Columbia Electrical Generating Station, Portage, Wisconsin.
This power plant shows Wisconsin's dependence on fuels imported from outside the state.
Right now we're burning coal coming from two different states, Montana and Wyoming.
This machine behind us right now is recovering the coal about 1,600 tons an hour to fuel the units.
The two units right now will burn somewhere on a day like today around 300 tons per hour per unit.
So that would be about six railroad cars of coal per hour.
In the next 20 years, Wisconsin utilities plan to build more coal and gas-fired power plants,
enough to increase capacity as much as 50 percent.
But there is growing concern about the environmental cost of increasing our use of fossil fuels.
Rising mercury levels in surface waters, acid rain, global warming, and air pollution will increase as new power plants are built.
At the same time, cleaner, renewable energy sources will gain increasing sophistication and efficiency,
and the cost for this energy will keep dropping.
This program will look at the potential of renewable energy sources in Wisconsin.
How much power could producers generate economically?
How many dollars would this keep in Wisconsin's economy instead of shipped out to buy oil, natural gas, and coal?
How many jobs could be created by generating more of our own power ourselves?
Wind power. Once used to pump water on Wisconsin farms, wind machines have grown increasingly sophisticated over the years.
New turbine designs now deliver clean electrical power with high efficiency and reliability.
Single wind machines already provide power for a small number of homes and businesses.
In the next few years, scenes like this could become common in Wisconsin's windiest areas as utility-scale wind turbines come online.
The technology is more cost-effective today than it was ten years ago, by a factor of five to ten times.
That makes wind energy a real possibility, not only for Wisconsin, but for Minnesota, the Dakotas,
and in fact, elsewhere throughout the United States, Northern Europe, and Americas.
Practically any place that has a good wind resource today, wind energy makes economic sense.
To measure Wisconsin's wind resource, the Union of Concerned Scientists used recently developed computer mapping programs.
From these wind maps, they made estimates of the electrical energy available from the wind.
We found that you could generate the equivalent of maybe ten coal-fired power plants from wind power.
The issue there is where would those wind sites be developed?
And what we look for is areas of the state that are likely to be both windy and near a transmission line,
like right here you see a spot, and through here there are areas.
Those are likely to be the better sites for wind power development in Wisconsin.
At this Brown County site, anemometers measure the potential for economical wind-powered electricity.
Right now we're on top of the Niagara escarpment, which is a gentle ridge, and it extends from Door County to south of Fond du Lac.
And so this whole ridge is a very good site for wind turbines, and you get higher winds at the higher elevations.
Wisconsin doesn't have the greatest wind resource in the United States,
and so naturally those of us who are advocates of using wind energy are going to look to other places first.
North Dakota, of course, is a Saudi Arabia of wind energy, and we're naturally prospecting in North Dakota,
and southwestern Minnesota is very attractive.
In fact, it's possible that a great portion of the wind-generated electricity that Wisconsin could use could come, in fact, from southwestern Minnesota.
In Marshall, Minnesota, Minnesota wind power is developing the kind of industries Wisconsin might need to build its own wind machines.
The blades will come from up in northern Minnesota and Crookston, Minnesota.
The towers will be built in Morris, Minnesota.
The machines will be built here in our factory in Marshall.
The fiberglass comes from La Verne, Minnesota.
The hydraulics come from Minneapolis.
And so that's what we're talking about as far as creating jobs in the manufacturing of the equipment that goes into the manufacture of energy.
Wisconsin, of course, has Milwaukee Gear, which manufactures gearboxes for a number of wind turbine manufacturers here in the United States,
and Marathon Electric makes the generators for many of the wind turbines used in California.
So if wind energy is going to grow, the United States is going to grow, and Wisconsin.
Wind-powered electricity would create more jobs than the same amount of coal-fired power.
Wind turbines would have to be installed and periodically maintained.
Well, right now we're in the early stages.
We're monitoring at a number of different sites and trying to keep track of the technology.
And I see wind being installed in more and more areas than in the future as it becomes more economical and as the technology improves.
Appleton, like many Wisconsin cities and towns, grew and prospered with the help of water power.
Hearthstone, now a museum in Appleton, was the first home in the country to be lit from a central hydroelectric plant.
This is H.J. Rogers' house, and H.J. lived here in 1882.
He ran the paper mill on the river below, and it was his idea to light this house and his paper mill with hydroelectricity using the dam next to his mill.
This is a turn switch that actually lit the house on September 30, 1882, using the power from the dam.
And up here we have an electrolyr, which also lit the house in 1882.
The bulbs are replicas. They looked like that in those days.
And the people that gathered outside on the sidewalk said it was as bright as day.
Over four percent of Wisconsin's electricity now comes from water power.
Opening a floodgate at Wisconsin Power and Light's Prairie du Sac dam shows the power of falling water.
This is the largest hydro plant on the Wisconsin River, and it's been producing electric power from 1914 until now.
And we're producing more now than we ever have.
Today we've got all the machines on because we've had a lot of high water in the area,
and we're passing about 13,800 cubic feet of water a second through the eight turbines.
The water hits the turbine, spins the turbine, and the generator is hooked onto that turbine shaft.
And when the generator spins, of course it produces power.
The total output of the plant with all the machines on is 30,000 kilowatts per hour.
Improving the efficiency of older machinery and adding new turbines to smaller dams is slowly increasing the amount of hydropower.
But without building more dams, which is unlikely because of their environmental impact,
we have already harnessed most of Wisconsin's available water power.
Half of Wisconsin is covered by forest, and the amount of our timberland continues to expand.
With logging residues, the tops and branches of trees left in the woods after harvest,
when combined with dead wood, thinnings, and other poor quality trees, make up a huge potential energy resource.
As much as 17 million tons is available each year.
However, harvesting this wood is often not practical.
Sawmills generate tons of bark and sawdust, which can be burned in coal-fired power plants modified to use this fuel.
NSP's Bayfront Power Plant in Ashland burns 95 percent wood, mostly residues from nearby sawmills.
This provides cleaner power than coal and uses a waste product that would otherwise be landfilled.
Wood represents Bayfront's lowest-cost fuel, less than half the cost of its other principal fuel source, coal.
Wood is a very clean-burning solid fuel, which has resulted in substantially reduced particulate and sulfur dioxide emissions.
Walnut Hollow Farm in Dodgeville manufactures unfinished wood products for a growing crafts market, making over a thousand different products.
With state-of-the-art routers, lasers, and planers, Walnut Hollow cuts, shapes, sands, and assembles more than six million board feet of lumber a year.
The sawdust and wood scraps add up to about a hundred tons of waste wood each week, waste that became a tremendous problem as the company grew.
We had a problem of getting rid of the wood waste, and rightfully so.
I guess we were concerned the only option we had is to take it to a landfill, which we didn't feel comfortable with, and we knew that was going to end.
The other thing was to move it to another county, to a burning facility, so that prompted us to put in our own cogeneration plant.
The cogeneration plant works like this. All sawdust and waste wood is collected at the plant, ground up, and conveyed to a steam boiler where it's burned.
The steam drives a generator, which produces electricity, enough to power the entire operation.
We use it for generating our own electricity and our own heat for our plant, which is roughly $100,000 to $150,000 a year.
I think it was a case of knowing our need, and it was an opportunity to create our own energy with our own wood waste,
which is a good feeling environmentally to know that most of the wood waste that we use creates most of the energy for our plant.
Great potential exists in Wisconsin for growing trees and other crops to burn in power plants.
Researchers working for Oak Ridge National Laboratory are searching for native plants that fit in with the local landscape,
grow fast, and produce a lot of burnable plant matter, or biomass.
That are perennial crops, that are ones that you plant once and you can harvest several times, or that they grow for several years.
Switchgrass is a native species we establish in one year and can probably harvest those each year for a 10-year period.
Switchgrass can be cut and baled using common haymaking machinery.
Fast-growing hybrid poplars are another promising energy crop.
With the trees, you establish those once and harvest them every 5, 6, 10, 12 years,
and if you want to, you can allow them to sprout back and harvest them again.
William Heckrod of Appleton is a hybrid poplar entrepreneur.
This is a hybrid poplar, 7 years old. It was planted in the field and moved here.
It's quite tall and quite about 8 to 10 inches in diameter,
which is a good example of, under the proper conditions, what a hybrid poplar will do.
On his tree farm, Mr. Heckrod tinkers with new ways to cultivate the fast-growing poplars.
These trees grew over 10 feet in their first year.
All there is to planting the hybrid poplars, putting in the ground so the top two inches sticks up.
At Wisconsin Power and Light, engineers are studying the feasibility of building a power plant using hybrid poplars as fuel.
For this study, we are looking at a utility-scale power plant. This is a 100 megawatt power plant.
The fuel source or the fuel supply required for this power plant would be 80,000 acres of trees,
with 10,000 acres a year harvested annually to supply the plant.
We're looking at the potential for this fuel source to exist within a 50-mile radius of the plant for transportation purposes.
This harvest area would then represent less than 1 percent of the land area within that 50-mile radius.
The system under study would work like this. All trees would be harvested and transported to the plant.
Stored under a structure with waste heat from the power plant blown in, the trees would dry for 30 days.
The dry trees would then be conveyed to the furnace, cut to size, and burned for power.
If you look at closed-loop biomass, which is euphemistic for wood burning and whole tree burning,
I think there is opportunity for that here in this state.
We have a lot of land that is out of production that could be used to grow trees,
and although this is a combustion source and many would cringe at that,
you will find as you do the economics and the equation that it has a net beneficial impact on the environment.
While energy crops hold great promise for providing new income and jobs in rural areas, there are many issues to work out.
The considerations that go with growing these crops and thinking about the water quality considerations,
the soil erosion kinds of concerns, the habitat issues all have to be built in at the front end.
Some kind of coordinated effort has to occur which gets the farmers growing the crop and gets someone building a power plant,
and so it all happens at the same time because you don't want one thing waiting for the other.
So actually it's going to be quite a monumental task of putting all these pieces together so that it happens at the right time.
At the state fair, Wisconsin's renewable energy future is on display.
This car, part of the state government fleet, burns 85 percent ethanol and alcohol distilled from corn
and draws people curious about renewable clean burning fuels.
For over a decade, the state government has provided technical and financial assistance
and formed private sector partnerships for a variety of renewable energy projects around Wisconsin.
We have it in our potential here in Wisconsin to be a leader, to be a leader in developing new ways to create energy,
that we don't have to import fossil fuels, that we don't have any in Wisconsin.
We can develop these kind of new programs and at the same time we can save taxpayer money,
we can save money for economic growth to be back in Wisconsin and not export those dollars to $6 billion down to Texas or over to Saudi Arabia.
We can do that right here by developing new ways to develop new programs.
It would be great for farmers, whether it be a tree farmer to a corn farmer or a soybean farmer.
All of these individual farmers have got a tremendous opportunity to grow crops
and to be able to use the crops for developing these kind of alternative fuels.
Clean air laws will require drivers in southeastern Wisconsin to use alternative fuels by the year 1995.
One alternative is a blend of ethanol and gasoline called Gasahal.
Surplus corn now provides the feedstock for over a billion gallons of ethanol produced each year.
But corn can only provide a small percentage of the fuel needed by our transportation system.
The search is on for other possible raw materials.
Sugar-rich liquid whey produced in cheese plants throughout the state is one possibility.
Researchers are now developing processes to convert this abundant byproduct into ethanol.
At the USDA's Forest Products Laboratory in Madison,
researchers are fermenting ethanol from the abundant sugars found in plant fibers.
Every year, Wisconsin produces millions of tons of agricultural and forestry wastes that go to rot in the fields and forests.
These residues, these agricultural and forestry residues, could be converted into liquid fuels
if we had the technology to do it efficiently.
The researchers sample the tiny yeast organisms found in nature.
They then identify which types will best convert the sugars from plant fibers, such as xylose, into ethanol.
Carbon dioxide is evolving from this culture because the yeasts are growing on this difficult-to-use sugar.
Xylose occurs abundantly in nature, but it's very difficult to convert into ethanol.
Therefore, we're looking for organisms that will use it and other hard-to-metabolize sugars.
The researchers take promising organisms, modify them through a process of genetic engineering, and test their rate of ethanol production.
Sometime in the next century, large numbers of automobiles will be powered by liquid, renewable fuels,
fuels that will not contribute to the greenhouse effect, fuels that will utilize wastes,
and that will basically give us easy, clean transportation at a reasonable price.
At the oryta plant outside of Plover, they process tons of potatoes.
Cleaning the potatoes, cooking them, and other processes at the plant use plenty of hot water.
The water picks up a lot of nutrients and other particles, which must be separated out and cleaned up.
The wastewater is first screened, and the large potato pieces are collected to make into animal feed.
It is then treated to separate finer particles, which are applied onto farmers' fields.
After clarifying, the water is pumped into large tanks where bacteria break down the remaining waste.
What I'm doing here is pulling out some of the particles, the active biomass that's in the bottom of this unit here,
and this is a formation of all the bacteria that's come together in one large particle.
And one of the things that these bacteria do during this process is produce methane gas.
We remove that gas, we compress it, and we send it over to the boiler and refrigeration department here at the factory.
Throughout Wisconsin, many other industrial and municipal wastewater treatment plants could also economically harness the power of energy-rich methane gas.
Just down the road at the Torque Sanitary Landfill in Wisconsin Rapids,
there is an experiment going on to collect and clean up the methane gas continually produced by the landfill.
We're on the Torque Sanitary Landfill. This is the well fill that has about 16 wells drilled on it.
This well is number four, and it is about 100 feet deep.
It contains about 30,000 cubic feet of gas coming up every day into this line that gathers the gas to the plant.
This well contains about 50 percent methane and 50 percent CO2.
Blowers extract the gas from the landfill and send it to the gas processing plant where impurities are removed.
Once cleaned, the methane can then be used just like natural gas.
Torque trucking uses the methane to heat several buildings, including this machine shop.
The gas is burned in a generator that supplies the electricity for the shop.
The gas is also piped over to heat the tar at the county's nearby asphalt plant.
Torque compresses the gas and uses it to fuel specially modified trucks.
And as far as we know, we've checked the records.
We're the only plant in the world that has taken landfill gas and made pure methane and compressed natural gas for vehicle use.
In the city of Green Bay, this large array of solar collectors proves that capturing the power of the sun can make sense, even in Wisconsin's climate.
What we have here is the largest flat plate solar energy system in the world.
It's used to make hot water for a meatpacking plant.
We have 5,256 collectors, which is 168,000 square feet.
And we use all these collectors to produce hot water every day.
On a day like today where it's nice and sunny and the water's kind of warm, we're bringing in water around 50 degrees and heating up to about 140.
The fluid comes in at the bottom, rises through these tubes, and picks the heat off of this black plate up to the top,
and then it's taken back to the pump house where it gives its energy up to the water.
It's really no different or more sophisticated than your car being closed during the day with the windows up.
It's remarkably effective and very primitive, but it works every day.
Once the equipment's in place, you'll be saving money continuously, no matter what happens with the price of energy.
It's tough making that initial investment lots of times because business runs on a much shorter cycle,
whereas this really has to be viewed like a power company views a power plant that they're in it for 20, 30 years,
and it's going to take that kind of time to recoup your investment and make a substantial return on it.
Thousands of home hot water heaters, installed when tax breaks were offered in the early 1980s,
continue to collect solar energy and prevent pollution.
But without incentives, the long payback period makes solar hot water a difficult purchase for most homeowners.
Solar building designs have been ignored in recent years, even though solar energy offers the opportunity
to substantially reduce the energy needed to heat a building.
This home, built by Frank Lloyd Wright, was one of the first attempts to capture the sun's energy for home heating
and shows the basic principles of solar design.
The house has to start by being oriented toward the south to open up toward the winter sun,
the major amount of glazing facing the winter sun,
and that also then allows you to have the shading overhang that protects you from the summer sun.
Once the solar radiation enters the windows, it needs to be converted to heat
and then have that heat turn into natural energy flows within the house.
This is a perfect example of it.
The sun shines on the exposed floor, warms the floor.
The warm air and the infrared radiation find a lot more mass with the exposed rocks in this house,
so they retain the heat, distribute the heat into the house.
The warm air can circulate freely through this great open architectural space,
and even the upstairs has access with this open balcony, so the warm air can go upstairs,
distribute through the bedrooms, and ultimately then return down the stairwell.
What's interesting is the techniques that we use for solar heating in the winter to bring the sunlight in
can also provide for cooling commercial office buildings in the summer,
because if you throw away 99% of the solar radiation and just let 1% of the remaining light in,
you get 100% of the light that you need in typical offices.
The result of that is that the daylighting coming in, and it's what we call daylighting,
is the coolest form of lighting for offices that we have.
The CUNA Mutual Insurance Building in Madison supplements the light for many of its offices
with daylight from a central atrium.
When you use the daylight on a hot summer afternoon, it really unloads the air conditioner
because you're reducing the heating from the electric lights.
Daylighting is probably the most cost-effective form of solar energy use that we have right now.
A photovoltaic panel uses solar energy in a different way.
Silicon crystals convert sunlight directly into electricity.
This maintenance garage at Wisconsin Public Service is now powered by electricity generated on the rooftop.
This array of photovoltaic panels, the largest in the state,
is being used by the utility for research into future uses of solar electricity.
Photovoltaics works in Wisconsin. When light is there, they will produce electricity.
The question is, when will they become cost-competitive with existing electricity?
And we're forecasting sometime after the year 2000, they will become cost-competitive with existing electricity.
Photovoltaic panels are already less expensive than running new power lines for some applications.
At this farm outside McFarland, they take the place of an old windmill.
A pump powered by the panels draws water from the old well, ensuring a steady supply of clean water for livestock.
These panels will charge batteries that will light this billboard for Noah's Ark several hours a night.
Just outside Green Bay, Alltech Energy is installing enough photovoltaic panels to supply the electricity for a new home.
While this installation is an experiment conducted by Wisconsin Public Service and the Environmental Protection Agency,
it shows the kind of jobs that could be created as costs for the panels continue to drop.
The solar industry would be comprised of contractors, similar to the home construction industry.
There are electricians that would be doing the wiring.
There would be roofers or general contractors that would install the panels on the roof.
If it was a solar heating system, there may be plumbers or sheet metal workers also.
It's a type of industry where there would need to be contractors working on thousands of roofs throughout the state,
and so there would be jobs in every community.
Developing renewable energy industries would provide definite benefits to Wisconsin.
Thousands of jobs, a more secure energy supply, and less pollution.
Renewables would also slow the flow of energy dollars out of the state, recirculating millions through Wisconsin's economy.
Research into the application of renewable energy sources, like this demonstration of coal tree drying,
continues to improve the technology, and new initiatives now make it easier for Wisconsin businesses to invest.
But as we look ahead and begin to make greater demands on our energy supply,
it remains to be seen what role renewable energy will play in Wisconsin's future.
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