Pheonix contract 210 Feb 2020 20:32
https://acconsensus.org/2019/09/12/proposed-biomass-plant-site-toured-in-wilseyville/
On a Sierra Nevada Conservancy (SNC) Board tour on Sept. 4 of forest-thinning projects in northeast Calaveras County, local advocates expressed that subsisting on grants alone to fund current forest management practices for fire prevention is unsustainable.
The solution?
Support in kick-starting a biomass industry that could build up a local workforce, restore forests and protect communities and watersheds from wildfire for years to come, according to Steve Wilensky, founder of Calaveras Healthy Impact Product Solutions (CHIPS), a local nonprofit that provides fuel reduction and prescribed burning services on private and U.S. Forest Service land. Funded in part through master stewardship agreements with multiple Forest Service districts, the organization has provided jobs for youths and members of local indigenous Native American communities, including the Hung A Lel Ti – a Washoe community situated in Woodfords in Alpine County.
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In the wake of devastating wildfires over the past few years, state funding has been increasingly funnelled into forest-thinning efforts. Local volunteers with the Calaveras-Amador Forestry Team have applied for and been awarded numerous SNC grants in the past few years, with CHIPS as the fiscal sponsor.
Wilensky and others say the surplus of small trees and shrubs from fuels reduction projects in Calaveras County could be fed into a cogeneration power plant for energy production. The plant would gasify wood chips to power an internal combustion engine that would generate electricity.
“We’re in a restoration effort and we’re trying to get value-added business so we can actually sustain ourselves economically,” Wilensky told SNC board members, Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) officials and others at the site of a former lumber mill in Wilseyville.
CHIPS has been planning to build a biomass power plant at the location for more than a decade.
“We don’t want to be applying for grants,” Wilensky said. “We don’t think that’s a way to live, we think that’s a way to start something.”
Wilensky has said in the past that the proposed biomass plant will generate enough energy to power the surrounding Blue Mountain communities of Glencoe, Rail Road Flat, West Point and Wilseyville, and potentially secure jobs for 65 to 85 people.
The nonprofit has already reached a 20-year power purchase agreement with Pacific Gas & Electric Co., but uncertainty regarding the company’s bankruptcy has left investors hesitant to buy into the approximately $25 million project, Wilensky said.
Wilensky said he has suggested that East Bay Municipal Utility District customers in the bay area invest in forest restoration efforts upstream that could protect their water supply from wildfire. Supporting a biomass plant’s construction would be one way they could do that, according to Wilensky.
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