Biomass plants getting to industrial scale; forecast to be main renewable source of electricity in 2020

"While solar power is taking root in the sunny Southwest and wind power is growing in the blustery band from the Dakotas to Texas, other places are turning to trees and grass as their best bet for producing renewable energy, leading to a new building boom in 'biomass' power plants," The Wall Street Journal reports.

This photo from Zuma Press shows a biomass plant in California, a state that also has much solar and wind potential. But many areas have neither, and the climate-change bill moving through Congress would require utilities to generate 20 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2020, Russell Gold notes. That, and federal tax credits, are prompting electric utilities in the Southeast and parts of the Midwest to start building "industrial-scale plants that burn wood and other plant material." Biomass is forecast to be the top renewable source for U.S. electricity by 2020.

Biomass offers an advantage over other big renewables: It's always available, unlike the sun and the wind. "While greenhouse gas is released when biomass is burned, the process is considered nearly carbon neutral because the plants only emit the carbon they absorbed while they were growing," Gold reports. "The plants would release the same amount of greenhouse gas if they died naturally and decomposed. The burning of coal, by contrast, releases carbon that otherwise never would have been sent into the atmosphere." (Read more) Biomass plants can still cause controversy. They can create more pressure to harvest trees and undergrowth from national forests, and can encounter opposition from citizens, as Grace Schneider of The Courier-Journal reports from Milltown, Ind.