The Collins Companies: Power company plans tree-fueled plant

The Oregonian, Thursday, January 11, 2007

Power company plans tree-fueled plant

A California energy company is going ahead with plans to build a plant in Lakeview that will burn small trees from surrounding forests to produce electricity.

It represents the culmination of three years of work to find a way to pay for thinning local forests to reduce the danger of wildfire, provide more logs for wood products and improve the health of forests plagued by beetle infestations, said Jim Walls, director of the Lake County Resources Initiative in Lakeview, Oregon.

DG Energy of San Diego hopes to have the $20 Million, 13-megawatt plant online by late 2008, said Steve Mueller, the company president. The company owns other biomass plants in Fairhaven, Calif., and Whitefield, N.H., as well as District Cooling Co. in Portland, which supplies cold water for air conditioning in the Pearl District.

The plant will be built next to Collins Pine Co.'s Fremont Sawmill in Lakeview, fueled by waste from the sawmill as well as small trees thinned from the Fremont National Forest and Collins Pine lands and junipers from U.S. Bureau of Land Management rangelands, Walls said.

Selling electricity to the grid and steam to the sawmill, the plant will create 15 family-wage jobs at the plant and 70 in the woods in a community of 2,600 people Walls said.
— The Associated Press