Company to Burn Biomass in Escanaba, Michigan Coal-Fired Plant

- by Jen­ny Lan­cour, April 3, 2015, Escan­a­ba Dai­ly Press

Any­one want­i­ng to express com­ments on a com­pa­ny’s recent pro­pos­al to buy Escan­aba’s pow­er plant can attend a pub­lic hear­ing next week at city hall, accord­ing to city officials.

A pub­lic hear­ing on a pur­chase pro­pos­al sub­mit­ted by Ster­ling Ener­gy Group, Inc. will be held dur­ing the joint meet­ing of coun­cil and the Elec­tri­cal Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee begin­ning at 6 p.m. CDT Wednes­day in coun­cil chambers.

Ster­ling Ener­gy has offered to buy the coal-fueled pow­er plant and equip­ment for $250,000 and plans to invest addi­tion­al funds into the prop­er­ty to con­vert the facil­i­ty to burn biomass.

The plant has been for sale for sev­er­al years because it is less cost­ly for the city to buy pow­er com­pared to gen­er­at­ing ener­gy by burn­ing coal. Escan­a­ba has been buy­ing pow­er from a sup­pli­er for more than three years.

Coun­cil announced SEG’s pro­pos­al last month but took no action pend­ing next week’s pub­lic hear­ing allow­ing cit­i­zen input on the matter.

SEG — head­quar­tered in Gary, Ind. — buys coal-fired plants which no longer have a use­ful life and retro­fits them into bio­mass-fueled facilities.

For exam­ple, the com­pa­ny owns a bio­mass plant in Nia­gara Falls, N.Y., which was con­vert­ed to burn the renew­able fuel of slash — the left­over waste prod­ucts from for­est harvests.

SEG is look­ing to retro­fit the Escan­a­ba plant to burn an esti­mat­ed 200,000 tons of bio­mass a year con­sist­ing of more than 80 per­cent for­est slash and “C&D” wood — a mulch made from con­struc­tion and demo­li­tion debris — and less than 20 per­cent of rail­road ties.

In addi­tion to the $250,000 pur­chase of the prop­er­ty, SEG also offered to post a $200,000 non-refund­able deposit to pay the city’s past legal bills and addi­tion­al legal fees to com­plete the sales transaction.

Employ­ees cur­rent­ly work­ing at the plant would be hired on with the new company.

Accord­ing to a demo­li­tion esti­mate com­plet­ed a few years ago, it would cost the city more than $600,000 to demol­ish the pow­er plant build­ing which also con­tains asbestos, not­ed Elec­tric Super­in­ten­dent Mike Furmanski.

Fur­man­s­ki dis­cussed the pub­lic hear­ing fol­low­ing Wednes­day’s coun­cil meet­ing when he pre­sent­ed an update on the city’s recent­ly-con­struct­ed substation.

A new unit was built fol­low­ing an explo­sion at the pow­er plan­t’s sub­sta­tion on Feb. 2. The load from a rental mobile sub­sta­tion has been trans­ferred to the new unit, explained Furmanski.

Extra load which was put on the city’s west-side sub­sta­tion after the explo­sion, will be trans­ferred to the new unit dur­ing the next week, he added.