Wholesale Fireworks for Sale

Palo Alto looks to landfill for ‘green’ energy

Palo Alto is banking on an old landfill in the Central Valley to help it meet its long-term goals for renewable energy.

The City Council Finance Committee voted Tuesday to sign a 15-year contract with the firm Ameresco, which builds power plants that capture escaping methane gas from landfills and converts it into electricity. The company already supplies Palo Alto with 9 percent of the city’s power supply and 42 percent of its renewable energy.

The four-member committee agreed to sign another agreement with Ameresco despite serious concerns about rapidly changing energy technology and the risks associated with getting so much electricity from one company. Last month, staff recommended four 20-year contracts with Ameresco, but the committee balked at committing to the new contracts and rejected the staff proposal.

The contract the committee approved on Tuesday is less ambitious than the ones it rejected March 16. The contract term has been reduced from 20 years to 15, and the price of electricity has been reduced. Two of the four landfills considered in the previous package were removed from the new proposal.

Tom Kabat, senior resources originator at the Utilities Department, said the remaining two renewable-energy contracts would raise local electricity rates by about 1.7 percent.

The city’s Utilities Advisory Commission reviewed the contracts last week and unanimously recommended approval.

“I think there is little doubt that these will turn out to be the right thing for the rate payers as time goes on,” Commissioner Steve Eglash told the committee Tuesday night. “As you look back over decades of trends, energy is the only commodity that has consistently increased with price.”

Councilmen Larry Klein and Sid Espinosa supported signing two contracts with Ameresco, one for the San Joaquin Landfill in Linden and another one for the Crazy Horse Landfill in Salinas. Klein advocated the longer contracts and agreed with Eglash that the price of energy will only continue to rise. Espinosa urged two 15-year contracts.

Committee members Greg Schmid and Greg Scharff disagreed and urged more caution on the new contracts.

Scharff proposed not signing any new contracts with Ameresco. He questioned whether landfill-gas-to-energy technology is really “green” and noted that Sierra Club has opposed this type of technology. He also said he was concerned about the city concentrating so much of its renewable-energy portfolio in landfill gas, given Ameresco’s other contracts use the same technology.

Scharff’s proposal was rejected by the rest of the committee.

The committee ultimately agreed to sign only one 15-year contract with Ameresco. The $88.7 million contract would bring the city up to 52,000 megawatt-hours of energy per year from the San Joaquin landfill.

The new contract with Ameresco will still have to be approved by the full City Council.