Published: April 01, 2008 10:12 pm            

No time to give up hope

An Associated Press report last week indicated things weren’t going so well at BioTown USA.

Our hope is that supporters will not give up the effort. Three years ago, Reynolds, a town of about 550 people, set out to become the first U.S. community to meet all of its energy needs through renewable sources. The goal was to create a model for other communities to follow, but now locals are beginning to wonder how much of the original vision will ever come about.

It’s clear that some of the project’s original goals were unrealistic. BioTown leaders learned early on, for example, that it would be nearly impossible to take Reynolds off an established electricity grid. Instead, they determined that what alternative energy the town produced would likely need to be sold to a power company to offset the use of traditional sources of energy.

Organizers also hoped to break ground in November 2006 on a $10 million facility that would house the core equipment needed to turn manure and other biomass material into energy, and the plant would be generating electricity by last July.

That hasn’t happened.

Last fall, farmers prepared about 5,000 bales of mostly corn stover to feed a gassifier, but months later, thousands of unused bales are still sitting in a field just outside town, and it’s beginning to look like the gassifier might never come about.

Still, there’s a lot happening in BioTown.

Energy Systems Group, a Vectren Corp. subsidiary, says it will spend about $10 million on a plant to convert biomass to energy. The company hopes to start building soon and to be producing power by the end of the year.

Clearly, Reynolds will not be self-sufficient as quickly as organizers of the project had hoped, but that is no reason to give up the effort.

A local delegation last fall visited Juehnde, a German village that runs on renewable energy, and organizers brought back some lessons they believe will be helpful as Reynolds moves forward.

One is that projects like this one don’t happen overnight. It took eight years for Juehnde to reach its goal of self-sufficiency.

The key to this effort is patience.

At a time when gasoline prices are at their highest point ever, it’s clear that the United States needs finally to get serious about alternative energy sources. Projects like the one in Reynolds will show the way.

– Pharos-Tribune, Logansport, and Kokomo Tribune

        

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