April 5, 2016
BY Tim Portz
At this time next week the general session for the International Biomass Conference & Expo will be in the books and my favorite professional week will be well underway. As a result, this week is incredibly busy as our team busies itself with everything from last minute producer registration requests, to tour logistics and finally more content specific inquiries. With an eye on the last item, I’m co-opting this blog to share with all of you the questions I’m looking forward to having answered next week. If I’ve missed something that you’d like me to ask during our general session, please feel free to leave me a note in the comment section.
In no particular order:
New Faces: For the last four or five years the International Biomass Conference has provided an annual opportunity for me to catch up with the executive directors of the various trade organizations that make up this broad industry. For the most part, that roster of executives has remained largely unchanged. This year saw the exit of both Jennifer Hedrick and Joe Seymour from the Pellet Fuels Institute and the Biomass Thermal Energy Council respectively. Both BTEC and PFI will be represented by their board chairs and I’m looking forward to meeting them on stage for the first time and hearing about not only the industry news impacting their membership but also their transitions to new leadership.
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Worthy of the Hype?: For the last year our team has been tracking Clean Power Plan with a great deal of interest and what it might mean for the broader biomass industry. I’m confident the Clean Power Plan will be a topic of discussion throughout the conference and I’ll certainly be asking about it during the general session. I expect Bob Cleaves will have plenty to say about the CPP and his organization’s efforts to ensure that biomass has an opportunity to figure into state implementation plans. Immediately after the general session we’ve got an entire panel dedicated to the CPP at 1:30 moderated by Biomass Magazine’s own Anna Simet, our resident expert on the CPP.
Co-firing in the Netherlands: I’ve been reporting on the re-emergence of the Dutch pellet market for well over two years and candidly, I’ve lost track of where things stand with the policy discussions there. I know that the sustainability requirements have been a bottleneck and in my brief conversations with Seth Ginther it sounds like we might be close to seeing that market come back online. The industry has widely held that once an agreement was reached around sustainability, the Dutch market would likely grow to over 3 million tons of annual consumption. Do those numbers still look viable?
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How pellet producers in the residential market are getting along: This year was hard on pellet producers making pellets for the heat market. The facts are pretty straightforward. We didn’t have much of a winter and the heat products those producers compete with are at all-time lows. Our pellet producer registrations are once again our largest producer contingent and I look forward to catching up with my producer colleagues and hearing about their plans for the off season and their strategies looking forward to next year.
On-Site Energy Management: BBI International has recently launched a new publication and conference property. Both of them will essentially be introduced to the public at the International Biomass Conference & Expo. Our organization has been covering the deployment of biomass power and heating solutions at hospitals, campuses and breweries for years. This title looks at on-site deployments beyond simply biomass. I’m looking forward to meeting the professionals that work in this space while we’re in Charlotte.
If you’ll be in Charlotte next week, look me up and say hello. Finally, I urge all of you to wring as much value from the event as you possibly can. Push yourself to visit an extra booth, talk to one more person you don’t know and attend one more session than you otherwise would have. You won’t regret it. See you all soon.