The future of the Ryegate Power Station’s biomass plant is in question, as its 10-year contract to provide energy to the state is set to expire in 2022.
The contract requires utilities to buy energy from the wood-burning plant at a rate of 10.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. Vermonters supply about $5 million a year to subsidize that steep price for wholesale energy.
On Wednesday, the Senate voted unanimously to approve a bill that would extend the current contract until 2024, asking the state to come up with a contingency plan for the plant’s closure.
Two years is a significant departure from the original proposal to renew the contract for 10 years.
“I’m obviously disappointed with the shorter timeframe,” said the lead sponsor of the bill, Sen. Jane Kitchel, D-Caledonia.
The bill would also ask the new plant owners — Stored Solar Services LLC — to come up with ways of making wood-burning more efficient. Right now, the plant has big efficiency problems: Only 23% of the biomass is converted to electricity — in other words, of every four trees burned, only one tree is converted to electricity.
“The rest goes out as waste. Hot air,” said Sen. Mark MacDonald, D-Orange.
The idea is that the state could review the Stored Solar Services proposal before deciding whether to keep subsidizing the plant in the future. The new owners wouldn’t be required to take action if the proposal became law, but it would be in their interest to do so, according to MacDonald.
“We think that [the owners] deserve an opportunity to make a case to keep Ryegate open for longer than just two years,” MacDonald said on the Senate floor Wednesday.
Proposals made this year during hearings on the bill, such as using the excess heat for shrimp farming, have been received with some skepticism, although not by all senators.
“If you’re burning wood for heat, and you also get some electricity, it starts to make sense,” said Sen. Chris Pearson, P/D-Chittenden.
Kitchel said that she hopes some of these strategies will bear fruit “because the impact on the rural economy is very substantial” if the plant closes.
Loggers say a Ryegate closure would decimate the industry in Vermont.
Climate change concerns
However, Pearson said burning wood for electricity isn’t a smart energy policy.
Those concerned about climate change agree.
Opponents of biomass say it’s a terrible deal for the environment and for Vermont ratepayers, who pay $5 million a year in subsidies to keep Ryegate open. Without those subsidies, the plant would close. And that would be a welcome outcome for those concerned about global warming.
Rachel Smolker of the nongovernmental organization Biofuelwatch said she would like to see the plant eliminated. But short of that, she says, reducing the term from 10 years to two years is a step in the right direction.
“It tells me that the committee members have come to understand that this is not a good thing for Vermont financially,” said Smolker, who called biomass the “darling” of the renewable industry because it provides baseload — or consistent power — unlike solar and wind that provide intermittent power, which turn on and off when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.
Biomass has also been popular as renewable energy because it’s considered “carbon neutral.” The assumption of carbon neutrality comes from the idea that a new tree will grow to replace the old one, absorbing the same amount of carbon.
“All the carbon that comes out is completely uncounted,” Smolker said, and in some cases burning trees is as bad or even worse than burning coal when it comes to emissions.
“That is such a simplistic and mistaken equation,” Smolker said.
A tree can be burned quickly, but it takes a long time for a new one to grow in its place.
Logging jobs
Biomass plants like Ryegate have been closing throughout the region, with plants in New Hampshire and Maine not being relicensed. Sawmills and paper mills are closing, too. Last March, the Jay Paper Mill in Maine — which used to take 250 truckloads of material a day — exploded and will not be rebuilt.
And loggers in Vermont are feeling the crunch, says licensed forester Markus Bradley. According to Bradley, Ryegate is the one place left in the region that takes “low quality” softwood. Sometimes the trees are twisted, or weevils have gnawed into the wood, so they can’t be used for timber. Those are the logs that make their way to Ryegate, where 250,000 tons of wood chips are burned per year, with $7 million going into wood products.
About 60% of the wood burned at Ryegate comes from Vermont, according to Ryegate forester Tyler Mousley.
“Because markets are so tough right now, loggers are doing everything they can to utilize trees as best they can,” Mousley said.
That means that selling chips to Ryegate is a last resort for the lowest grade wood.
That market is so difficult in part because of all the mill closures. Bradley said that in the 25 years he’s been paying attention to forestry, “it’s been nothing but mill closure after mill closure.” For loggers who are still in business, Bradley said it feels like Ryegate is the last place left to sell certain kinds of wood.
“It’s kind of an ugly world,” Bradley said. “A lot of loggers are going to have to go out of business for supply to meet demand.”
Bradley said there could be other consequences to the loss of logging jobs in Vermont, such as the infrastructure in place for highly efficient wood pellet boilers used in homes and schools. Ryegate provides a demand for the chippers and wide-bottomed trucks in the summer when Vermonters aren’t heating their homes with pellets.
“For me, it’s about a way of life,” Bradley said. “We’ve already lost so much.”
But others in the renewable energy sector say the state shouldn’t require Vermonters to save an industry that’s harmful to the environment.
“If the outcome of their job is cooking the climate, then I think we should find them a better thing to do,” said Thomas Hand, a solar developer at MGH Solar, who compared logging jobs to coal jobs.
For Hand, paying more for a worse product is a “crazy” arrangement. He pointed to other renewables like solar and wind that are available for a lower price.
Vermont lawmakers tried to stake out a middle ground in the bill that passed the Senate Wednesday.
“We’re trying to thread a needle here,” Pearson said. “It was sort of a situation where nobody got everything they wanted.”
