  She says it’s expected a B-train of biomass waste will be trucked to the plant every three or four days.  "And, generally, that same transportation would be trucking it up to the landfill, so we will not be increasing what is already existing and we’ll probably be decreasing it."

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