Biomass Feasibility Project Final Report - Xcel Energy

into renewable technologies that support this mission. Results of RDF projects are
expected to become available to broad audiences.
The Board considers the primary objective of research projects to be testing a hypothesis
or the marketability and application of an energy-related technology, with energy
production being a by-product of the research.
The project before you was conceived in 2003, submitted for the second round of RDF funding
on March 16, 2004, and ultimately began on August 1, 2005. This report and the associated tools
developed as part of the overall program effort is the culmination of over two years of work by
the project team.
Mission
Minnesota has enacted a number of policies over the past decades that indicate a strong
interest in expanding the biomass power industry within the state. The 1994 Biomass Mandate,
the Renewable Energy Objective, and the recent Renewable Energy Standard have all
provided support for bio-power within Minnesota. While general studies have indicated that
Minnesota has significant potential to utilize existing biomass for electrical generation, no
comprehensive statewide evaluation of Minnesota’s biomass resources in relation to existing
infrastructure and appropriate processing technologies has been completed. Biomass is
increasingly more complex than traditional electric generation approaches. It encompasses a
wide range of feedstocks (crops to residues to animal manures and even, by some definitions,
municipal solid waste and landfill gas) and a wide range of technologies (standard combustion
boilers to anaerobic digesters to gasification processes). This makes a side-by-side comparison
of diverse projects even more difficult.
The concern becomes that without such a common framework from which to identify and
compare diverse projects, projects may be selected for political expediency rather than
technical and/or economic feasibility. The lack of a commonly accepted standard for decision
making, combined with current regulatory and perceptual barriers in the biomass arena,
complicates the selection process even further. The idea was therefore to provide tools and
information to assist in the comparison of diverse biomass projects and allow for an objective
evaluation. The result of this effort is before you.
This project fulfills the objective delineated in the R&D portion of the RDF for assisting new
technologies to the point where they can begin the process of commercial introduction by
providing objective information to minimize transaction costs in the evaluation, selection, and
ultimate implementation of biomass projects.
Goals
The goal of this project is to create a framework that communities and legislators can use to
determine the feasibility of biomass generated electricity in their region and to develop costeffective
projects that use local biomass resources efficiently. Although biomass can offer
multiple benefits as a fuel source, biomass resources are extremely diverse in their physical
characteristics and their potential for energy generation. It is imperative that projects are
designed with this diversity in mind and within the parameters established by local or regional
contexts. This project developed a number of resources to aid in the identification of areas in
the state where relationships between fuel sources, local conditions, and appropriate
technologies produce a promising opportunity for a biomass project. With this information,
funding organizations, policy makers and state regulators will be better able to select the most
Identifying Effective Biomass Strategies: Page 3
Quantifying Minnesota’s Resources and Evaluating Future Opportunities