A Madison electric utility last week launched tests to burn wood chips, native grasses and other forms of biomass in coal boilers at its 50-year-old power plant in Cassville on the Mississippi River.
The tests by Wisconsin Power & Light Co. are designed to help the company explore cost-effective strategies to reduce its carbon footprint and prepare for a national system to reduce emissions linked to global warming, utility spokesman Steve Schultz said Tuesday. Coal-fired power plants are a leading contributor of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The tests are taking place in southwestern Wisconsin, at a site where the utility had proposed to build a $1.3 billion new power plant fueled by coal and biomass. State regulators rejected that proposal a year ago.
The state Department of Natural Resources granted a one-year research and testing exemption to the utility to conduct test burns of a variety of biomass fuels over the next 12 months. Testing began Thursday and Friday with burning of wood chips.
“At this point we have no plans to burn biomass there on a permanent basis,” Schultz said. “By doing these test burns we hope it will help us understand our capabilities with the boilers there, if at some point down the line a decision was made that we’d want to make a change.”
The tests will evaluate a variety of factors, including environmental impacts, supply chain capabilities, material delivery and handling costs, and the blending and combustion of biomass based materials within the current plant configuration.
Initially, biomass will account for 1% to 2% of the fuel burned in the plant, and that could ramp up to about 5% over the course of the year.
The DNR permit allows for about 20 or so different forms of biomass to be burned. The utility’s initial focus will be to burn wood chips, agricultural-based pellets, switchgrass and reed canary grass, from a 100-mile radius of the plant.
As part of the tests, the company will also burn switchgrass that's been grown on test plots in the Platteville area in a project involving the Platteville-Southwest Badger Resource Conservation and Development Council, Schultz said.
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