Vermont’s democracy and socio-economic welfare over the long run will depend substantially on whether energy supplies are local, diverse, and equitably distributed.  Along with complementary measures – energy conservation, efficiency improvements, wind power, solar and geothermal energy – appropriate development of Vermont’s bioenergy capacity (biomass, biogas, and liquid biofuels) is absolutely central for achieving this.  There are indeed many bright spots across the state – reasons for hope – but hurdles remain, and it is going to take great political will, legislative success, and civic unity to make the changes necessary to bring Vermont’s energy regime back into alignment with the viability of our democracy and the welfare of our citizens.   
     
In our current circumstances, with almost all energy coming from international sources and made available through large-scale, centralized capital infrastructure (e.g., oil, gas, coal, nuclear, hydro), control of an essential factor in the life of our families and communities has migrated from the local and the transparent to the distant and opaque, and naturally become subject to abuses of power and manipulation for elite, private purposes.  The Iraq War, mountain-top removal for coal extraction, violations of indigenous people’s rights in large-scale hydro schemes, financial houses’ gaming of oil futures markets, the buying of politicians and science by the oil companies, and continued operation of nuclear plants despite majority public opposition, are all examples of this. There would be no basis for such outrageous social and economic dysfunction if energy were largely local, diverse, and equitable.
     
The situation was not always thus. It is interesting to note that the constitutional, representative democracy that we struggle to maintain today emerged under circumstances in which large-scale, centralized energy and food systems had not yet been developed. But as scholars have pointed out, high standards of living around the world tend to correlate with high individual and household access to energy, and have throughout history.
    
Units of energy are convertible from one to another; i.e., chemical energy can become thermal energy (for example, through combustion), and this applies to kinetic and mechanical energy as well. This enables us to equate the energy produced and expended by human beings with other forms of energy, such as the energy it takes to power an electric bulb (which we now measure in watts).
    
Prior to industrialization, an average household member might produce and expend about 100 watts of energy in service to the homestead or farm. A draft animal might expend hundreds or even thousands of watts, depending on its size and strength. (For both humans and animals, the energy capacity depended on factors like health and nutrition.) The household’s mechanical energy consumption, then, depended upon how many people or animals were working to sustain it.
     
Burning wood, dung, and other organic material boosted a household’s energy access enormously.  While combustion of these materials did not provide households with mechanical energy, it provided thermal energy for space heating, food preservation, metalworking, cleaning, and much more – and the chemical energy in a relatively small quantity of wood was equivalent to the mechanical energy of several well-fed people.  
    
For example, a pound of cured cordwood contains (with some variation) an average of about 7,000 BTUs, or around 2,000 Watt-hours – i.e., the energy equivalent of a person working at a moderate pace for 20 hours.  A dry 40-pound log, dragged over to the campfire, added to a Stone Age household’s energy budget the equivalent of a man working 10 hours a day for almost three months.  Cutting, hauling, and stacking firewood is therefore well worth the effort!  And it is easy to see how human access to chemical energy sources for combustion catapulted humans out of the energetics that the rest of the biosphere is constrained to live within.
     
But bioenergy is not what built our modern, technological society.  Fossil and nuclear energy did that. A gallon of gasoline, as an example, weighs about 6 pounds but contains the energy equivalent of more than 50 days of human work.  When you cruise in your car, you have the power output of several hundred human slaves working for you, depending on your engine type. And this output, combined with the higher EROEI (energy returned over energy invested) of fossil fuels – i.e., the energy you have to spend to make available the energy in a fossil fuel resource like an oil field or coal seam – has brought extraordinary energy intensities to support our way of life – energy that is many orders of magnitude more dense and more accessible than anything humans experienced for most of our history.
     
Like Tolkien’s magical ring, fossil fuel energy has been an irresistible means of acquiring power, for individuals, companies, and nations. Public policy has pushed fossil and nuclear energy production to high economies of scale, and made energy deceptively cheap.  Concentration of the ownership and control of such energy systems into few hands has linked energy to political influence and almost eliminated local accountability.  More than a century of this process has led to significant erosion of democracy and welfare.  
    
To be sure, in Vermont we enjoy the energy availability that supports a high standard of living, particularly in terms of winter heating and mobility; but offsetting this are climate change, rising energy costs, the democratic deficit in decisions about energy policy, the political influence of absentee owners of energy systems, and the fact that most of the dollars we spend on heating fuel, transportation fuel, and electricity leave the state, to be used in ways and places that do not vitalize our economy.
 
The democratizing value of bioenergy

With future availability and prices of fossil and nuclear fuels in question, it is clear that conservation, efficiency, and renewable energy sources will have to regain a substantial share of our energy regime, at the same time ensuring that our households, businesses, and community institutions continue to enjoy the energy intensity that a decent quality of life requires.  Bioenergy has a key role to play in this.
     
Bioenergy is by definition local.  Because of transportation costs combined with relatively low EROEI, bioenergy economies become uncompetitive beyond source-to-use distances of a few dozen miles.  Bioenergy therefore has its greatest positive impact within its own economic source region, and cannot and should not be globalized.
     
Bioenergy sources are geographically and materially diverse.  Wood, switch grass, agricultural waste, waste from food processing, etc. – i.e., bioenergy feedstocks – can be locally produced in many places and on many levels of scale.  There is therefore much greater potential for the widespread ownership and economic participation of individuals and households in bioenergy economies than there is in fossil fuel economies.  That is good for the economy and good for democracy.  It is also good for spreading technical competencies in local populations – skills and knowledge that otherwise are concentrated in distant, centralized energy-company sites, as they are today.
     
Bioenergy will never provide the blast of dense energy into society that fossil fuels have provided for a century.  A natural limitation of bioenergy is its continual reliance on how much sunlight nature manages to embody as sugars and other molecules in the living tissue it builds each year (i.e., the net natural product of photosynthesis).  Studies consistently show that currently available wood biomass, for example, can only provide fractions of a percent of a typical state’s primarily fossil energy consumption.  Even with more efficient collection of slash and waste wood in forest industries, harvesting of whole trees for burning, cultivation of energy crops, the development of cellulosic ethanol, the industrialization of algae-based biodiesel, and comprehensive digestion of sewage, food-industry, and other wastes for biogas production, it is hard to imagine bioenergy accounting for more than several percent of Vermont’s energy diet through this century – certainly no more than 10 percent.
     
Nonetheless, it will be a key component of a new energy regime that strengthens, rather than erodes, our democracy, local and regional economic vitality, economic equity and justice, and ecological health.
     
Vermont appears to be emerging as a leader in the most appropriate forms of bioenergy (corn ethanol excluded from this definition).  With the support of state political leaders and agencies, local governments, and entrepreneurs and investors, the development of biomass, biogas, and liquid biofuel projects in Vermont is moving at an exciting pace, even in these hard economic times.
     
There are currently five biomass (wood chip) combined-heat-and-power (CHP) district heating projects underway, all of which have received some state or federal funding, in Brattleboro, Burlington, Middlebury, Montpelier, and Randolph.  The groups have started forming a network for cooperation, assisted by BERC – the Biomass Energy Resource Center – in Montpelier.  Added to these district projects are numerous woodchip boilers for schools and other facilities, including a major campus CHP project just started at Green Mountain College, and the state-of-the-art CHP facility and energy-crop research at Middlebury.
     
With the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund and UVM playing major roles, liquid biofuels development is substantial.  For example, UVM Extension is working with farms to develop on-farm biodiesel and ethanol production, and the integrated energy-food projects now being planned by Carbon Harvest Energy of Burlington, with a first facility having passed the initial approval hurdles in Brattleboro, offer a stunning vision of how food and biodiesel could be produced in the future.
     
Biogas is also emerging as a growth sector.  Central Vermont Public Service Corp. has found success with its Cow Power™ manure-to-electricity biogas program, now operating on six farms in Vermont.  Vermont Technical College in Randolph is developing a food-waste biodigestor project that will provide both heat and electricity to the college, and has received nearly $1 million in funding so far.
     
These are only some of the bioenergy developments underway in Vermont, but they are gaining momentum with support from our Washington delegation, state government, town governments, colleges and universities, entrepreneurs, and communities as a whole.  Progress may appear slow, especially if you do not have direct contact with these efforts, but they are exactly what is needed for Vermont, and will have important benefits for our political culture and prosperity in the uncertain, possibly turbulent future ahead.