Biomass Energy Growing Pains

Sev­er­al bio­mass pow­er facil­i­ties have come online over the last few years in Col­orado, Texas, Wis­con­sin, Flori­da, and Hawaii, but not with­out dif­fi­cul­ties, includ­ing fires, inef­fi­cient equip­ment, law­suits, and com­pet­ing with the low price of nat­ur­al gas.

Gyp­sum, Colorado

Eagle Val­ley Clean Ener­gy, an 11.5‑megawatt bio­mass pow­er facil­i­ty in Gyp­sum, Col­orado start­ed oper­at­ing in Decem­ber 2013, only to have its con­vey­or belt catch fire in Decem­ber 2014. Spokesper­sons said the facil­i­ty would be back online short­ly, yet as of Octo­ber, it’s still offline. There have been no fur­ther media reports inves­ti­gat­ing why the facil­i­ty still isn’t oper­at­ing, and mul­ti­ple calls and emails to the facil­i­ty were not returned. 

Anoth­er thorn in Eagle Valley’s claw is a law­suit filed against the com­pa­ny in U.S. Dis­trict Court in June 2015 by Wellons, Inc., an Ore­gon-based cor­po­ra­tion that designed and built the bio­mass facility.

Wellons is suing Eagle Val­ley Clean Ener­gy for $11,799,864 for breach of con­tract, accus­ing the com­pa­ny of “fraud­u­lent trans­fers” and “civ­il con­spir­a­cy,” involv­ing the trans­fer­ring of $18.5 mil­lion of fed­er­al sub­si­dies to “insid­er” par­ties in an alleged effort to hide the mon­ey. The mon­ey was issued to the facil­i­ty from the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment under Sec­tion of 1603 of the Amer­i­can Recov­ery and Rein­vest­ment Act (ARRA), also known as the Stim­u­lus, involv­ing pay­ments to reim­burse com­pa­nies build­ing renew­able ener­gy facilities.

Wellons claims that, on top of the near­ly twelve mil­lion dol­lars Eagle Val­ley must pay them, they are owed past due inter­est of $1,185,433.56, with debt accru­ing at $3254.90 per day.

Anoth­er bump in the road for Eagle Val­ley involves the Chap­ter 11 bankcrupt­cy of the log­ging con­trac­tor that pro­vides them the trees to fuel the facil­i­ty, West Range Recla­ma­tion. West Range has pro­vid­ed near­ly all of the wood to the facil­i­ty since it opened, most­ly from bee­tle-killed lodge­pole pine from the White Riv­er Nation­al Forest.

Nacog­doches, Texas

South­ern Power’s Nacog­doches Gen­er­at­ing Facil­i­ty, a 100-megawatt bio­mass pow­er facil­i­ty in Nacog­doches, Texas, opened in 2012 only to sit idle much of the time due to an inabil­i­ty to com­pete with the low price of nat­ur­al gas, accord­ing to Reuters.

Roth­schild, Wisconsin

In Novem­ber 2013, WE Ener­gies and Dom­tar Corp’s 50-megawatt bio­mass pow­er facil­i­ty opened in Roth­schild, Wis­con­sin. How­ev­er, it was offline from Decem­ber 2014 through May 2015 for repairs, and was oper­a­tional only 16% of the time dur­ing its first full year, in part due to an inabil­i­ty to com­pete with the low price of nat­ur­al gas, accord­ing to the Mil­wau­kee-Wis­con­sin Jour­nal Sen­tinel.

Gainesville, Flori­da

The Gainesville Renew­able Ener­gy Cen­ter (GREC), a 100-megawatt bio­mass pow­er facil­i­ty, came online in Gainesville, Flori­da in 2013, and soon ran into con­tro­ver­sy with noise com­plaints from neighbors.

In Octo­ber 2014, the Gainesville City Com­mis­sion approved an audit to look into finan­cial trans­ac­tions between Gainesville Region­al Util­i­ties (GRU) and GREC, which increased costs for the util­i­ty and its customers.

In April 2015, Wood Resource Recov­ery, one of the main fuel sup­pli­ers for GREC, sued the facil­i­ty for breach of con­tract for $5 mil­lion in dam­ages. Part of the com­plaint has to do with GREC’s refusal to take yard waste and mate­ri­als from agri­cul­tur­al­ly zoned properties.

In August, the facil­i­ty shut down tem­porar­i­ly, and when it became oper­a­tional again, Gainesville Region­al Util­i­ties decid­ed not to bring it back online, with no “pro­ject­ed return to ser­vice at this cur­rent time,” accord­ing to Mar­garet Craw­ford, GRU Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Direc­tor. Instead, GRU is rely­ing on pow­er that is “more eco­nom­ic than GREC’s facility.”

In Sep­tem­ber, the city audit report uncov­ered that Gainesville Region­al Util­i­ties was pay­ing $56,826 more per month than it was sup­posed to, total­ing $900,000 in over-payments. 

Koloa, Hawaii

Green Ener­gy Team’s 7.5‑megawatt bio­mass pow­er facil­i­ty in Koloa, Hawaii, was sched­uled to start up in April 2015, but the offi­cial open­ing has been pushed back to Novem­ber because the effi­cien­cy lev­el from burn­ing wood chips was low­er than it should be, accord­ing to The Gar­den Island. The tur­bine was dis­man­tled and reassem­bled, and is cur­rent­ly under­go­ing more testing.