Legalectric

Hot off the press from David Morris – ILSR, a demolition of the Benson Burner celebratory historical podcast about burning turkey shit. The ILSR podcast gets into some of the origin of the “biomass mandate,” the history of Fibrominn, Fibrowatt from England, and in Maryland, where chicken shit was polluting land and water.

I so well recall the hours and hours of testimony about turkey turds back in 1998, when state Sen. Steve Novak, chair of Minnesota’s Senate Energy Committee (and on of the orchestrators of the 1994 Prairie Island bill that pushed biomass as part of the deal to keep Prairie Island nuclear plant open) refused to let “our” bill be heard that would delete the alternate site mandate to site nuclear waste “in Goodhue County.” Burning turkey shit was ahead of our bill on the agenda, and so hours and hours and hours of testimony. Of the many, many “environmental” groups in Minnesota, ILSR was the ONLY one opposing this turdful idea, and in that 1998 session, David Morris testified in excruciating detail about why burning turkey shit was a bad idea, more than I ever wanted to know about turkey shit.

So glad to see this go:

Benson biomass power plant thunders to ground in explosive demolition

Fibrowatt was run out of Delaware when they wanted to burn chicken shit there, thanks to Alan Muller and Green Delaware. That was when I’d first heard from Alan, way back in 2002, warning about Fibrowatt as they pushed into Minnesota!

When Xcel filed for permission to get out of the turkey shit Power Purchase Agreement (PUC Docket 17-530), Alan Muller and I filed comments:

Note that not one of the many funded “environmental” groups weighed in on this!

The Commission gave Xcel what it wanted, including $20 million to the City of Benson…

WHY would the PUC reward Xcel this way? Cancelling the Xcel PPAs and shutting down that Benson plant, and also the Laurentian Energy Authority, that was good, but the pay offs? Doesn’t seem reasonable to me.

And while you’re at it, check this out from ILSR on a “renewable” issue here in Minnesota and elsewhere:

Report: Waste Incineration: A Dirty Secret in How States Define Renewable Energy