Asheville Rising Tide builds green power plant in Duke CEO’s front yard (USA)

May 25, 2008 — Char­lotte, NC

Front-yard power stationMay 25, 2008 — Char­lotte, NC
Today, activists with Asheville Ris­ing Tide broke ground on a new 800 Mw clean ener­gy pow­er plant in Duke Ener­gy CEO Jim Rogers front yard. The pow­er plant will tap into a pre­vi­ous­ly unex­plored ener­gy source known as hot air which has been found in large con­cen­tra­tions at Roger’s res­i­dence, 330 Eas­t­over Rd, Char­lotte, NC. “The hot air emit­ting from Jim Rogers mouth has been around for quite some time, but the last cou­ple of years has seen an expo­nen­tial growth of this untapped ener­gy source as Rogers parades around the coun­try call­ing for green­house gas reduc­tions while build­ing the dirty Cliff­side coal plant. This was sim­ply an oppor­tu­ni­ty we couldn’t pass up,” said Jill Rock­ing­ham, chief engi­neer for the project.

Asheville Ris­ing Tide believes that the con­struc­tion of the pow­er plant is a win-win sit­u­a­tion for the econ­o­my and the envi­ron­ment. “We are tak­ing a very dan­ger­ous and volatile gas and turn­ing it into a source for clean, car­bon free elec­tric­i­ty. The great thing about tap­ping into Roger’s hot air is that it is a tru­ly renew­able resource. At this point there appears to be an end­less sup­ply,” said, Rock­ing­ham. “Why build anoth­er dirty, expen­sive coal plant, when there are mil­lions of BTU’s of clean, cheap, ener­gy seep­ing out of their CEO’s mouth every day,” said Jake Tiller­man, Asheville Ris­ing Tide’s invest­ment rela­tions man­ag­er.

The plant has come under fire from some envi­ron­men­tal groups over con­cern of a lit­tle stud­ied ele­ment known as BS, a byprod­uct of burn­ing hot air. The hot air at the Roger’s res­i­dence has an unusu­al­ly high con­cen­tra­tion of BS and envi­ron­men­tal­ist are con­cerned over poten­tial health effects to near­by res­i­dents. “We are cur­rent­ly look­ing into ways in which to cap­ture and sequester the BS but the tech­nol­o­gy just isn’t avail­able at this moment,” said Rock­ing­ham. “We assure the envi­ron­men­tal com­mu­ni­ty that this is the last plant we build that does not have the capa­bil­i­ty of seques­ter­ing Roger’s BS. Besides, we paint­ed the plant green. That seems to be all that cor­po­ra­tions like Duke have to do to call a project sus­tain­able.”