Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Utilities Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jup The economic and environmental performance of biomass as an “intermediate” resource for power production Marilyn A. Brown ∗ , Alice Favero, Valerie M. Thomas, Aline Banboukian School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA, USA ARTICLEINFO Keywords: Biomass power plants Levelized cost of electricity Biogenic carbon and air pollution ABSTRACT Electricity powered by biomass is expanding. We examine four recent biopower plants and global benchmarks to assess their overall performance, confrming the characterization of biomass as an “intermediate” resource for power production. Electricity from biomass is more expensive than energy efciency, natural gas, wind, or solar but substantially less expensive than new coal or nuclear plants. Compared to coal and natural gas per MWh produced, the NOx and SO 2 emissions of biopower are also intermediate. We confrm that current investments in biopower can be attributed to an array of stakeholder value propositions extending beyond basic economic and environmental metrics. 1. Introduction Global electricity generated from biomass more than tripled between 2000 and 2016, and is forecast to grow at an increasing pace through the year 2040 when it could account for 3.6% of the world's electricity (IEA, 2017, p. 257). In 2010, biomass generated 164TWh (TWh) of electricity and accounted for 1.1% of world electricity generation. In 2016 biomass generation rose to 566TWh and accounted for about 2% of world elec- tricity generation with the United States leading, followed by China, Germany, Brazil (IEA, 2017, p. 257; REN21, 2017). China and Brazil are becoming increasingly important producers, benefting from support programs for biomass electricity generation, in particular from agricultural residues (Brown and Sovacool, 2014; IEA, 2017). Electricity generation from biomass in the United States has grown signifcantly over the past decade, increasing from 54.3TWh in 2005 to 62.6 TWh in 2016, also benefting from policy incentives (USEIA, 2017a, b). Much of the growth in biopower is occurring in southern states such as Virginia, Florida, and Georgia and is baseload and dispatchable (Mayes, 2016). For instance of the 545MW (MW) of current biomass capacity in the United States that has been converted from coal plants, 373MW (68%) is located in the Southeast (SNL Energy Database, 2017). Given the continued political and economic interest and growth in biopower, this paper evaluates the economic and environmental per- formance of four Virginia biomass plants owned by Virginia Electric and Power Company (referred to as “Dominion”). Three of these plants were converted from coal plants in 2012 and one was purchased and expanded in 2004. Unlike plants that co-fre coal with biomass, which have received comprehensive reviews in recent years (Agbor et al., 2014; Roni et al., 2017; Verma et al., 2017), dedicated biomass plants such as these four owned by Dominion have not received the same thorough treatment recently. This article helps fll this gap by assessing the economic and en- vironmental performance of four recent investments in biomass plants and comparing our fndings to benchmarks in the literature using the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) and estimated emissions of NOx, SO 2 , and CO 2 per MWh. Confrming the characterization of biomass as an “intermediate” resource for power production in terms of both economic and environmental performance, we explore the question of why this resource continues to compete in Virginia and beyond, by examining other motivating factors. The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we describe Do- minion's biomass plants in Virginia and the regulatory and policy context of these utility's investments. Section 3 describes the data and methodology used to assess the economic and environmental perfor- mance of the four biomass plants, and the role of other motivating factors. Section 4 presents the results, comparing them to an array of benchmark sources and including a sensitivity analysis of the results to key parameters such as discount rates and power plant lifetimes. Sec- tion 5 presents a discussion of the paper's fndings and its conclusions. 2. Virginia's commitment to biomass power: background and context Biopower investments in Virginia have contributed prominently to https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jup.2019.04.002 Received 9 October 2018; Received in revised form 2 April 2019; Accepted 2 April 2019 ∗ Corresponding author. 685 Cherry Street, Atlanta, GA, 30332-0345, USA. E-mail address: mbrown9@gatech.edu (M.A. Brown). Utilities Policy 58 (2019) 52–62 0957-1787/ © 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd. T