SDG&E signs contract for renewable biomass

by: Bradley J. Fikes - Staff Writer
North County Times June 12, 2007

VISTA -- San Diego Gas & Electric Co. announced Tuesday that it has signed a contract with Envirepel Energy Inc. for renewable biomass energy. Delivery of the energy from Vista-based Envirepel is expected to start by October, SDG&E said.

The energy is to come from a pilot project, called Kittyhawk, in the city of Vista, which is rated at 2 megawatts. A megawatt is enough to supply about 1,000 homes with electricity for a year.

The city's Planning Commission approved the Envirepel project in December. The contract will be submitted to the California Public Utilities Commission for approval.

The contract represents a tiny fraction of the county's total usage of about 4,600 megawatts. But Envirepel plans to supply more power under an ambitious series of proposals recently submitted to SDG&E. Earlier this month, Envirepel announced that it had submitted 240 megawatts worth of proposed contracts to SDG&E. The company intends to supply this power from additional locations, including Fallbrook and Ramona.

The question is just how much room for growth biomass power has in San Diego County. The power plants must be low-polluting, they must be economical and there must enough biomass to power them. Biomass power results from burning plant-based materials such as wood.

It's not the first biomass contract for SDG&E in San Diego County. A San Diego-based company called Bull Moose Energy signed a contract with SDG&E last year to deliver 20 megawatts. Bull Moose is due to start delivering power from a San Diego facility in 2008, its first plant. Bull Moose announced Tuesday that it has received $60 million in financing to build the plants.

The utility needs such renewable, low-emission power sources to meet a California mandate. By 2010, utilities must have contracts for 20 percent of their energy from such sources, including geothermal and solar power. SDG&E said that it now has contracts for 12 percent of its future energy supply to be delivered from such resources.

The Kittyhawk pilot project is intended to show that Envirepel's process, called "gasification combustion," can meet the low emission standards mandated by the state. It has done so, said Anthony Arand, Envirepel's chief executive officer.

"The environmental evaluation, the CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) evaluation, of this facility showed that it had less impact as a power plant in a manufacturing facility than the guys who were in here before us," Arand said.

"The regulatory change in our state since the last major round of power plant construction has basically taken the ability to pollute away from the power plants," Arand said. "So if you're going to build new ones, you have to do it so they don't pollute."

If the 240-megawatt bid is accepted, Envirepel's total commitment to deliver biomass-generated electricity to SDG&E, including existing contracts, would reach 264.5 megawatts, Arand said.

This includes 90 megawatts from the Fallbrook landfill, 60 megawatts from the Sycamore landfill off of Route 52, 30 megawatts from the Miramar landfill and 60 megawatts from the Otay landfill in South County. Three smaller plants would be constructed, each generating 7.5 megawatts, in Vista, on the Ramona Landfill and on the Los Coyotes Indian Reservation in East County. The remaining 2 megawatts would come from the Kittyhawk plant.

However, Michael Shames, executive director of the Utility Consumers' Action Network in San Diego, said biomass projects can only become a "modest" boost to the local energy supply.

"There is only a limited amount of cost-effective biomass stock to tap into within the county," Shames said by e-mail. "Landfills are likely the best source -- and we only have a limited number here. So it is nice to have the contract, but I fear it isn't the beginning of a local biomass boom."