Cogen plant fuels town’s future

CHIPS to juice up old mill

Weeds and a few concrete foundations are about all that’s left now at the former Associated Lumber and Box Co. mill in Wilseyville, where hundreds of people once held good-paying jobs.

Matt Hart is planning to replace those weeds soon with a high-tech cogeneration plant that will turn wood chips into electricity. Hart is with the Rancho Cordova-based firm TSS Consultants. He’s been hired by Calaveras Healthy Impact Products Solutions – or CHIPS, a local nonprofit group – to do studies needed to make the project work.

On a visit to the site, which CHIPS recently purchased from the Calaveras County Water District, Hart showed where trucks filled with chipped wood from forest slash piles will roll into the plant, be unloaded into a dryer and then fed via an elevator system into gasification chambers.

Gasification heats the chips in a low-oxygen environment. That creates gas that burns much more cleanly than raw wood. The gas, in turn, will generate power, possibly as much as 3 megawatts at the plant proposed for Wilseyville. That’s enough to serve 1,500 homes, possibly 3,000, depending on how much electricity each home uses.

The stuff left over from the gasification and electricity generation is called biochar. It, in turn, can be sold for use in filters or as a fertilizer, Hart said.

“The trucks that deliver the fuel can also take the biochar away,” Hart said.

The cogeneration plant won’t replace the roughly 300 jobs that were here when the Associated Lumber mill was at its peak more than a half century ago. But it will mean eight to 10 jobs at the plant, as well as dozens more elsewhere as crews cut underbrush from area forests, chip slash piles and truck it to the plant, said Steve Wilensky, a founder of CHIPS and former county supervisor.

It also represents a turnaround of sorts for a local economy that collapsed in the decades after World War II when all the local mills closed.

CHIPS has worked for more than a decade to put locals back to work in the forests and has had some success. After initially using grant support to get started, the nonprofit now keeps a staff of 15 working entirely without grant support, Wilensky said.

That happened both because CHIPS trained crews and because the organization teamed up with loggers, local officials and state and federal forest managers to lobby that much-needed work be done to thin local forests and reduce fire hazards.

The cogeneration plant planned for Wilseyville, however, takes that up a notch because it means there will once again be local industrial production using forest materials.

In addition to making electricity, CHIPS plans ultimately to also have businesses at the site processing firewood, producing wood chips for landscaping use, producing compost and even possibly a small mill and kiln to produce finished lumber.

Hart and CHIPS board members say that if all goes well, the cogeneration plant could be feeding the grid by 2016.

If that happens, it will also be part of a statewide effort to reduce the air pollution now caused when forest slash piles are burned out in the open. A California law passed in 2012, Senate Bill 1122, seeks to encourage construction of small electricity plants that can cleanly burn wood chips or other biomass. The law will soon require major private utilities, including Pacific Gas and Electric Company, to generate 50 megawatts of electricity from forest wood waste. (Other provisions of the law also require electricity generation from the waste created by sewer plants, food processing and agriculture.)

“This bill made our project viable,” Wilensky said.

As soon this fall, Wilensky and other CHIPS leaders expect to be able to bid on PG&E contracts authorized under SB1122. Because the Wilseyville project is one of only a handful statewide preparing to operate small community-scale plants, they expect to eventually secure a contact.

That contract, in turn, will allow the Wilseyville project proponents to approach investors to finance the $10 million to $15 million cost to build the plant. Phoenix Energy, the project developer selected by CHIPS, has already successfully built small cogeneration plants elsewhere in California, Hart said.

Proponents say they’ve already done a lot of the work, including setting stringent standards on what fuel they will take to make sure that the project benefits local forests by thinning them but doesn’t give property owners and forest managers an incentive to clear cut the landscape. The purchase of the former mill site was signed May 23.

More work is ahead. CHIPS recently began training fork lift drivers and others who might work at the plant. The organization also recently began holding community meetings to discuss the project with neighbors.

Also in the works in coming months are a “feedstock procurement plan” detailing exactly how operators will keep fuel flowing to the plant and a Pacific Gas and Electric Company “system impact study” needed to determine how much new wiring and infrastructure will be required before the plant can begin feeding the grid.

Wilensky says that CHIPS is pioneering small-scale wood chip-powered electricity generation in California. Other groups also working on the concept that he knows of include biomass plants proposed in Placer and Nevada counties as well as a proposal to add such plants at schools and hospitals in the Burney Hat Creek area of the Lassen National Forest.

“We will be in the first three or four in the state,” Wilensky said.