Wisconsin Badgers Toward Cleaner Energy

CO2 is removed in the plant's two tall silvery columns (top).

Today, as part of the Society of Environmental Journalists annual meeting, I hopped a bus and toured three of Wisconsin’s leading renewable-energy projects. Heartened as I was to see innovation in action, I could also tell we’re still in Mile One of a long marathon away from fossil fuels.

Just one percent of the plant

First we visited a Wisconsin Energy coal-fired power plant outside of Milwaukee called Pleasant Prairie. There, engineers built a four-story plant that diverts a slice of the coal’s smoke and vapor and extracts the CO2 by sprinkling it with chilled ammonia. This is one approach to “carbon capture,” as its known. On one hand, scrubbers like this could help erase coal’s giant black mark as an agent of global warming. On the other, the very notion of “clean coal” was viewed with suspicion by the well-informed journalists on the bus, who have seen lies billow from the energy industry much like the smoke billowed from Pleasant Prairie’s stack.

At a press conference, the bigwigs at Wisconsin Energy and its affiliates boasted that their new annex pulled two tons of CO2 an hour from the plant’s waste stream. That’s not much really, considering the project treated just one percent of the exhaust gas, and then re-emitted what it captured. But it’s only a pilot project. One of Pleasant Prairie’s sponsors is Alstom, the global power-generation and rail giant. Alstom has now built another and much larger test plant in West Virginia that might remove 110,000 tons of CO2 each year and pump it into the ground. By 2015, Alstom hopes to be selling carbon-capture facilities to  coal plants around the world.

When asked whether energy producers will be able to afford the technology or fit a scrubber the size of an apartment building onto their existing facilities, the executives had no ready answer.

The prototype of the all-electric Ford Escape sat in Johnson Control's plug-in bay.

Next we visited SC Johnson, the manufacturer of such home-care items as Windex and Ziploc bags. All of the plant’s electricity comes from a generator powered by methane from a local landfill. Laudable as the project is, there wasn’t much to see; we put on safety glasses and earplugs and toured the (very hot) generator room, where the methane-powered beast hummed and rattled behind steel plates.

Finally, our bus pulled up to the gleaming headquarters of Johnson Controls (no relationship to SC Johnson), one of the world’s top producers of car batteries, including those for hybrid cars. Nothing loud or dirty here. We toured the manufacturing rooms and saw a prototype of one of Johnson’s most high-profile projects, the battery for the 2012 plug-in electric Ford Escape. I saw the room where the innards of a nickel-metal hydride battery are pressed together and spun in a spool. The Ford Escape, however, uses the even newer lithium-ion battery.

Watching these projects I got the sense of being on the cusp, of technologies ready to spring out of the test lab and into every coal plant and automobile trunk across the land. If Congress gets climate legislation right, that leap might help trim a few degrees Fahrenheit off the Earth’s rising temperatures, and create a safer world.