Darren Springer, general manager of the Burlington Electric Department, and Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, not pictured, announced on Tuesday, October 15, that the city will seek full ownership of the McNeil Generating Plant. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
The Burlington Electric Department announced on Tuesday that it was entering into negotiations to take over full ownership of the McNeil Generating Station, the state’s largest single producer of power.
The controversial biomass-burning plant is currently under split ownership — Burlington Electric Department owns 50%, Green Mountain Power owns 31% and the Vermont Public Power Supply Authority owns 19%.
But the joint owners agreed this month in a signed letter to negotiate over a six-month period on a potential sale that could give the city full ownership of the plant.
“For us, this is an exciting and tangible and, we think, creative way to try to reach some of the goals that we have from an environmental standpoint, while continuing to support the workforce, continuing to provide reliable power and give us control of our destiny when it comes to the McNeil plant and the McNeil site,” Darren Springer, general manager of Burlington Electric, said at a press conference Tuesday.
Negotiations with the joint owners have not begun, and Springer said he “didn’t want to characterize their position.”
“We’re open to talking to Burlington Electric Department about what could benefit all of our customers, and so we’re open to the conversation,” said Kristin Carlson, a spokesperson for Green Mountain Power. The McNeil plant, she added, makes up about 1% of GMP’s overall energy mix.
Springer, in a letter to the co-owners on Oct. 8, said the city was “interested in pursuing a variety of initiatives” at the plant using new or different technologies.
Darren Springer, general manager of the Burlington Electric Department, left, and Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak announced on Tuesday, October 15, that the city will seek full ownership of the McNeil Generating Plant . Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
That could include adding battery storage on-site, investing in community initiatives, and bringing in a wood chip dryer or other investments to transform the operations at the plant.
Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak during the press conference Tuesday called the potential buyout “the first small step” in transitioning the city away from carbon-based fuel sources.
The mayor, who was elected in March, called for phasing out the plant on the campaign trail, but said on Tuesday that she’s developed a more nuanced view since taking office.
Her “ultimate North Star goal” remains moving Burlington away from carbon fuel sources, she told reporters. But taking full ownership of the plant would provide the city the ability “to rethink how we’ve been doing things to innovate,” and to, eventually, move away from biomass generation of electricity, she said.
“The other part about this … is affordability, and making sure that we’re really starting to think about, how do we keep ratepayers in mind, and also about the overall economics, of course, of the city,” she said.
Bringing the plant under full ownership would give the city an opportunity to “change the operating parameters and cut stack emissions” at the plant, Springer said.
“And over the longer run, if we get to a point where we have an abundant amount of wind, solar, hydropower, battery storage, and we don’t need a resource like McNeil,” certainly it would give them an opportunity to close the plant more unilaterally than they could under the current ownership structure, he said.
Tuesday’s announcement comes amid fierce debate over the future of the plant, and its environmental impacts.
Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak and Darren Springer, general manger of the Burlington Electric Company, announced on Tuesday, October 15, that the city will seek full ownership of the McNeil Generating Plant . Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
The plant creates nearly 250,000 megawatt hours of electricity in an average year, enough to meet the city’s electricity demands. But the plant produces power primarily by burning wood chips left over from logging jobs, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a result.
The city last November approved a district energy plan to pipe steam from McNeil to the University of Vermont Medical Center, which would use it to heat the facility.
Disagreements over the financial viability of the plant have also arisen. Environmentalists have argued that McNeil has lost millions of dollars in the last decade, but Burlington Electric Department has refuted that, and has said the plant has provided a net financial benefit to the utility and its ratepayers.
Both Mulvaney-Stanak and Springer noted part of the challenge in closing the plant is the uncertainty of renewable energy generation in the state in the coming years.
Springer said the state is seeing little new wind power generation, large-scale wood generation, or any hydro power generation of any kind. Without these sources available, moving away from wood fuel remains challenging.
“The one thing we don’t want to do is go backwards to fossil fuels,” Springer said. “We already are over reliant as a region on natural gas … So, we don’t want to go back to having our economics in Burlington tied to global commodities that we have no control over.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Burlington Electric seeks to buy out city’s wood-burning plant from joint owners.