The story broke in the NVDailey website and the next day the county announced it a day after the BoS meeting with the EDA said they were under non disclosure to speak, that Fibrowatt may be coming to Page County. It was mentioned on the Feb. 5th edition on SpeakOut that if it wasn’t for Project Clover, the County would not have been looked at, or given a thought. I would like to mention that I like to thank Rebecca for helping the County out by “allowing” the County to “defer” the first payment until the Summer for $900,000 instead of the $300,000 plus that was originally to be payed by a governing body that is not required by law to pay in the first place. Now I am worried how many teachers or county employees may lose their job or what programs are going to get cut so the payment can be made.
Jim Turner has on his blog site has found out much about Fibrowatt. Homeland Renewable Energy is the holding company of Fibrowatt. For the past year, they have been trying to open three plants in North Carolina and meet with fierce opposition. The main reason is that one of the by product of burning chicken or poultry litter is arsenic. An Article in an Eastern Carolina website quoted NAACP saying that building the proposed power plants in rural areas would expose blacks and poor people to arsenic and other pollutants. I guess the white folks are immune. Fibrowatt maintains that steam and ash are the by products of the burn, steam to turn the turbines to make the electricity and ash to be used as fertilizer.
There is an article from 2006 in the Washtion Post Online Edition about chicken producer Allen Family Foods Inc burning poulry litter to power their factory. They were meet with less opposition because if more manure was burned, then less will end up as runoff. A search on the internet about burning poultry litter will yield many sites whereas many poultry farmers are burning the litter to power their farms.
The questions I have are these. Where and how would the power lines be run? Underground? Overhead? Who will benefit from this electricity? If the company starts out at 55mW, then that is enough to power the majority of Page County. The creation of initial 100 jobs does seem appealing, but what happens if the plant is not built and the economy recovers?
Fibrowatt may only need about 70 acres for the plant and with the county having 38 acres and the data center has 15 acres, thats just over half of the project site acreage. But there is one problem, the data center. As businesses grows and hardware improving, data centers will become obsolete. So is Premire Technical Center going to make a big impact on whether other businesses wants to settle here?
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Data centers will not become obsolete any time soon. It’s not just hardware improving that affects data centers.
Many businesses need disaster recovery which if they are a west coast business, having an east coast data center set up mirroring their west coast operations is very valuable to get back up and running in case anything should ever happen.
There are many reasons to have a data center and the government is throwing a lot of money their way as well.
Have you heard all the latest developments in clean , renewable geothermal technology? You can now not only heat and cool your home this super earth friendly way-but also your POOL-well worth looking into!
Keith,
Thanks again for referencing the Fibrowatt series over on Hawksbill Cabin. I haven’t quite yet gotten into the environmental discussion from NC yet, but will very soon.
These outputs and impacts are a very serious matter. I think they can be managed acceptibly, but there is a cost, and many risks – just as you highlighted. Those things might not come together in a way that makes Page County a good location…but on the other hand, maybe they do.
I haven’t decided what I think about it yet.
“Cabin Jim”