Project Profile Building Bioenergy Two new projects are building up B.C. grids with biomass By Andrew Snook W oody biomass will be generating a lot of juice in the interior of British Columbia by the end of 2016. Two biomass-fuelled power plants in the B.C. Interior will be generating a combined 80 megawatts of electricity that will be fed into BC Hydro’s grid. The 40MW biomass power plants are located in the southern interior in Merritt and in the northern interior in Fort St. James. Both power plants will be fuelled by a combination of sawdust and other re-siduals collected from local sawmills, harvested dead wood and cleanup oper-ations. Once commissioned, the power plants will have the capacity to supply electricity to upwards of 160,000 homes in the province, as well as reduce CO 2 emissions for the province by 570,000 tonnes annually. The two power plants are owned by Fengate Capital and Veolia with the turn-key construction contracted out to Spanish energy firm Iberdrola for $330 million for both power plants. Enrique Reyes Molano, site manager for Iberdrola, says the decision to create the massive power plants was mainly to help plan and promote future growth in the Fort St. James and Merritt areas. He says the B.C. government is interested in using the electricity mainly to have the ability to grow its local economies, which are mainly fuelled by the forest sector in Merritt and the forestry and mining in-dustries in Fort St. James. The construction of the facilities has been a major boost to the local economies in Merritt and Fort St. James, supplying ap-proximately 250 construction jobs to the towns, as well as 22 new direct jobs for the operation and maintenance of the plants. Another major benefit of having the power plant up and running in Fort St. James is that it will create a home for much of the dead pine that is still sitting in local forests due to the mountain pine beetle epidemic that ravaged many of the forests in northern B.C. ABOVE: The turnkey construction of the two power plants was contracted out to Spanish energy firm Iberdrola at a cost of $330 million. 16 Canadian BIOMASS MARCH/APRIL 2016
Canadian Biomass March April 2016: Page 16
