Project Profile An Ontario power generation facility is focusing on continual improvement to provide clean energy and district heating to its surrounding community District heat By Tamar Atik Index Energy is on a mission to encourage diversion from landfills, clean energy use and provide district heating for the Town of Ajax, Ont., just east of Toronto. The parent company, Index International Group, is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden and Jupiter, Fla., but Index Energy is the company’s power generation facility in Ajax, where president Derek Blais and supply chain manager Daniel Rainbow tell Canadian Biomass the full story. Approximately 95 per cent of Index Energy’s biomass supply comes from within 50 minutes of the facility, within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), with the remainder coming from other parts of southern Ontario. The biomass is chipped wood primarily from the GTA’s construction and demolition sectors. Index Energy is looking to consume 158,000 tonnes of that biomass this year, but that’s only one component of the optimization plan which was developed in August 2017 with a transition to new management, including Blais, Rainbow, plant manager Mark Seely and retired Florida Power and Light Asset transition manager Joe Aletto. “We built an optimization plan which basically looked at all the pinpointed struggles from the original construction and how we would overcome those hurdles to meet production targets,” Blais says. The change in management also led to bringing in a team with a more specialized power generation background. There are currently 31 employees on-site, mostly composed of operating engineers and maintenance staff. The Ontario Feed-in Tariff (FIT) contract, which was put in place in June 2015 (and will expire in May 2034), marked the beginning of an opportunity for Index, Blais says. He explains that the facility has struggled to meet production targets because the site, which was originally built as the Ajax Steam Plant in 1941, was not optimally designed in reconstruction. Interesting to note, the original plant provided steam to the Defense Industries Limited shell filling plant during the Second World War and continued providing steam to the community until the 1950s when the steam lines started being moved underground. This eventually led to Index Energy’s current redevelopment of the plant into a district Derek Blais (left) and Daniel Rainbow are the president and supply chain manager of Ajax, Ont.-based Index Energy, which is looking to consume 158,000 tonnes of biomass this year. 10 Canadian BIOMASS MARCH/APRIL 2018
Canadian Biomass March April 2018: Page 10
