A number of business owners who supply wood to Ryegate Power Station, a wood-burning power station in Caledonia County, say they haven’t received timely payments from Stored Solar, the facility’s owner.
Ryegate Power Station is owned by Ryegate Associates LLC, which is owned by Stored Solar.
Before Stored Solar took ownership several years ago, Ryegate’s suppliers said, they were paid on a regular basis. But according to seven comments filed with the state’s Public Utility Commission, owners of timber businesses have been paid late and inconsistently, and the problem has worsened over time. Some have reported late payments totaling tens of thousands of dollars.
A contract that Ryegate holds with the state, which requires utilities to buy power from the plant, expires this year. In 2022, lawmakers approved a new 10-year contract, the details of which are currently at issue in a case before the utility commission.
Officials from the Vermont Department of Public Service and the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation are looking into the late payments reported by the loggers, according to TJ Poor, director of planning at the Vermont Department of Public Service.
Loggers have weighed in to support continuation of Ryegate’s agreement with the state — and ask that the commission require Stored Solar to issue formal contracts with its suppliers, ensuring they’re paid fairly and consistently.
Meanwhile, owners of Stored Solar, a Maine-based company that also owns other plants in New England, are in the process of filing for bankruptcy for a number of their other facilities in the region. Other states don’t have the same purchase agreements with the power stations Stored Solar owns.
Efforts to contact Bill Harrington, vice president of Stored Solar, on Wednesday were not successful. VTDigger also sent questions to the owners of Stored Solar via email through an attorney for Ryegate Associates and through a contact form on the company’s website, but did not receive a response.
According to comments filed with the Vermont Public Utility Commission, Stored Solar went months without paying Shawn Pollard, who owns Crown Point Excavation in Chester, and the arrearage added up to $70,000 at one point earlier this year, according to a comment Pollard filed with the commission. Stored Solar still owed the company $8,455 as of Oct. 14, according to Pollard.
The company owed Chris and Rebecca Crowe, who own Timberwolf Logging in Littleton, New Hampshire, $54,000 earlier this summer, they reported.
Zachary and Chris Emerson, owners of Emerson and Sons Logging in Groton, provide forestry services for landowners enrolled in the state’s current use program. Each year, they deliver 441 trailer loads of biomass to the Ryegate plant, according to their comment with the Public Utility Commission.
“Stored Solar has not provided us with a written contract and we are not offered consistency and reliability as our business management requires,” the Emersons’ comment states. “We want to ensure the longevity of our company and meet forestry standards, and to do so, we need to ensure that our wood chip payments are completed based on the business we provide.”
Comments say a scale at the utility, used to measure the amount of wood in suppliers’ load and pay them accordingly, is broken. As a result, the suppliers have been paid for an average load, which is less accurate, according to Teresa Hardwick, president of DH Hardwick and Sons, based in Bennington, New Hampshire.
The state’s arrangement with Ryegate functions, in part, to provide a market for low-grade timber that has little value in other timber markets. Around 40 suppliers regularly sell wood to Ryegate, according to a report published earlier this year.
Recently, some lawmakers have taken a second look at the facility’s economic and environmental sustainability. When they approved the most recent contract renewal, state lawmakers required the facility to improve its efficiency. Now, only 23% of the biomass becomes electricity — one of every four trees burned.
Ryegate generates around 160,000 megawatt hours of electricity per year — 3% of Vermont’s total load and 7.4% of the energy produced in-state. Many loggers — and lawmakers — say the biomass facility is essential for the viability of the timber industry and Vermont’s rural economy.
Like many other industries, timber businesses are feeling the impacts of inflation, with supply chain and fuel prices up significantly, said Samuel Lincoln, owner of Lincoln Farm Timber Harvesting in Randolph. Lincoln served as deputy commissioner of the Vermont Department of Forest, Parks and Recreation from 2017 to 2020.
“This is supposed to be a benefit to the rural economy, not undermining us,” Lincoln said.
Lincoln, who works with a third party that turns his wood into chips before they’re delivered to the plant, said he’s heard from half a dozen loggers who have experienced the same problems. Loggers have had “some hiccups” with payments from Ryegate for around a year and a half, he said, but at first, those problems were minor.
In his comment to the Public Utility Commission, Pollard, one of the loggers, said he received a response from Stored Solar’s account manager in December 2020.
The response said the company had been sold several months prior, and was “making every effort to keep business as usual, but with any new transition comes change and challenges.”
“It is our goal to have consistency for us all,” the account manager said, according to the comment. “As we see, that is not the case at this time, but I can assure you it will be in the near future.”
To maintain a diversified income stream, some loggers send their wood to more than one power station in the region — but many of them were recently purchased by Stored Solar.
“Part of the issue is Stored Solar bought up so many mills, so many of the power plants, that for some loggers, they had no alternative,” Lincoln said. “And so, if plant A, B and C (weren’t) paying, it’s not like they had a backup. They had nowhere else to go.”
While payment problems at Ryegate mirror some patterns that loggers at other plants experienced before the owners filed for bankruptcy, Lincoln said he expects the plant’s power purchase agreement with the state to prevent the same situation in Vermont.
The prospect that the owners might file for bankruptcy at Ryegate is concerning, said Poor, who’s with the state’s Department of Public Service. However, even in a bankruptcy, the entity that manages the assets would likely continue operating the plant because of its secure contract with the state.
Hardwick said she’s affected by similar problems at Stored Solar’s other facilities in New England, where she also sends forest products.
“The instability of it all is making us not be able to run business as usual, for sure,” she said.
Correction: A previous version of this story mischaracterized the contract currently being discussed before the Public Utility Commission and understated the amount of electricity generated by the Ryegate Power Station each yer.