$133 Million to Fund Biomass Plant
BARNESVILLE, Ga. — Developers of a 53.5-megawatt biomass power plant under construction recently secured $133 million in construction and bridge loans, allowing them to begin building what is being called the “first true” biomass plant developed in the United States since the 1990s.
The Piedmont Green Power biomass plant in Barnesville, about 70 miles southeast of Atlanta, will also draw approximately $75 million in funding from independent power producer Atlantic Power Corp., the developer that is building the Piedmont plant. The facility will be operated through Atlantic’s subsidiary, Rollcast Energy, based in Charlotte, N.C.
Scheduled to go online by yearend 2012, the Piedmont plant will convert 500,000 tons per year of woody biomass, including logging and mill residue and urban wood waste, into electricity. Biomass plants burn residue and wood waste to boil water, which creates steam that turns a generator to create electricity. The electricity produced by the Piedmont plant will be sold to the investor-owned utility company Georgia Power through a long-term power purchase agreement.
Of the previous two biomass facilities constructed in the past decade, one in Arizona and the other in Minnesota, one of the plants was privately owned and operated by a paper mill and the other used poultry litter as fuel, according to Rollcast president, Penn Cox.
“Our feedstock is basically waste wood — wood that’s left over from logging operations, wood that’s left over from mill operations, wood that is produced from clearing land or trimming trees, that type of thing,” explains Cox. “The bulk of it will come from relatively close — I’d say 95 percent of the stock will come from within 75 miles from the plant, and virtually all of it from within a 100 miles.”
San Antonio-based Zachry Corp. is building the Piedmont plant, which is expected to create 27 full-time jobs once completed.
“The biggest problem factor in closing on the financing for this project was the economic downturn — that delayed us a fair amount,” says Cox. “We’ve been working on this project for about two-and-a-half years and we might have started six to 12 months earlier without the crisis. There are still not a tremendous number of banks in the project finance market and of all the renewables, biomass is probably the most complicated to finance.
Cox says Rollcast hopes to close financing and start construction of two other plants next year. The company has a total of seven or eight plants in “various stages of development,” says Cox. Boston-based Atlantic Power recently inked a $77 million deal to purchase a 40-MW biomass plant in Cadillac, Mich., which Rollcast will serve as operator.