Thursday, November 15, 2007

Chicken-waste power plants planned in North Carolina after Minnesota startup

A company called Fibrowatt Ltd. wants to build three power plants in North Carolina that would burn chicken manure and take advantage of a new state law requiring power companies to use such fuels. "The law contains a requirement that at least 900,000 megawatt hours of electricity sold to retail customers by 2014 must come from poultry litter," reports Monte Mitchell of the Winston-Salem Journal.

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That is an amount of electricity about equal to the amount that would be produced by Fibrowatt’s three proposed plants. Critics say that the bill was designed with Fibrowatt in mind," Mitchell writes. “There’s nobody else in the state I know who would benefit from this,” said Lou Zeller of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League told Mitchell. Fibrowatt's CEO told the Journal that it didn't lobby to put poultry waste in the bill.

One of the plants would be in Wilkes or Surry County, "and the others would be in Stanly, Montgomery, Monroe, Duplin or Sampson counties," Mitchell reports. "Fibrowatt recently opened the nation’s first poultry-fired electricity plant. The 55-megawatt plant in Benson, Minn., uses turkey litter as fuel to heat a boiler that drives a generator. It can produce enough electricity to power about 40,000 homes a year." The company is negotiating a contract with Duke Energy Corp. (Read more)

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