The global effort to produce less carbon-intensive completely stalled over the last two decades, according to a new report by the International Energy Agency. The paper put together a measure of carbon intensity — how much carbon is released per unit of energy created — and found its essentially been flat in the United States since 1990, while dropping slightly for Europe and rising for China

The combined result was that the carbon intensity of the world’s energy production dropped 6 percent from 1971 to 1990, but then flat-lined afterwards.

But because world energy consumption doubled between 1971 and now, that meant a massive increase in carbon emissions. If things continue as they have, the planet will be well on its way to warming six degrees Celsius by 2100. That would mean life-threatening sea level rise, extreme heat waves, extreme storms, extreme droughts, massive collapses in land and marine-based food supplies, the list goes on. If we’re going to get below two degrees of warming — the level scientists have cohered around as the bare minimum for avoiding catastrophe — world carbon intensity will have to be cut by 5.7 percent from its 2010 levels by 2020, and by over 60 percent by 2050.

This will not be easy, to put it mildly. The IEA report concluded that renewable power generation, taken on its own terms, was on track for the two degree goal — solar capacity grew 42 percent in 2012, and wind grew 19 percent, for example. Electric vehicle and hybrid vehicle sales doubled in 2012, and if they keep to that growth rate they’ll be on track for the two degree goal by 2020 as well. But for every other facet of the climate solution mix, the world is falling badly behind.

The opportunities for smart grid technology, more energy efficient buildings, more energy efficient industrial processes, better fuel economy standards, and for shifts to nuclear and natural gas power are all being badly underutilized, according to the IEA’s metrics. The biggest problem is the continued growth in coal use: half the coal-fired power plants constructed around the world in 2011 used inefficient technologies, and coal-based power generation overall increased six percent from 2010 to 2012. The coal sector is so large that this increase alone left its power production 28 percent higher in 2010 than all power production from non-fossil fuel sources combined.

The emerging and developing world is the big driver here: China and India alone accounted for 95 percent of the growth in global demand for coal between 2000 and 2011. In fact, while the carbon intensity of the United States’ energy sector remained virtually unchanged since 1990 — and Europe’s declined — it steadily rose for both China and India over the same time period.

This gets to one of the fundamental obstacles to reducing carbon emissions. Economic development is producing an astonishing reduction in global poverty, lifting hundreds of millions of human beings out of misery. But as a matter of technological necessity, this accomplishment has so far required a massive increase in carbon-intensive energy production. China and India — along with parts of Africa — are ground zero for this paradox.

That, in turn, gets to why America’s failure to put together ambitious climate change legislation is not just a political or policy failure, but a massive moral failure. Certainly, we need to reduce our carbon intensity for its own sake. But more importantly, as the world’s most advanced economy, with living standards that are already incredibly high in a global context, we can afford any disruptions from a wholesale shift off of fossil fuels and onto renewables. Indeed, we ought to show the rest of the world how to do it. And we have a moral obligation to do so as the biggest cumulative carbon polluter in the world.

Instead, thanks to our refusal to put a price on carbon, America remains the single largest subsidizer of fossil fuels in the world. Instead of doing the heavy lifting on renewables ourselves, we’re leaving the less fortunate of the world to carry the burden.

The recent bad news out of the state of New Jersey is that it’s proposed slashing its renewable energy budget to a mere $7.5 million in 2014. The good news is that this loss will be at least somewhat offset by a proposal to bulk up funding for energy storage specifically.

One of the key difficulties with renewable energy is that it often relies on an intermittent source of power — solar panels require sunshine, turbines require the wind to be blowing, etc. The result is often a mismatch between when demand for electricity is high and when electricity from renewables is available. (Power plants that rely on fossil fuel, by contrast, can be ramped up or down in response to demand.) But improved storage technology could go a long way towards solving this problem, since excess power generated when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing could be built up, and then provided during other times when needed.

So while New Jersey may be backing off funding for further development of renewables, the storage funding may allow it to get significantly more power out of the wind and solar installations it already has:

In a straw proposal developed in the Office of Clean Energy at the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, the staff is suggesting that the state allocate between $5 million and $10 million over the next four years for energy storage. The proposal says it may award up to $2.5 million in state fiscal year 2014. Over four years, the total could rise to $10 million.

Power storage of course largely means batteries, but the technology is still trying to catch up with the growing needs of the grid, expanded use of renewables, and electric cars. But if New Jersey wants to help push the technology along, there are a few areas the state could choose from.

Lithium-ion batteries are the obvious go-to choice, and they’re already widely used in small consumer electronics. But at larger scales they’re prone to shorts and overheating — as Boeing found out when their new Dreamliner fleet had to be grounded after the lithium batteries on board two separate planes caught fire. But there’s a new technological approach being developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee that promises to overcome these safety issues, while making the batteries lighter and far more efficient in the process. It’s still embryonic though, so it could sue a boost.

Alternatively, Bill Gates and other investors recently announced they’ll be plowing $35 million into a new battery system by Aquion that relies solely on cheap and non-toxic materials like carbon, sodium, manganese, and good old fashioned salt water. The batteries are modular and thus can be grouped as a stack, making them applicable to large and small-scale projects, and they can even withstand a wide range of temperature extremes. Aquion is hoping to have production up and running at a manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania by the end of this year.

And if New Jersey wants to get really ambitious, they could take a cue from Belgium’s plan to build an artificial island to store power from wind farms. Excess power generated by the turbines would be used to pump water 15 meters up to a reservoir on the island, and then when electricity demand was up but wind was down, the water would flow back out for hydroelectric generation.

A new study published in Energy Policy, and flagged by Wired, suggests that a bold-but-not-extreme carbon price could make providing all of Australia’s electricity needs cost-effective by 2030. This would meet all of the country’s electricity demand as of 2010 (that demand will remain at that level is an optimistic, but not unrealistic, assumption according to the study) and would maintain the established reliability standards of the grid.

The current Australian government established a carbon tax in July of last year. Any firm has to acquire a permit to emit more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. The price of those permits — effectively, the price of carbon dioxide — currently stands at $23 per metric ton in Australian dollars, and the Australian Treasury expects it to gradually rise over the next four decades. The study ran a number of simulations — drawing on regional hourly demand, technology data, and weather data as of 2010 — to figure out when a national electrical supply provided entirely by renewables would become cheaper than one provided by fossil fuels.

The discount rate — the economic term for how much we worry about future costs — also had an effect. A lower discount rate means greater concern over the future costs of carbon emissions, and a higher rate means lower concern. The study ran its models at a rate of both 5 and 10 percent.

The study concluded that at a 5 percent discount rate, 100 percent renewables become cost-effective between 2030 and 2034, with a CO2 price of $50 to $60 in Australian dollars (U.S. dollars are roughly equivalent). At a 10 percent rate, its between 2035 and 2045 with a CO2 price of $70 to $100.

The path of the carbon price itself is what the Australian Treasury thinks would be necessary to keep the country’s emissions in line with goal of stabilizing global carbon emissions into the atmosphere at 550 parts per million. It should be said the International Energy Agency has estimated a much higher carbon price ($120 in 2035 compared to the $74 estimated in this study) to hit the lower goal of 450 parts per million. Australia’s carbon price was also recently linked to that of the European Union, and the latter hasn’t exactly behaved reliably as of late. So whether these projections for the path of Australia’s carbon price hold is open to debate.

The standard assumption is that CO2 emissions should be priced around $25 per ton at the moment, though various studies have pegged the number as high as $85, or even $266 per ton.

Wind power is the most technologically mature form of renewable power currently in operation, and when that’s combined with Australia’s climate and geography, the study found it would provide around half of the electricity generation. Much of the rest would be provided by both residential and commercial solar power, with limited use of hydroelectricity and biofuels filling in the remaining gaps. And it turns out wind power is already cheaper in Australia than coal or natural gas, even before considering the carbon price.

All told, this is good news for Australians and an added incentive for the country to keep pushing forward with renewable energy, given that climate change hasn’t been kind to them recently.

Between directly lowered prices, tax breaks, and the failure to properly price carbon, the world subsidized fossil fuel use by over $1.9 trillion in 2011 — or eight percent of global government revenues — according to a study released this week by the International Monetary Fund.

The biggest offender was by far the United States, clocking in at $502 billion. China came in second at $279 billion, and Russia was third at $116 billion. In fact, the problem is so significant in the U.S. that the IMF figures correcting it will require new fees, levies, or taxes totaling over $500 billion a year, or more than 3 percent of the economy.

The most significant finding is that most of the problem — a little over $1 trillion worth — is the failure to properly price carbon pollution. Global warming is the ultimate example of a “negative externality” — a market failure in which one market actor enjoys the benefits of an exchange while another actor pays the costs.

When we burn gasoline to power our cars or coal-fired electricity to run our homes, we enjoy the benefits of that energy use. But someone else — a farmer facing increased drought, coastal populations facing rising seas, or the global poor facing food supply disruptions — shoulders the burden of the added carbon pollution we’re dumping into the atmosphere. It’s the global ecological equivalent of tapping into your neighbor’s electrical wiring so that they wind up paying your utility bill.

The world’s advanced economies consume huge levels of fossil fuels, so the failure to properly build pollution costs into the consumer price of fossil fuel use — through a carbon tax or cap-and-trade-style system, or some other policy — is what makes these economic giants the biggest contributors to worldwide fossil fuel subsidies. Emerging and developing economies in Asia (which mainly means China) come in a decent second. “Pre-tax” subsidies, which are breaks built into the tax code along with other policies, contributed another $480 billion, mostly from countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The pre-tax subsidies of the advanced countries were negligible.

Finally, lots of countries have a national consumption tax called a VAT (or value added tax), and often offer breaks through it for energy purchases. The IMF had to calculate those separately for methodological reasons, and found they contributed several hundred billion dollars more, again largely from the advanced countries.

It’s worth noting that western Europe has an (admittedly troubled) carbon pollution reduction program, so the big externality subsidy created by the advanced economies can likely be blamed mostly on the United States.

In calculating the value of the externalities subsidy, the IMF assumed the global warming damages of carbon emissions at $25 per ton. They then went through the policies of various countries to see who is and isn’t making an attempt to work that price back in through taxation, and to what extent. But the report notes that various studies have pegged the price as high as $85 per ton — and other studies have put it much higher than that — in which case the size of the externality subsidy would be much larger. Beyond global warming, the IMF also attempted to account for other externalities, particularly the pollution and health effects of coal burning.

All told, the analysis found that eliminating all externality subsidies entirely would reduce carbon dioxide emissions as much as 13 percent, along with having lots of positive ripple effects by reducing fossil fuel demand and increasing investment and jobs in clean energy.

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This video produced by the Climate Reality Project featuring Reggie Watts demonstrates the argument that because carbon pollution costs us money, the world should put a price on carbon.

It’s important to remind viewers that it should be the polluters paying for what their products cost all of us — that they should not simply pass on the costs to everyone else. These companies already know carbon emissions will affect their bottom lines. But it’s difficult to ask consumers to pay double for fossil fuel addiction when these large companies and utilities slow-walk toward renewable energy. Especially when polluters’ products cause so many dangerous and expensive impacts.

So what’s the answer? The Center for American Progress has a report detailing what a carbon tax should look like, including ways to “minimizing harm to vulnerable consumers and businesses, growing the economy with investments in clean energy infrastructure and other infrastructure that makes communities more resilient in the face of climate change, and reducing the deficit burden on future generations.”

What do you think a price on carbon should look like?

According to a new cost-benefit analysis by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), a switch from burning oil for heat to burning switchgrass biomass would cut down on both energy costs and carbon emissions for homes in the northeastern United States.

What’s especially significant is that study’s accounting of carbon emissions considered the entire life cycle of switchgrass, from crop planting, to growing, to harvesting and production. It still found switchgrass pellets yield a significant reduction in carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions compared to both heating oil and natural gas, as well as a cost saving of just under $7 per gigajoule of heat compared to oil:

[T]he researchers calculated that using switchgrass pellets instead of petroleum fuel oil to generate one gigajoule of heat in residences would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 146 pounds of CO2e. Using switchgrass pellets instead of natural gas to produce one gigajoule of heat in residences would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 158 pounds of CO2e.

Substituting switchgrass pellets for fuel oil for home heating would also save money. Totaling all costs associated with installing an appropriate residential heating system and fuel consumption, Adler’s team concluded that each gigajoule of heat produced using switchgrass pellets would cost $21.36. Using fuel oil to produce the same amount of heat would cost $28.22. The savings would be less in a commercial facility, because capital costs for a commercial biomass boiler, storage, and fuel-handling equipment are five times greater than the costs for components that use fuel oil.

According to the team’s calculations, heating with switchgrass pellets would continue to be less expensive even if switchgrass production costs rose 200 percent and the price of fuel oil dropped 70 percent.

There some important caveats, to this as Clean Technica points out: First, the cost savings apply primarily to properties that are replacing old and outdated heating equipment, and thus will be investing in new equipment regardless. As noted above, the capital costs will significantly diminish savings for commercial rather than residential properties, though they won’t obliterate them. Second, the point applies to heating oil specifically — replacing gasoline with switchgrass biofuel would be difficult to justify currently, and replacing coal with switchgrass for electricity generation would significantly drive up energy costs. Third, the finding is specific to the Northeast region only.

But for the Northeast specifically, the ARS cites research indicating that by 2022 enough sustainably harvested biomass will be available to compensate for the entire regions demand for heating oil. That would save consumers something in the range of $2.3 to 3.9 billion in fuel costs per year, and cut the region’s carbon emissions by 5 percent. The finding also dovetails with President Obama’s “Better Buildings Initiative,” which aims, among other things, to take advantage of buildings and infrastructure with existing upgrade needs in order to improve energy efficiency and reduce energy bills. Finally, unlike other more widespread biofuels based on corn, for example, switchgrass has the economic and moral advantage of not doubling as a food source for humans.

So those caveats shouldn’t be interpreted to dismiss the importance of ARS’s analysis. The market is a huge and complex system, and how different people in different areas meet their energy needs are organic and myriad — how they move those needs from fossil fuels to renewable sources will be equally diverse. For the American Northeast, switchgrass for home heating looks like a compelling part of the mix. Every bite at the apple counts.

Here’s a small story to warm the heart, via Clean Technica: At the start of March, a group of fourth graders from Central Park School in Durham, North Carolina — along with their teacher, Aaron Sebens — set up a Kickstarter campaign to raise $800 to set up a solar array to power their classroom.

“We believe in the sun,” their Kickstarter page says. “And would like to fundraise to get enough money to buy solar panels for our classroom so we do not have to use any electricity from the power plant.”

Apparently, they reached the $800 mark within a single day. Not only that, but they’ve blown so far past their initial target that they’ve set up a list of further goals:

If we can raise $3000 we’ll be able to buy 2 more 145w panels (6 total) and make more than 1kw of clean energy for our classroom. We will be able to send whatever extra electricity we make back through the grid to other classes in the school!

If we can raise $3500 we will be able to buy enough materials for every student in the class to build their own wind turbine!

As of Thursday morning, the class had raised just over $5,800.

Adam James from the Center for American Progress recently argued that this form of online crowdfunding — through sites like AngelList and Gust as well as Kickstarter — could play a big role in clean tech financing, especially now that President Obama’s recent;y-passed JOBS Act has opened up this form of financing to smaller investors.

In fact, companies like Mosaic are already stepping in to provide solar array financing at unusually low interest rates by taking advantage of crowdfunding’s potential.

On Monday the Senate held a symposium under the auspices of Sen. Tom Carper’s (D-DE) office — “Climate Change Actions under the Clean Air Act: Reducing Power Plant Emissions without Harming the Economy” — bringing together representatives from both clean energy groups and the energy industry to explore how greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing power plants could be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

The Supreme Court has ruled that under that law, the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate carbon dioxide emissions if it finds them to be a danger to public health and the environment — which it has. The EPA is already finalizing rules for new power plants, with rules for existing plants anticipated to be in the works, which brings us to the symposium’s question of just how to apply those powers.

The stand out presentation came from David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which lays out a plan for the EPA to cut carbon emissions from power plants 26 percent from 2005′s levels by 2020. The plan was run through the same model used by the EPA and a host of other outfits, and according to the analysis it would prevent 3,600 deaths and thousands of other health incidents by 2020, deliver $25 to $60 billion in savings (depending on your preferred discount rate) by avoiding those health effects and the damage of climate change, and it would do this for a compliance cost of only $4 billion in 2020.

The three main parts are:

1. Set a different carbon emission rate for each individual state. This avoids imposing a one-size-fits-all approach. The baseline rate for coal generation would be 1,500 lbs of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour versus 1,000 for natural gas generation. The final rate for an individual state would be a blend between those two baselines determined by its mix of coal and natural gas power generation. (For example, a state that now gets 90 percent of its fossil fuel electricity from coal and 10 percent from gas would be required to hit a rate of 1450 lbs per megawatt hour.) This would be an overall emission rate for the state, meaning individual plants could emit at higher or lower levels. The allowable emission rate would drop again in 2025.

2. Allow plants an array of tools for meeting their emission rate. Each plant or company could then decide which mix tools works best for particular circumstances. For example, an individual plant could improve its boiler technology or retrofit with carbon sequestration — assuming, that is, the latter becomes commercially viable. Owners of multiple plants could coordinate running times, or build in more natural gas or renewable capacity to average out to the overall target. Low- or zero-emitting sources would earn generators credits that could then be traded between companies, within states, or even across state lines among states that allow it — essentially creating a kind of cap-and-trade system under the auspices of the EPA rather than an act of Congress.

3. Allow energy efficiency to also earn credits. Qualifying efficiency programs run by the states could also earn credits, which generators could then purchase to give themselves added leeway. Increased efficiency would lower costs for consumers and businesses and thus cut demand. To qualify, these energy efficiency programs would have to meet rigorous standards laid out in NRDC’s report.

If states can demonstrate that an alternative approach from the EPA’s model — say, California’s new cap-and-trade system — will deliver equal or better results, they’ll be free to pursue that.

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By Ron Pernick

2012 proved to be an unsettling and difficult year for clean energy. High-profile bankruptcies and layoffs plagued many clean-tech companies, overall venture investments retreated in the face of increasingly elusive returns, and the industry was begrudgingly transformed into a partisan wedge issue during the U.S. presidential campaign.

But as we highlight in our just-released Clean Energy Trends 2013 report, the fundamental global market drivers for clean technology remain largely intact. Intensifying resource constraints loom large. Unprecedented climate disruption in the U.S. and abroad is putting resiliency and adaptation front and center. And President Obama has signaled a strong commitment to expanding clean energy and energy efficiency in his second term, calling for another doubling of renewable power by 2020. Similar commitments exist in China, Japan, and the European Union.

The report found that lower prices for many clean-tech goods and services, combined with a renewed focus on scalable projects, resulted once again in record annual solar, wind, and biofuels deployment. Against this continued expansion, however, combined global revenue for solar PV, wind power, and biofuels expanded just one percent, from $246.1 billion in 2011 to $248.7 billion in 2012. This marginal growth was one of the many consequences of rapidly declining solar PV prices.

Some of the report’s key findings include:

• Biofuels (global production and wholesale pricing of ethanol and biodiesel) reached $95 billion in 2012, up from $83 billion the previous year. From 2011 to 2012, global biofuels production expanded from 27.9 billion gallons to 31.4 billion gallons of ethanol and biodiesel.
• Wind power (new installation capital costs) expanded to $73.7 billion in 2012, up from $71.5 billion the previous year. Global wind capacity additions totaled 44.7 GW (gigawatts) in 2012, a record year led by more than 13 GW added in both China and the U.S., and an additional 12.4 GW of new capacity in Europe.
• Solar photovoltaics (including modules, system components, and installation) decreased from a record $91.6 billion in 2011 to $79.7 billion in 2012 as continued growth in annual capacity additions was not enough to offset falling PV prices. While total market revenues fell 19 percent — the first PV market contraction in Clean Energy Trends’ 12-year history – global installations expanded to a record of 30.9 GW in 2012, up from 29.6 GW the prior year.
• Together, we project these three sectors will continue to grow over the next decade, nearly doubling from $248.7 billion in 2012 to $426.1 billion in 2022.



In many ways the shift to cleaner sources couldn’t be clearer. Renewables and natural gas made up more than 80 percent of new electricity capacity additions in the U.S. in 2012, with renewables coming in at 49 percent and natural gas at 33 percent. For the European Union, the renewables number is even higher, with solar in the driver’s seat. In 2012, newly installed solar PV accounted for 37 percent of all added capacity, followed by wind with a 26.5 percent share, and gas at 23 percent. In total, renewable sources represented more than 31 GW of the 44.6 GW of new generation capacity in the EU, roughly 70 percent of all new capacity for the second consecutive year.

Generating capacity is, of course, not the same as actual generation. But even in this regard, clean energy sources have moved past their days as rounding errors and are playing a significant role in meeting electricity demand in a number of global markets. Wind energy in Denmark blew past a 30 percent share of national electricity use in 2012, and an official target is in place to generate half of the nation’s power from wind by 2020. In Germany, clean energy already accounts for 25 percent of energy production — led by wind (9.2 percent), biomass (5.7 percent), and solar (5.3 percent) — and the country is aiming for 35 percent from renewables by 2020.

Clean energy continues to expand as a major economic force, with an increasing focus on deployment of readily available technologies.

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According to a new report from the New York Times, the ongoing drought in the Midwest is causing the American biofuels industry to begin crumbling around the edges.

The United States has mandated for several years that gasoline contain 10 percent biofuel — a requirement generally met with corn-based ethanol. It also maintained a tax credit for ethanol of 45 cents per gallon, though that was allowed to expire at the end of 2011. That led to the establishment of hundreds of ethanol plants throughout the Corn Belt, and communities which in turn heavily rely on those plants for their livelihoods.

But now it looks like the punishment Midwest corn yields took from the drought — one Cairo, Missouri farmer quoted in the piece said his corn crop last year was just 5.5 percent of his usual yield — has driven the price so high that ethanol plants are being forced to shut down:

Nearly 10 percent of the nation’s ethanol plants have stopped production over the past year, in part because the drought that has ravaged much of the nation’s crops pushed commodity prices so high that ethanol has become too expensive to produce.

The other half of this is falling demand for gasoline — a result of both the recession, and a renewed policy push for electric and hybrid vehicles and tougher fuel economy standards. Most cars can only take a fuel blend of only 10 percent ethanol, and most service stations are set up to only handle that amount, resulting what’s referred to as the “blend wall.” The Environmental Protection Agency allows for blends of up 15 percent, but cars that can take that haven’t caught on in the marketplace. Nor have “flex-fuel” vehicles, which can take up to 85 percent.

That’s left ethanol with a smaller amount of gasoline to be blended with, squeezing the industry:

Thousands of barrels of ethanol now sit in storage because there is not enough gasoline in the market to blend it with — and blends calling for a higher percentage of ethanol have yet to catch on widely in the marketplace….

[Demand for fuel] has shrunk to 8.7 million barrels a day from 9.7 million in 2007, said Larry Goldstein, an economist and a director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation. And with corporate average fuel economy rules now in place to double the number of miles that the average car gets per gallon by 2025, “you know we’re on a trend,” he added.

Globally, the combined effect of U.S. and European biofuel policy has been a massive divergence of corn crops into biofuel production, which in turn drove up the price of corn and contributed to global food insecurity. Much of the carbon-reducing benefits of biofuels are diluted if not reversed entirely by the carbon output from the agricultural production required to produce them. Nor does the conversion of more grasslands and forest into biofuel cropland to take advantage of the higher prices help, as those environments actually sequester more carbon that cropland.

Cellulosic biofuels, by relying on crops that don’t double as food, could provide a solution. But whether they can be widely commercialized without requiring high levels of water and land use remains an open question.

All told, our reliance on biofuels as an answer to the challenge of climate change has been an ongoing policy and humanitarian disaster, so there’s a certain irony now that the droughts and extreme weather driven by climate change are starting to eat away at the biofuel industry itself.

Of course, the people paying the price of that irony aren’t the Beltway insiders who developed America’s biofuels policy. They’re the global poor, as well as the everyday working Americans whose communities and towns are being threatened by the loss of the plants. The plant in Cairo, Missouri had been buying 16.5 million bushels of corn per year before it shut down. And the town of Walhalla, North Dakota is bleeding families due to the closure of its plant.