The past few mornings during my run, I've been passed by at least a dozen flat bed trucks each carrying one prison cell for the new federal prison up the road. Each is a completely self-contained unit, with windows, plumbing, the works. Every time another one passes, I wonder who built it and in what community those jobs were created. It certainly wasn't Berlin. The company that makes them is based in Pennsylvania.
So anytime someone proposes a fabulous new factory or "job creation" project, make sure you ask the right questions. Sure it's going to create jobs, but where?
It is amazing how contradictory Laidlaw is between their PR for Berlin and Henniker.
In Berlin, their arguments are all about how the only way that makes sense is to use an existing plant. That to do a “Greenfield” project like Clean Power is not economically viable and doomed to failure, because everyone knows that it’s too hard to do a whole new plant from the ground up.
In Henniker, where they are facing a vocal majority regarding their plant, they are speaking in glowing terms of how this will all be new from the ground up, employing the latest state of the art combustion system and how everything will be new and shiny.
I guess that they just pick which side of the topic they need to argue for in whatever town they are in.
I also thought that it was interesting that with all of their discussion of employing people in the area . . . that they are now admitting that they will be bringing in wood from New York on rail cars. I don’t see how that does much for employment in Coos County.
Speaking of railroads – The only place around here that I'm aware of that is doing it is Burlington and they were forced into it as part of their agreement to get permission to build the plant. If you go to their web site, they admit that chips coming in by rail cost 20% more than those brought in by truck.
“There were some concerns about the plant in the permitting process. The most immediate access to the McNeil site from the interstate highway was through the streets of neighboring Winooski, Vermont. In order to mitigate these concerns, BED agreed to receive 75% of all wood fuel deliveries by railroad, despite a 20% effective increase in fuel prices for transportation”
Also – if you hadn’t seen/heard . . . the Biomass Energy Resource Center just released a new study on “Wood Heating in Coos County, New Hampshire”.
Amazing how close the wood supply study portion of their report is to the CPB report.
For example - “For all practical purposes, WMNF is inaccessible for timber harvesting and has been excluded from total forestland” in the study
Posted by: Jonathan Edwards | August 22, 2008 at 02:42 PM