This past week, Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson announced he would sponsor a bill to remove trash incineration from the state’s definition of renewable energy. Ferguson’s announcement provides a glimmer of hope for improvements in the state’s troubled climate program.
For years, community and environmental groups, including PEER, have been trying to get trash incineration out of the state’s renewable portfolio standard, also known as the RPS. Removing trash incineration from the state’s definition of renewable energy would make facilities that burn municipal waste ineligible to receive subsidies under the RPS program.
These subsidies have been propping up three highly polluting trash incinerators in Baltimore, Montgomery County, and Fairfax County, Virginia.All are top sources of pollution in their communities. The Virginia facility is so dirty that it got kicked out of New Jersey’s renewable energy program.
To highlight the problems with trash incineration as a renewable energy, in March 2024, PEER, Clean Water Action, and Progressive Maryland published a report, Maryland’s Energy Subsidies Are Going Up in Flames: Classification of Trash Incineration as “Renewable” Hurts Climate and Consumers. The report found that Maryland was spending hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing trash incineration as a renewable energy and that the pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from these facilities were as harmful or worse than energy produced from coal.
Maryland’s RPS program is full of other dirty energy subsidies as well. In February 2022, PEER published a report that found that Maryland’s RPS program –
- Spent millions of dollars on a Virginia biomass facility that is too dirty to qualify for Virginia’s own recently enacted RPS;
- Allows credits for burning “biomass gas” from DC’s Blue Plains wastewater treatment plant, which makes fertilizer from sewage sludge with extremely high levels of toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS); and
- Supported the burning of wood at a facility in rural Kentucky.
These were just a few examples of the harmful subsidies described in PEER’s report. The report found that almost a quarter of these subsidies went to facilities that burned trash, wood, waste and other biomass. It also found that most of the facilities subsidized by Maryland’s RPS were located outside of Maryland and provided no energy to Maryland energy suppliers. The costs for these subsidies are passed on to Maryland consumers who get no benefits in return.
Removing these types of polluting facilities from the RPS doesn’t mean they would need to shut down. It only means they would no longer be eligible to receive subsidies under Maryland’s premier climate law.
Three years ago, at the urging of PEER and other groups, Maryland removed black liquor – a dirty byproduct of the paper industry — from the definition of renewable energy.
Ferguson’s announcement is another step in the right direction. Incineration, like black liquor, should not be considered a climate fighting tool or subsidized as renewable energy.
PEER will be working in the coming years to make sure the General Assembly removes all dirty sources from Maryland’s renewable portfolio standard. By doing so, the state will be helping provide real clean energy jobs and benefits to all Marylanders.
Tim Whitehouse is the Executive Director at PEER.