Should We Be Burning Wood for Energy in California?
A conversation about the benefits and limitations of biomass energy + the latest California climate news.
Welcome to issue number 11 of State of Change, a project of the Climate Equity Reporting Project at Berkeley Journalism.
Featured Stories
In California, a Push to Decommission Gas Lines in Low-Income Neighborhoods Moves Forward
By Twilight Greenaway, Inside Climate News
The Path to a Just Transition for Benicia’s Refinery Workers
by Isabella Roya Marzban, KneeDeep Times
California Climate News
Federal Climate Policy (That Impacts California)
The Senate will vote today on the “Big, Beautiful” GOP tax bill and things are looking very bad for renewable energy. In addition to cutting tax credits for solar and wind projects by the end of 2027, the latest draft of the bill also includes a provision that would impose a steep new tax on future projects.
On the brighter side, the bill no longer calls for the sale of hundreds of millions of acres of public land, primarily in Western states, including an estimated 10 million in California.Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that fuel producers may sue over California’s limits on vehicle tailpipe emissions. The Court did not weigh in on whether the waivers that allow the state to set its own limits were legal — but merely that the companies have legal standing. Vickie Patton, the general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund, told the New York Times, “While the Supreme Court has now clarified who has grounds to bring a challenge to court, the decision does not affect California’s bedrock legal authority to adopt pollution safeguards, nor does alter the lifesaving, affordable, clean cars program itself.”
California Climate Policy
Climate advocates are celebrating the election of Senator Monique Limón as the next California state Senate leader. Limon has been named a “climate champion” by the Climate Center for her work on climate legislation including the passage of Prop 4, the creation of setbacks for oil and gas wells, efforts to plug abandoned wells, reforms to cap and trade, and more. She is also a member of the Joint Legislative Committee on Climate Change, and she attended the UN Climate Conference COP28 in Dubai in 2023.
Proposition 4, the climate resilience-focus bond that passed last November may not live up to its promises. That’s because it may end up covering other gaps in the state budget caused by disappearing federal grants and loans. For example one proposal currently on the table would move $300 million in climate-related project costs from the General Fund to Proposition 4. The bond also, notably, doesn’t fund clean energy investments.
As California lawmakers weigh whether or not to support the Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act, advocates are pointing to the recent developments in Richmond as a valuable case study. There, community groups built overwhelming support for a ballot tax measure that would have imposed a tax on the Chevron oil refinery. Rather than let it go to the ballots, the company opted instead to offer the city a $550 million settlement for impacted communities.
The Energy Transition
Battery Storage is less expensive and more dependable than gas-fired power plants in California according to the new report released by Regenerate California and the Center for Energy Efficiency & Renewable Technologies (CEERT). The report found that battery storage, if matched with renewables, achieves grid reliability requirements more effectively, reducing the risk of black outs, and saves consumers money. The cost of maintaining gas infrastructure went up by 357% between 2017 and 2022, according to the California Public Utilities Commission. “Californians are paying hundreds of millions of dollars every year to keep these aging plants online, though they only run for a few hours each year,” said Maia Leroy, Policy Director at CEERT told the Imperial Valley Press. “Battery storage technology, by contrast, is flexible, clean, and getting cheaper.”
In a recent op-ed, Carl Pope, longtime climate advocate and former executive director of the Sierra Club, said he regretted concentrating solely on carbon dioxide in recent decades. Pope has recently shifted his focus to methane — a very potent greenhouse gas — and now believes taking quick action to prevent it from leaking out of industrial facilities is an urgent step in preventing further warming of the atmosphere. Pope writes: “The only way to incentivize them to move faster and to get every single company on board is for governments to pay for their cleanup costs and for buyers to purchase only certified low-leakage gas.”
Last week the California Energy Commission greenlit a giant solar project in Fresno County that, when built, will be the largest in the United States so far. Intersect Power’s Darden Energy Project will provide power for nearly 900,000 homes, as well as a huge battery that can keep those homes electrified for four hours and a substation link to the grid. Environmental justice advocates who initially raised a red flag over dust from construction and fire risk from the project’s battery struck a tentative agreement with developers in exchange for a robust list of community benefits. The project is the first to make it through the state’s new streamlined permitting process, and there are still several others in the queue.
Transportation
California remains steadfast in its commitment to zero-emissions trucking but Trump’s sheer hostility to the plan means it will need clever policymaking. The state plans to ensure that 100% of the medium and heavy-duty trucks purchased by 2036 will be electric. With the Advanced Clean Fleet rule dead for now, the regulators are now focused on the Clean Fleets Partnership — a direct agreement with manufacturers.
If the state succeeds, the region that will likely benefit the most is the San Joaquin Valley, a place where people breathe in the dirtiest air in the nation. The atmosphere is hazy with high truck traffic and one in six children who live there is reported to live with asthma.The effort to expand Highway 37 — which runs along the northern rim of the San Francisco Bay — has been contentious as best. A week before a vote on whether to fund the $73 million project in Napa County, new reporting found that Caltrans erased a presentation from its website that showed the road will likely be completely underwater by 2040 due to sea level rise.
In a recent San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, experts also pointed to research that has found that “adding new highway lanes in the hope of reducing traffic only encourages more drivers to use the road. “There are other projects the state could embark on if it really wants to get cars off the road and improve our quality of life,” the authors write. “Our public transit systems are struggling to maintain service. Our existing streets and highways are crumbling due to poor maintenance. We also need major investment in the charging infrastructure for zero-emission trucks and trains that could reduce diesel pollution in communities near freeways.”
The U.S. Postal Service has begun rolling out its much anticipated — and very different looking — Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDVs). Sixty thousand of them are slated to be electric vehicles, after the Biden administration provided $3 billion for the transition. Now, however, Republicans in Congress are trying to block the Postal Service from deploying more EVs and the Big Beautiful Bill might require it to sell off the ones that are already in use (despite the fact that doing so would mean losing money).
After federal agents detained commuters sitting at a bus stop in Pasadena last week, the LA Times reports that Los Angeles’ Metro system has reported a 10-15 percent drop in ridership.
A new article from researchers at UCLA and USC published in Nature Communications dug into inequitable access to reliable electric vehicle charging stations. The researchers analyzed over 470,000 user reviews in an effort to vet public charging stations at the U.S. census tract level and revealed that disadvantaged communities (DACs) have 64% fewer chargers per capita—and found that access is even worse for renters in multi-unit housing. DAC users — always low-income and racially sidelined — rely more on public charging due to shortage of home access. They faced more reliability issues, especially from hardware malfunctions. These outcomes indicate a need for focused investments in charging infrastructure and reliability.
Building Electrification
Southern California air quality regulators rejected a plan to begin phasing out gas water heaters and furnaces highlighting public concerns about surging housing prices and the risk of a federal lawsuit. The proposed policies (1111 and 1121) would have required manufacturers to transition to selling zero-emission electric appliances, rather than gas appliances. The vote follows a campaign by SoCal Gas and gas appliance manufacturers to head off the new rule. The South Coast Air Quality Management District board will now send the rule back to committee, pushing the possibility of another vote until 2026.
Food Waste
Residents of Antelope Valley claim that California law SB 1383, which mandates separating food waste, yard trimmings, and other organic waste from trash to reduce methane emissions, has an unintended consequence: more illegal dumping. A lawsuit filed by residents this year alleges that waste-hauling companies are dumping hazardous substances without permission. However, some argue that landowners are allowing dumping in exchange for payment.
Agriculture
Researchers at U.C. Riverside have released a new study showing that dairy digesters—a gas-tight tarp that covers manure ponds, allowing for the capture and reuse of methane gas—can reduce methane emissions in the air by nearly 80 percent. The result of this study aligns with estimates used by California state officials in their climate planning. With over 130 digester systems already in place, California is ramping up efforts on both farm digesters and satellite monitoring to make sure they’re on track with their climate goal: a 40 percent reduction in methane emissions below 2013 levels by 2030.
Climate Impacts
California has a new tool to assess your risk of extreme heat: CalHeatScore. Also known as the California Communities Extreme Heat Scoring System, the tool utilizes zip code data to generate scores ranging from 0 (low risk) to 4 (severe). It also lists nearby cooling centers. Although available now, CalHeatScore is still in its early stages of development. Once fully operational, public health officials and others will have a valuable planning and alert tool for heat emergencies.
Southern California: Prepare for more power outages this year. Southern California Edison says its system is now more sensitive to severe weather, which could result in more frequent outages. Additionally, Edison is taking extra steps by burying hundreds of miles of power lines and installing covered conductors. In 2024, over 137,000 people experienced power loss for about a day and a half on average.
UCLA researchers released the Latino Climate and Health Dashboard, comparing census tracts that are majority Latino with non-Latino white majority communities in Los Angeles. The findings show big environmental health disparities, with Latino neighborhoods across California experiencing “approximately 23 more extreme-heat days per year than non-Latino white neighborhoods.” Researchers say the tool is meant to help those who use it, from community advocates and policymakers to journalists, easily identify the areas of greatest need.
A Little Good News
The Western Rivers Conservancy has officially returned over 47,000 acres (73 square miles) to the Yurok Tribe. It is the largest single “land back” agreement in California history. The land, which runs along the lower Klamath River is currently known as the Blue Creek Salmon Sanctuary and Yurok Tribal Community Forest. The land will provide habitat for endangered species such as chinook and coho salmon, the marbled murrelet, the northern spotted owl, and the Humboldt marten. The land will also protect Blue Creek, a critical cold-water source for Klamath River salmon and Yurok cultural tradition, and it will likely be managed in a way that builds new carbon sinks and improves on existing sinks.
Q&A: What Do You Need to Know about Biomass?
by James Mawien Manyuol
Biomass energy — which produced in power plants by burning wood residues and byproducts — is a lesser known part of California’s energy landscape. But it may soon grow.
A nonprofit organization Golden State Natural Resources has a controversial plan to work with the United-Kingdom-based company Drax to build two industrial-scale wood pellet facilities (one in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and another on the Modoc Plateau in Lassen County) and send the pellets to Asia, where they would be burned for energy in place of coal.
The plan appears to be moving forward as part of a 20-year Master Stewardship Agreement with the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), despite the fact that Critics say that it could radically reshape the state’s forest management practices and lead to more logging.
Meanwhile, A.B. 706 would establish a permanent fund — the Forest and Wildfire Prevention Fund — to support the procurement, transport, and beneficial use of forest biomass waste. The goal is, in part, to reduce the piles of wood that get left behind in the forest after it is thinned and managed for fire prevention.
“When we leave that stuff out there, it either gets burned in big open piles or it rots. Both release harmful stuff into our air. With the right equipment and facilities, we can cut those emissions by nearly 98% compared to open burning,” said assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, the bill’s sponsor, in a recent email interview.
In order to further understand the benefits and limitations of biomass energy, we spoke with Steve Frisch, the president of Sierra Business Council, an organization that focuses on the sustainability of the Sierra Nevada region. The group works on fire mitigation, forest management, and new product development, with a goal of “lifting up a new resource economy that is based on restoration rather than extraction.”
Frisch is one of the founders of the organization and has been at its helm for over 20 years. Prior to that, he served on the board of the California Stewardship Network.
How does your work at Sierra Business Council interact with the biomass industry?
We've been pretty deep in the wood utilization and biomass utilization field for about 20 years now. Our primary objective is ecological restoration, not commercialization of forest products, and we gravitated to this field because one of the critical issues in California is that [the forests are too dense]. If we are trying to get back to a pre-European forest composition, it is going to require some interventions in the forest in order to do that because 150 years of fire suppression makes wildfires more severe. So, it leaves you with this massive problem: What do you do with the 15 to 25 million bone-dry tons of wood waste that comes out of forest thinning projects? Currently, most of that material is either left in the forest because it's not economically viable to remove it, or it is open-pile burned, which leads to not just greenhouse gas emissions, but also criteria air pollution emissions. So, unless we can come up with a strategy for what can be done with this material, as we scale up forest management to achieve ecological restoration, we're going to have waste that is actually counterproductive to that long-term objective.
Is the idea that the wood is going to burn regardless, so we should burn it more strategically?
Because of the slow rate of decomposition in Western Forest, [there’s a good chance] that if wood is left in the forest, a fire will eventually burn that material one way or another. So, the question becomes, can you actually reduce emissions by managing that material in a different way, and come closer to meeting the state's carbon-neutrality-by-2045 goal. Controlled combustion actually removes about 98 percent of the criteria air pollutants such as PM2.5, NOx and SOx, and about 30% of the greenhouse gas emissions of the actual CO2 emissions [through a filtration process].
Can you say more about that process?
Well [if we use wood-based] chemicals, polymers, mass timber products to replace steel and concrete, the CO2 emissions and embodied carbon in mass timber products are about one third of what they are for concrete and steel. So, the best-case scenario would be we develop a bioeconomy that develops higher value products that crowd combustion out and most of this material could then get used for those products instead of combustion, because we don't think combustion is the best use. The problem we have is that it's the only available use right now.
If forest material is piled up and decomposes over a 100 year period, which is about as long as it takes in a Western Forest for the material to completely decompose, the main emission is methane, and that’s a more potent greenhouse gas. So that for a certain period of time, the actual emissions factor is higher because it's emitting primarily methane rather than carbon dioxide. And then it goes down over time. The amount of carbon that actually goes back into the soils from that decomposition is relatively minimal, so unless it's treated somehow and put back in the soil as biochar for example, most of that material is getting converted to methane.
A.B. 706, a bill moving through the legislature, would establish a program to support procurement, transport, and the beneficial use of forest biomass waste.
Do you think passing it would strengthen the use of biomass?
We support 706 at this time. Right now the only process that is removing material from the forest is biomass combustion. And by continuing the Bioenergy Renewable Auction Mechanism (BioRAM) and the Bioenergy Market Adjusting Tariff (BioMAT) programs it maintains that process until 2031 and creates a market for that material in order to make forest thinning more economically viable. Because there is no alternative at this point, we're supporting 706 but our position is that it should be coupled with a strategy to develop a bioeconomy in California that eventually retires combustion as a strategy. It will probably take somewhere between 10 and 20 years to get to that,
Are you referring to the biomass processing facilities that exist in the state or the new ones that are being planned by Drax?
I am referring to both, but they would need to have a retirement strategy. The problem we're running into right now on this biomass conversion issue is that the technology for other bioeconomy products is not advancing as rapidly as I think people were hoping it would, and part of it is that there's very little state or federal support for research and development in those areas. There's also very little early investment capital available in those areas. Until there's a really focused bioeconomy development strategy — the Biden Harris administration was working on but it has since been eliminated — it's going to be difficult to get to these new markets that would crowd combustion out of the picture. So what do we do in the meantime? Do we just keep thinning forests and letting the wood pile up? Do we bury it? Do we control the combustion, and remove most of the criteria air pollutants, like we are. We are in a moment where none of the choices are really good.
Do you think biomass burning counts as a renewable energy source?
For the purposes of the state's energy purchasing requirements, and because of the CO2 benefits that it creates, it should count as a renewable energy source at this time. But I do think that as technology advances, it should be taken off that list and we should shift to non-combustion technologies. And there are good examples that have not been quite fully tested in the marketplace. For example, you could couple combustion with carbon capture and storage. And if we can prove carbon capture and storage really works, that might be one solution, because it makes it a hell of a lot more renewable if the CO2 is not going into the atmosphere. Another way you could approach it would be to look at the CO2 benefits of forest management, and value the CO2 benefits of forest management, like biological diversity and carbon sequestration, carbon capture in soils and the improvement to water supply and water quality. So that would be another route to getting this to be more economically viable.And we are beginning to have mechanisms to do that. In the Yuba River watershed in the Sierra Nevada, for example, there's a company called Blue Forest Conservation that is actually selling a public purpose bond to support forest management. The main driver is the fact that by treating the forest in the upper watershed you improve water quality and water supply downstream. And the value of that water is used to pay for forest management. We are gradually developing the mechanisms to make this work, but we're not there yet.
How do you respond to environmental advocates who say people who say passing it will harm the forest and add air pollution?
Our organization's position is essentially that large-scale forest management for the purpose of developing products for export should not be the goal of California's forest policy. The goal should be ecological restoration of California forest to pre-European conditions, so that it acts as a carbon sink. So if you look at proposals like those of Golden State Natural Resources and Drax for large-scale export of wood pellets, that is really not the right direction for the state to be going, because it commoditizes that forest biomass, and it encourages what is essentially plantation forest management in order to create a supply for a commodity product. That should not be our goal. If we can get forests to a condition where they [are less dense] can actually accept fire. Fire at low intensity occurs on a recurring basis, and it reduces risk.
What do the local population or authorities in California say about biomass?
It depends upon where you live. I live in the Sierra Nevada, and I have a go bag in my house because I've been told at least five times that I need to leave in five to 10 minutes or I might die. So, if you live in a wildfire prone region of the state where you are under that kind of threat and risk, and you see an industrial process that helps address that risk, you are very likely to support it.
If you're not in a wildfire prone area of the state, or you live in an urban region, you're perceiving the forest through a different lens. And in California, we have many different visions of what the forest is and its role in our lives, and we've done a very bad job of getting people to understand each other's perspectives. In the Sierra, most environmental organizations support biomass utilization to some degree including, by the way, the need for, at times, combustion based technologies to have achieved that forest restoration goal. If you live in an urban area, you might not agree. Although, I would argue that the Campfire and the demise of the town of Paradise, the Santa Rosa fires, the Los Angeles fires, are changing that perspective very rapidly in the state. This is now a level of statewide crisis that is very difficult to really fathom.
The cost of wildfire in California is estimated to cost $117 billion a year. So that's an emergency response. Air quality, lost tax revenue, lost business. The Palisades and Eaton fires together are estimated to have cost somewhere between $250 and $275 billion in damage. So what was once a forested region kind of perspective is rapidly becoming a statewide perspective. And it's going to require that we reassess how we think about biomass utilization as one tool to meet our resiliency goals.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
