Board agrees to negotiate water for woodchip plant

The Springfield Select Board voted 4-1 on Tuesday to enter into negotiations with the developer of the proposed wood-chip electric generating plant in North Springfield for water usage.
http://rutlandherald.com/article/20120531/NEWS02/705319910

Published May 31, 2012 in the Rutland Herald Board agrees to negotiate water for woodchip plant By SUSAN SMALLHEER Staff Writer SPRINGFIELD — The Springfield Select Board voted 4-1 on Tuesday to enter into negotiations with the developer of the proposed wood-chip electric generating plant in North Springfield for water usage. The board was supportive of the request for upwards of 30,000 gallons of town water a day. In addition, the town will negotiate with the North Springfield Sustainable Energy Project over the purchase of the town’s now-decommissioned Davidson Hill water tank. Only Select Board member Michael Knoras voted against the project, saying he didn’t have enough information about the town’s overall water usage and long term needs. Knoras said he was concerned about the town making a long term commitment for the water without having a bigger picture of all the commitments the town has made to various businesses. The developers of the controversial woodchip plant have drastically scaled back the amount of water they will use to cool the facility, which could generate as much as 35 megawatts of electricity. Dan Ingold, an engineer with Weston Solutions, one of the partners in the proposed woodchip plant, said that a new air-cooled design was responsible for the dramatic cutback in water usage. And Ingold said that the developers believe that it would only need town water during dry spells in the summer, because the project plans to “recapture” rainwater off the roof of the former Fellows Corp. building, which is now called 36 Precision Drive and is owned by Winstanley Corp., the other partner in the project. And Ingold said the figure was actually closer to 23,000 gallons a day, although he asked the town to keep the higher figure in its planning. The Winstanley building is the largest flat-roofed building in the state, the developers have said, covering more than nine acres. Ingold said the project also planned on saving rainwater from structures that the woodchips would be stored in. Ingold told the Select Board, as well as a handful of North Springfield residents on hand for the discussion, that the project no longer plans on drilling any private wells on its property either. The impact on the local aquifer and surrounding wells had been one of the hot topics that neighbors had raised, since at one time Weston and Winstanley said they planned on using upwards of 700,000 gallons of water a day. The town’s water usage has steadily dropped in the past 20 years, according to Joseph Duncan, senior engineer with the town’s consulting engineer, Aldrich & Elliott of Essex Junction. Duncan, who has worked on the town’s recent water upgrade projects, said there was adequate capacity to serve the North Springfield project’s needs. Duncan said the statistics he has date back to 1989, when the town was pumping and using 1.02 million gallons a day. Current usage is about 860,000 gallons a day, he said, with peak usage in the summer. He said the town’s wells currently produced 1,049 gallons a minute. Duncan said that he would be hesitant about committing to selling 200,000 gallons a day to the North Springfield project, which was one earlier proposal. Jeff Strong, the town’s water and sewer superintendent, said that the former Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc., plant in North Springfield was using about 30,000 gallons a day as well. That company and its successor, Ellsworth Ice Cream, have both since gone out of business. The town gets its water from a series of shallow wells located in gravel along the Black River, called the Chapman and Gilcrist well fields. And Duncan suggested the town should find another water source to avoid having “all its eggs in one basket” when it comes to water source.