South Sioux City, NE, to Cut Energy Costs with Bioenergy

South Sioux City, NE will save about $40,000 a year by incorporating bioenergy into its energy strategy.

The city funded the project with a $216,000 grant from the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality and $50,000 of its own money, according to KTIV. The bioenergy unit, which is expected to be operational around Christmas, was provided by Green Star Gasifiers.

The system works by creating negative pressure in a cylinder adjacent to another cylinder in which wood waste is heated. The gasses from the wood are siphoned through a filter and ultimately into a generator, the story says.

The unit that the device the city bought holds about one-and-a-half tons of waste and would be filled weekly. The device will be incorporated into the grid.

The case against bioenergy is made at Oilprice by Tim Searchinger, a Research Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University and Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute. He suggests, among other things, that the idea that bioenergy is carbon-neutral is a misunderstanding of the facts.