What Counts as Renewable Energy – And Why

Here’s an article explaining that the state of Michigan proposes to meet a good chunk of its renewable portfolio standard by burning scrap tires from cars and trucks.

You may be thinking what I was: define “burning.” They can’t mean “incineration,” can they?  Just burn a feedstock whose combustion will choke the skies with poisons the levels of which far exceed what would happen if they were to burn wood?   That seems so unlikely, since laws were passed half a century ago outlawing things like this. 

Might they mean “pyrolysis?” This is a 100-year-old form of extracting the chemical energy from a substance while adding a minimum of oxygen, resulting in a tiny fraction of the toxins that occur in combustion.  Today, there are numerous competing technologies that make this completely feasible.  My favorite, for what it’s worth, is the one represented on our “clean energy investment opportunity” page.

The bottom line is no, they don’t mean pyrolysis.  Amazing though it may appear, they’re proposing to simply pull the tires out of the landfill, haul them to a power production plant, and light them on fire.

I’ve come to learn, however, that for every bunch of knuckleheads trying to move our energy back in time, there are those with some really solid and progressive ideas.  Here’s an upbeat article on the “Green Climate Fund which recently removed all fossil fuels from its list of possible investments.