On a vote of ten to four, the Agriculture, Conservation & Natural Resources committee of the Senate has declined the bill which was suggested for putting a cap on the total number of wood chips & similar lumber waste which power companies were allowed to burn as fuel and add towards their renewable portfolio standard. Utilties are able to burn sawdust, green wood chips and similar wood waste in order to create energy but they will only get credits as long as they remain under the cap of 1.5 million tons. Paper mills too make use of chips & similar other wood waste. Senator Richard Stuart and the people that supported his bill have said that it is going to encourage utilities to use renewable sources of energy and also provide more business to sawmill operators & others who run wood chip manufacturing businesses. This bill wil be cost prohibitive for the operators of sawmills as they would have to deliver the by products to various paper mills which, if they were far,  could cost more to transport than what they were paid. But Stuart says that the law does not allow operators of sawmills to dispose of or burn wood chips. This claim was backed by a few sawmill operators & environmental groups as well. “Anything which manages to increase the opportunities in a state for renewable energy sources is definitely a good thing,” felt Ken Hutcheson who was there representing Virginia Alternative & Renewable Energy Association. The opponents of this bill, including paper mills said that there was nothing in this law which would preven the power companies from making use of biomass as they desire and the cap was only on the amount of credits they would be getting for it. They believed that this cap was born out of the negotiations between all these sides only a couple of years ago & it is increasing competition among paper mills & power companies for byproducts of wood which would, no doubt, be disadvantageous for them in world markets. There are people who have argued saying that this bill could mean higher rates for customers of companies such as Dominion & AEP as they would have to pass on the cost of erecting new facilities in which they could burn biomass. He argued though that companies would not invest in alternative sources of energy unless they had a financial incentive fro doing so.