El sector de la biomasa en USA

En el blog tomorrow is greener hacen alusión a los proyectos puestos en marcha en 2010 en USA donde aparece una planta de 50 MW en Aspen, en plenas Montañas Rocosas que estará operativa a lo largo de 2011. No hay más que pasearse por esa zona para darse cuenta el potencial tan impresionante que tiene toda esa zona para cualquier instalación de este tipo.

Biggest Biomass-to-Electricity Projects in 2010

Posted by Greener Tomorrow on January 28th, 2011

A list of the biggest biomass to electricity plants that went online in the U.S. is below. Unfortunately tracking down the largest biomass to electricity plants that came online globally proved more difficult. If any readers know of larger biomass to electricity plants that went online in 2010 in other regions, please let us know in the comments section below.

Amanda Hamsley Lang, Operations Manager at Forisk Consulting and Managing Editor of Wood Bioenergy US, provided the information on the U.S. plants, below.

Plant Name	Developer	Location	Capacity	Power Purchaser
Marlboro Paper Mill	Domtar	Bennettsville, SC, USA	50 MW	Santee Cooper
EJ Stoneman Plant	DTE Energy	Cassville, WI, USA	40 MW	Dairyland Power Cooperative
Multitrade Rabun Gap	Multitrade Biomass Holdings	Rabun Gap, GA, USA	17 MW	Green Power EMC (a group of state electric cooperatives)

Note that these plants may not be operating at full capacity just yet, although full capacity is listed in the above table. Lang said to keep your eye out for the 50-MW Aspen Power plant in Lufkin, TX, which is expected to go online in the spring of 2011. The plant began testing its facility this month.

Research and development is underway on energy storage solutions, what some experts call the holy grail of renewable energy growth. If we can figure out a way to store all of the renewable energy that we can generate, the story goes, then dealing with the intermittency of wind and solar energy won’t be such a big issue.

The largest lead-acid energy storage system in operation is a 10-MW system in Chino, California, built in 1988. The first commercial compressed-air energy storage system is a 290-MW unit built in Hundorf, Germany in 1978, and it remains the world’s largest CAES install. The largest sodium sulfur (NaS) battery installation is a 34-MW unit for wind stabilization in Northern Japan. The largest pumped-hydro operation in the world in Lewiston (Niagara) with 2880-MW, which went online in 1961. That’s followed by an operation in Bath County in Virginia, (USA) with 2700 MW of storage, which went online in 1985. The third largest operation in the world is in Guangzhu, China. This 2400-MW facility went online in 2000.