Instead of waste, everything from the bark of trees that made your 2-by-4s to the shavings left from cutting that board to size is used as fuel for Southern Power, a power plant about 225 miles east of Austin.
Ron Ray manages the biomass plant and gets all of his wood shavings from within 75 miles of the plant.
“We bring that material in here. It provides a good location for those folks to get rid of that waste,” he said.
Behind all this steel is the main boiler for this power plant. When it’s running, it’s generating 100 megawatts of power that is carbon neutral solely for Austin Energy customers.
“It goes into the trees; it comes back to the facility. It’s just a closed loop,” Ray said.
Austin Energy has run the plant about 30 percent of the time since it came online three years ago. The cost of power varies week-to-week and dictates when the plant fires up.
“Our natural gas plants are really profitable, obviously, because the price of natural gas collapsing. This one has become not profitable to operate,” Austin City Council Member Don Zimmerman said.
Zimmerman wants to find a way out of the $2.3 billion contract. Austin Energy expects the plant to generate 8 percent of the city’s power by 2020 if natural gas and coal prices increase again. High prices fueled the venture seven years ago.
“It was a very different situation back in 2008. Gas prices were much higher; there was some economic sense,” Zimmerman said.
Ray says it’s about the future.
“Over time, you will see this be a more popular option, but today, you just have to look and see,” he said.
Ray says the plant has been idle since February, but he’s preparing for the summer months, when demand peaks.
Zimmerman wants to find a way to get out of the deal. He expects his investigation to take six months to a year.