http://www.vnews.com/01082012/8267293.htm
Published 1/8/2012
rogresses
Springfield Biomass Plant Progresses
By Maggie Cassidy
Valley News Staff Writer
Springfield, Vt. -- Developers have advanced their plans to build a 25- to 35-megawatt biomass energy plant at the North Springfield Industrial Park, filing a petition for a certificate of public good with the Vermont Public Service Board.
The North Springfield Sustainable Energy Project, proposed to be built on 20 acres about a half-mile from Main Street, would generate electricity for more than 25,000 homes in the area by burning wood chips purchased locally, according to developers Winstanley Enterprises, of Concord, Mass., and Weston Solutions Inc., of Concord, N.H.
The plant would also provide heat to other buildings in the park through a hot-water “thermal loop” that uses excess energy from the plant. Lead developer Adam Winstanley called the resulting below-market heating rates a “major economic incentive” to assist the park's current businesses -- and entice new ones.
“Providing a low-cost heat source for tenants -- that is going to be very, very unique for the industrial park,” he said. “It's a very creative way to utilize the excess heat.”
Winstanley and Dan Ingold, senior technical director at Weston Solutions, estimate the plant's 18-month construction will create 600 jobs, including about 400 in Windham and Windsor counties.
They hope to see it built by 2014, when its operations would require more about 30 full-time operator and managing positions to run the plant, Winstanley said. About 150 to 200 additional part-time jobs would be generated by the plant in the region, he said. The companies projected a combined $9 million annual payroll for all jobs involved.
The Springfield Planning Commission will address subdividing a lot for the proposed plant during a meeting on Tuesday at 7 p.m. at Springfield Town Hall. The lot, 36 Precision Drive, houses three businesses in an industrial building owned since 2006 by Winstanley, who hopes to construct the biomass plant on an adjacent field.
‘The Biggest Step to Date'
Winstanley Enterprises announced the project in 2009, and in July entered into a joint venture with Weston, a sustainable developer with worldwide headquarters in West Chester, Pa.
The two companies submitted their petition to the Vermont Public Service Board on Dec. 22, initiating a series of public hearings that company representatives say could take up to a year. The Public Service Board has yet to schedule hearings; Winstanley said he expects to receive notification within 30 days.
“This has been a project that's taken several steps. … (Submitting the application) is maybe the biggest step to date,” said Bob Flint, executive director of the Springfield Regional Development Corp., which helps companies create and maintain employment in southern Windsor County.
Flint said his organization supports the proposal for its potential to create jobs and its use of community-scale renewable energy.
According to pre-testimony reports submitted in the application for a certificate of public good -- a 600-page document that Winstanley and Ingold say should be online within weeks at a website to be called vermontbiomass.com -- state tax revenues from the plant are estimated at about $4 million during construction and about $3 million annually thereafter.
Also in pre-testimony reports, the companies said Springfield -- where the median income in 2009 was 19 percent less than the state as a whole -- would receive about $2 million in net annual increases to its budgeted revenues.
Town Manager Bob Forguites said he could not confirm that estimate.
Annual wood purchases are expected to bring in $15 million more, according to Winstanley Enterprises and Weston, who said about two-thirds of those purchases would be made in Vermont.
News reports said the project had stalled in 2009 because of Winstanley Enterprises' inability to contract with the Central Vermont Public Service Corp., the utility serving the Springfield area. But Adam Winstanley last week said that, in 2009, he had not entered serious conversations with the utility. The project gained new strength last year, he said, in part because of a new state administration more receptive to more energy projects. He said he was also prompted to start the long process of applying for a certificate of public good in July after hiring a local project manager, Chauncey Morgan, of White River Junction, to oversee the proposal's advancements, and partnering with Weston Solutions, whose global redevelopment projects include a coal-to-biomass fuel boiler conversion in Michigan.
“(We were) continuing to get good feedback from state officials, that we have a good project and a good site for this,” Winstanley said. “It increased my enthusiasm to stay with this project and not drop it.”
Neighbors' Concerns
Many neighbors of the industrial park said they supported job creation in Springfield and would likely support the overall project. But they also expressed concerns about its particulars -- especially increasing emissions, noise, and the already large volume of truck traffic on the neighborhood's small roads.
Although Winstanley owns 215 acres of uninhabited forest behind the industrial park and said there is “not a tremendous amount” of residential property in the area, some of his Main Street neighbors disagreed.
“I don't know if I want a smoggy park in the back of my house,” said Michael Karvonen, who has lived on Main Street adjacent to the park's driveway since 2004.
Along with other neighbors, including Julie Jones, he said the neighborhood has “tons of truck traffic already,” which would increase by up to 48 truckloads of wood chips during a 12-hour period on weekdays.
“The trucks (already coming in and out of the park) are outrageous how much noise they make,” said Jones, who has lived on Main Street for 10 years. “They're going to have to find a way to get those trucks in and out of there -- it's just going to be like one truck after another.”
Jones and Karvonen also expressed concerns about the plant's effect on air quality. The potential pollution from a 140-foot steam stack is well below standards that would require federal permits, according to Bret Anderson, national air modeling coordinator for the U.S. Forest Service, one of the agencies charged with protecting the nearby Lye Brook Wilderness Area.
Still, Karvonen said he's concerned for his 3-month-old son, who remains in the hospital after being born with a lung condition.
And while he said he liked the idea of creating new jobs, Karvonen generally worried about the value of area homes decreasing.
“If they stuck something like that behind my house, I'd be lucky to get what I owe” when trying to sell his house, he said.
Anderson said he believed there was no cause for concern about air quality. He said he thought it was unlikely groups or individuals would apply as interveners in the petition.
“It's a relatively small project, so I would question the logic (of intervening),” he said.
Efficiency Questions
While residents hoped to address questions about the effects on their neighborhood, some biomass energy experts have expressed general concerns about using the technology primarily for generating electricity, which they say is inefficient.
Tim Maker, CEO of Montpelier-based Community Biomass Systems, which develops biomass plants for heating purposes, said he was unfamiliar with the Springfield proposal. But based on his 30 years of experience in the renewable energy field, he said he disagreed with Winstanley's and Ingold's stance that the proposal had struck the right community-scale size at up to 35 megawatts.
No size is the right size when using biomass primarily for electricity, Maker said, arguing that a plant's electricity-generating efficiency decreases with its size, while its harmful effects increase.
Maker echoed the estimates of his friend Barry Bernstein, of East Calais, Vt., president and co-founder of Better World Energy Inc.
They separately testified in favor of industry regulation at the Statehouse last month, with Bernstein claiming these types of plants are generally 80 percent efficient in creating heat, but only 15 to 25 percent efficient in creating electricity.
Using excess heat could lower heating costs for the industrial park's current and future businesses, but Maker said it is unlikely the park could take advantage of enough excess heat to make up for the electricity generation's inefficiencies. He cited a similar 50-megawatt plant in Burlington, where he said all the city's buildings -- including those of Fletcher Allen Health Care and University of Vermont -- were not enough to use the excess heat generated.
“If you really didn't care where the wood came from, if there were no concerns about the availability of the wood … (and) if it were a junk resource that anybody didn't care about, you could justify (a process) that threw away 70 percent of the energy coming in,” he said.
Boosting Springfield's Economy
But Ingold, of Weston Solutions, said there is more than enough wood in the Springfield area to fuel the proposed plant. Ingold, a friend of Maker's, agreed the plant wouldn't be the right fit for a place like Burlington. He said it was a strong fit for Springfield, citing pre-testimony from forester Eric Kingsley that there is more than twice the required amount of non-commercially viable wood within 30 miles of the plant.
The point, Ingold said, is not necessarily achieving maximum efficiency, a goal he called “narrow-minded,” but to achieve strong overall efficiency while stimulating the local economy.
“The idea of this industrial park that has some empty buildings right now … and has a lot of potential, is that if we can provide low-cost heat to tenants and it brings more businesses into Vermont, to me that is a much more important sell than trying to get the optimum efficiency on the thermal side,” he said.
That position was supported by at least two of the park's half-dozen current occupants, including Robert Byington, president of the engineering, tool design and manufacturing company Lucas Industries, and Ken Millay, owner of Springfield Tool Supply Inc., a similar distributor.
“I would look forward to it because it would provide employment for our people that could make our area here a lot better,” said Millay, who added he planned to take advantage of the low-cost heat. He said he hoped the below-market costs would attract new businesses -- and that his company could sell tools to those businesses.
“It used to be great in the old days because here in the valley, we had about 3,000 jobs that pertained directly to what we supply, and today it's probably only less than 1,000,” he said. “Now there's really a vacuum around here for us. There’s nothing here for us anymore. But it’s still a wonderful place for us to be.”
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