Electricity from Wood

[Simonkenton]

Article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about making electricity from scrap wood. Huge industrial sized wood burning operations generating lots of electricity.
I am from Georgia, I go down there frequently, I had no idea they were making electricity from wood burning:

Biomass: Burning wood waste for energy is on the rise in Georgia

The battle over biomass in Georgia and across the Southeast region marks another environmental clash between residents in rural areas who say their quality of life is at stake and an industry that says it’s boosting the local economy and supporting one of the biggest industries in the state.

www.ajc.com

 

[peakbagger]

Definitely a bit biased. The city next to me, Berlin NH has the biggest one (75MW)in the Northeast, very few to any complaints. The comment about the emissions is way off on newer plants. Maine and NH has many smaller plants running for 30 plus years. They at a minimum have electrostatic precipitators on their outlet with cyclones upstream. That is a pretty good combination, newer plants usually have a couple of stages of ESPs which are about as good as they get as long as the feedstock is whole tree chips. The big thing to understand is the only way these plants make money is that someone is subsidizing what they get paid for power. Unlike other low carbon power sources they can be dispatched when needed as long as they have a pile of fuel.

NC has some very good incentives for biomass power about 15 years ago. There were several old coal fired plants in Eastern NC and a lumber industry with low grade wood that either got burned or left in the woods. One of my clients bought one of the plants and we converted it to burn local biomass. Eastern NC used to be a major rail hub and the way they got rid of the old tied is pay some farmer to dump it in their back forty where they slowly rotted and contaminated the ground water. The state really needed a solution to these railroad ties. We ran the numbers and the facility got permitted to burn ties along with green chips. The plant passed all emission tests. The plant had not been run for a few years so it put some locals back to work and gave another source of revenue to local loggers. A couple of years later Duke twisted NCs arm and the state handed the subsidy to Duke to shut down some dirty coal plants and build new natural gas plants. It shut the plant down once the state pulled the subsidies. There was a movement in western NC to prevent building new biomass plants. NIMBY is alive and well all over.

If there is ash being spread over the neighborhood, the plant is not being operated or maintained correctly. The plants have continuous emission monitors and by law they have to meet their permits. If particulate is coming out their stack its documented and this is as much a failing of the state regulators as the plant operators. I do agree biomass plants are noisy industrial operations. They have re-chippers to resize the incoming chips and they are noisy especially if they were located outdoors. Southern plants are frequently located outdoors. There also can be sawdust getting blown off the fuel piles but it does not carry far.

 

[kennyp2339]

I know at one point First Energy partnered up with another outside agency and converted a coal boiler into a bio-mass boiler I think at there Burger generation site, it ran for 1 or 2 years before the utility company pulled the plug and decided it was not cost effective, on paper it looked good, cut tree's near power lines, chip them up and return them to the generation site to be used as fuel. I think it was under estimated the amount of energy it would take in just transportation alone to secure a steady fuel source.

 

[peakbagger]

The problem with biomass plants is they have to be small to reduce the distance the chips need to be hauled. The usual rule is the plant has to be sized for wood from a 50 mile radius. One of plant I got to visit was built next to the site of 100 year old sawmill. There were huge piles of scraps from the sawmill so they built a plant next to it. I think they ran 25 years without buying a single chip from offsite, they just dug up the old sawdust piles. They ran out of piles and subsidies and its been mothballed ever since.

 

[ABMax24]

We have a biomass powerplant located in our city. The plant is only 1.25 miles from my house, I can see the steam from the stack out our bedroom windows. The plant is located adjacent to the sawmill and burns the waste residues that would otherwise be burnt in the big incinerator. The plant also provides low pressure steam to the sawmills kilns for drying lumber.

Emissions wise we never smell or see anything from the plant, we see steam out the stack in the winter, otherwise the emissions are visibly clean. There was some soot and ash out the stack during the first months of startup, but those issues were quickly figured out. The old incinerator was much worse for blowing smoke, soot, sparks and ash all over the city. Air quality is a much larger concern because of all the diesel trucks without emissions equipment, and the smoke from brush piles that are burnt outside city limits during the winter. If those brush piles were chipped and hauled to the plant our air would be much cleaner.

Economically the plant just scrapes by, if it wasn't for the source of fuel next door, and the sale of steam to the sawmill it would be running in the red. The plant is small, and is rated at 26 megawatts, but due to maintenance issues never runs much beyond 14 megawatts. There are 2 boilers in the plant and it seems one is always down for cleaning or maintenance. The steam is condensed in an air cooler, this has also posed issues operating in -40, numerous tubes have been replaced over the years due to water freezing and splitting them. There was an upgrade a couple years ago where all the round coolers tubes were replaced with oval tubes, allowing the tubes to expand a bit without bursting if water froze within them.

Most residents here are unaware of that there is a powerplant in town, and those that know are indifferent to it's existence. There have been a few jobs created from it's operation and maintenance.

 

[Simonkenton]

Very interesting peakbagger. I live near Asheville NC. We were getting our electricity from a coal fired plant on the south side of Asheville.
I think this is a Duke power plant. Of course to the many "greenies" in the Asheville area the idea of burning coal is abhorrent. Not so abhorrent that they would live in a house without electricity, but still, abhorrent.
Several years ago they switched that plant to burn natural gas. The NG comes in a pipeline, I believe it is piped in from the Houston/Lake Charles area.

So, when I read this story this morning about the biomass, I was wondering why they didn't just convert that plant to biomass.
NIMBY, huh?