Decline in California Logging Takes Its Toll on Biomass Power Plant

In the lonely cold rolling off the eastern slope of the Sierra, the Honey Lake biomass power plant has for a decade performed its small part to keep the lights on in California.

But this morning plant manager Ralph Sanders will issue the order everyone knows is coming but no one wants to hear.

Shut it down.

With a click of a computer mouse in the main control room, the dancing embers of fire will ebb in the massive furnace, the boilers will cool, the noisy whirl of the steam turbine will turn to icy silence.

And the Honey Lake plant will begin what is expected to be a six-month hiatus from producing electricity.

The timing is inauspicious. With the state’s new electricity marketplace buffeted by skyrocketing prices and power shortages, California needs every kilowatt it can get.

Equally surprising is the cause of the Honey Lake shutdown. Though the plant is among the more environmentally friendly in the state, its current troubles result in part from a fight over the environment.

The plant, a model of renewable energy that uses chipped timber boughs and other forest leftovers as fuel to make electricity, has become the unintended victim of a long-running clash between environmentalists and the U.S. Forest Service over the future of logging on public lands.

Concerns over threatened species such as the California spotted owl and Pacific fisher, a relative of the otter, have in recent years combined with broad market forces to cause a steady decline not only in lumber culled from Sierra forests, but also of biomass fuel.

Honey Lake simply ran out.

“It’s the ultimate irony--this is happening when the state needs our power more than ever,” said Dave Allen, fuel supply manager for the plant. Though the plant’s parent company, CMS Energy of Dearborn, Mich., has committed to firing up again in June when fuel supplies may be replenished, Allen said, “We couldn’t stand another year or two of this.”

The latest threat, a Sierra-wide federal logging moratorium that could stretch into March, has sounded bipartisan alarms all the way to Washington, D.C.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Rep. Wally Herger (R-Marysville) raised concerns in a Dec. 20 letter to federal regulators, saying the decline in biomass fuel and resulting threat to power generation “could not come at a worse time for electricity supplies in our state.”

Perched on a barren plateau 20 miles east of Susanville, the isolated Honey Lake plant is far from the forest and thus has been hardest hit.

But industry officials say more than a dozen other biomass energy facilities scattered around the Sierra face similar troubles. If they can’t get enough chipped wood, these plants--generating enough power for 300,000 homes--could face downtime.

“This threatens to cripple a big segment of the industry,” said Robert L. Judd Jr., executive director of the California Biomass Energy Alliance. “But it’s been hard to get the attention of policymakers. We’re not as photogenic as some of the other renewable energy sources.”

The biomass industry bloomed in the mid-1980s, largely in response to federal energy policy encouraging renewable power. But California’s deregulation of electricity hit biomass hard. In 1994, at the start of the deregulation debate, the state had 45 biomass plants. Since then a third of those have shut down, pulling the plug because of low energy prices in the mid-1990s and market uncertainties.

Though biomass electricity is traditionally more expensive than that generated with coal or gas, industry leaders believe that the higher price is offset by environmental benefits.

Unlike coal, the wood used in biomass doesn’t emit greenhouse gases. And the exhaust systems employed at biomass plants eliminate 97% of the pollutants once produced by open burning of wood waste such as orchard trimmings in the Central Valley. The crunch on landfills also is eased because wood pallets and construction refuse from urban areas can be ground up for biomass fuel.

But the industry’s biggest fuel source--fully 60% of the biomass produced in the state--is timber leftovers pulled from the forests.

U.S. Forest Service officials acknowledge that the untimely slowdown at biomass plants is unfortunate. But they say their current logging suspension in federal forests was necessary in the face of a lawsuit by Earth Island Institute, a San Francisco-based environmental group pushing to slash timber harvests and ease the threat to endangered wildlife and ecosystems.

Rachel Fazio, an Earth Island attorney, said the Forest Service has for generations let loggers plunder the forest instead of insisting on projects that carefully thin the thicket of brush and tiny trees that poses a threat of catastrophic wildfires. Those sorts of skinny trees--too small to saw for lumber--are the perfect fuel for biomass plants.

Lumber economics have also hurt the biomass industry. The market has been flooded with logs from Canada and whipsawed by fluctuations in the home-building industry, trends that have joined environmental concerns to slow cutting in California. Meanwhile, wood chips increasingly have been diverted for use in fiberboard and other more profitable products.

Forest Service officials say they are concerned about the short-term health of the biomass industry but see better times ahead.

A sweeping final blueprint for the 11 national forests running the length of the Sierra is set to be released by the agency in the next two weeks. Though forest officials are mum on the details, the plan is widely expected to include a more intense focus on--and additional funding for--steadily clearing the clutter now posing a fire threat.

“We’d like to see a healthy biomass industry,” said Matt Mathes, a Forest Service spokesman. “The types of trees that would be cut are the smaller-diameter types that presumably the biomass industry can use.”

Biomass is a tiny contributor of electricity in California. The entire industry, 31 plants in all, generates 600 megawatts--about 1.5% of the power produced in the state. Just one of Southern California’s big gas-fired power plants produces roughly double the electricity yielded by the entire biomass industry.

But in these tough times, every megawatt counts. During the recent Stage 3 energy alerts, the state was down to about 1.5% of its reserves, said Judd of the biomass alliance. “If biomass wasn’t there, the lights would have gone out,” he said.

Until now, the Honey Lake plant has done its part, a plume of steam rising from cooling towers silhouetted by the Skedaddle Mountains. Built in the late 1980s for about $60 million, the plant churns out 30 megawatts--enough for 33,000 houses.

Each day, a parade of 45 trucks--operated mostly by mom-and-pop outfits linked to the logging industry--arrives at the front gate to dump wood chips, which then travel on conveyor belts to a holding yard. From there conveyors feed the furnace, which in turn heats water in the boiler and produces steam to turn the turbine and a massive generator.

Normally, a mountain of chips, enough to run the plant for 60 days, is on hand. But on one recent morning, Allen and Sanders pointed to the current pile--maybe three or four days worth of fuel.

The plant, which normally operates 350 days a year, limped along in 2000 on 40% of its typical fuel needs, providing power only about 210 days.

During the coming months offline, the plant’s parent company has committed to keeping the 22 employees on the payroll--at a cost of $600,000. Statewide, biomass is accountable for about 5,000 jobs in rural hamlets and dusty valley towns where good work often is hard to come by.

“I think it’s horrible,” said Donna Bonnett, who weighs in the big-rig trucks that pull to the front gate. “The livelihood of a lot of people could be affected--families, little kids. It could be bad.”

Nearby towns also could take a power hit. During the harsh winters of the eastern Sierra, outposts like Susanville sometimes find themselves cut off from electricity for days. In such emergencies, the Honey Lake plant has served as a local source of alternative power.

But not this winter.

In the days to come, plant workers will keep busy with repairs, painting and other odd jobs. The comforting sounds of the plant--the whirring of the generator at 600 rpm, the roar of the 1,850-degree furnace, the hiss of steam cascading through pipes--will disappear.

“It gets real quiet,” Sanders said. “You drive in the parking lot, and it just seems wrong.”