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Should this clean energy forum continue? From: Lynn Benander Date: 2007 Jul 02 18:02 UTC Short link
David Caputo asked me to forward this message to the list for him.
It's a response to John Bos's questions to him.
-----Original Message----- From: David Caputo [mailto:<email obscured>] Sent: Monday, July 02, 2007 12:16 AM To: Lynn Benander Subject: [Fwd: Re: [PV-Base Camp] Should this clean energy forum continue?] Dear John, Since you work for the company that is trying to build this plant, it's completely unsurprising that you would defend it. Upton Sinclair famously once said, "It's very hard to make a man understand something, when his salary depends on him not understanding." I've read in this forum that the intention is to allow the plant to burn whole trees. Is this not the case? How can you make such assurances? Will you reject truckloads of (or that contain) whole trees at the gate if they arrive? Who will be monitoring your input streams to make sure this is actually the case? Since you asked me to "cite" my source for my claim that vast sums are available for true clean-energy purposes, the law that created the Mass. Renewable Energy Trust reads: The money for the Trust comes from a systems benefit charge paid by ratepayers of investor-owned utilities in Massachusetts. The average residential ratepayer pays approximately 50 cents a month, or $6 a year. The law was passed in 1998. It's now 2007. 304 out of 354 Massachusetts communities (85%) are served by investor-owned utilities. There are about 2.5 million households in Mass. That means approximately 2.1 million households pay into the fund. On top of this, using this formula and data from the US Census, there are another half a million businesses, that usually have higher electric bills than households, so we'll say they each kick in $12 a year. The basic formula then is ((2.1 x $6) + (.5 x $12)) x 9 years x $1 million = $167.4 million (and I know I'm significantly underestimating). I could call the MTC and find out the exact number, as could you, but it's Sunday and I'm trying to just show you how there is certainly quite a bit of money in the fund to which I refer. Didn't you read in the papers a while back about the State Legislature trying to grab the money for the General Fund? They weren't talking about peanuts, they were talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. Is my math wrong? Do they only have a couple hundred thou or something? I must also ask for YOUR citation for this "fast accumulation" of currently undisposable wood waste, that you think your plant is so urgently needed to burn, lest we be overrun. I haven't seen vast piles accumulating anywhere, or read about them in the news. Where is all this happening? Is it really the best solution to truck it all to Russell and burn it? I doubt it. One more question... how do you handle all this waste from new home construction without burning whole trees? Are you saying that you just chop them up first? (then they wouldn't be "whole", I guess) Or that you only burn the small branches and not the trunks and roots? I don't understand. Please explain how this can be so. David Caputo President Positronic Design http://www.PositronicDesign.com Publisher http://www.Hidden-Hills.com http://www.TotallyFixed.com No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.476 / Virus Database: 269.9.14/883 - Release Date: 7/1/2007 12:19 PM