ROCKLAND — Maine’s public advocate turned a key question back onto the citizens of Rockland Aug. 19, following a long panel discussion about natural gas cogeneration plants and the energy business in Maine. “What is the problem you are trying to solve with the addition of this plant,” asked Tim Schneider, speaking to a roomful of Rockland residents, leaders and business owners who gathered at City Hall.

His question cut to the core of the 2.5-hour community forum arranged by Rockland’s Energy Advisory Committee and the city’s community development director, Audra Caler Bell.

Are you trying to improve your tax base?” said Schneider. Attract manufacturing? Lower carbon emissions? Support an energy producer in Rockland? 

“It might be that you have industrial facilities in town that could use a source of waste heat, and so by combining with a power plant that’s going to sell its electricity into the market, that would be an example,” said Schneider, whose role as public advocate is to represent the interests of Maine users of utility services. 

Ask yourselves, he advised, “What problem does it solve for us?”

Schneider was referring to the elephant on the table in Rockland, a proposal by Rockland Energy Center LLC, a subsidiary of Energy Management, Inc., of Boston, to build a $200 million, 76 megawatt, gas-fired combined heat and power (also referred to as a cogeneration) plant on land it would buy from the city. That land is where the existing city hall, and nearby public works garages, sit, just off of Route 1 at 270 Pleasant Street.

The CHP plant would, the company has said, produce electricity for the New England electrical grid, and steam heat for Rockland manufacturers.

The project is far from a done deal; however, the company has signed an option with the city to buy two parcels of land on which it wants to build its facility. To do so requires extending a natural gas pipeline down Route 17 from a inland spur. That pipeline carries natural gas that is produced off of Nova Scotia and transported to a Massachusetts distribution point in Dracut.

It is an ambitious project and has Rockland on edge. The topic has generated much public reaction, with opponents strongly verbalizing that a gas-fired cogeneration plant is not what the city needs.

The Aug. 19 panel included Tony Buxton, attorney of energy law and related policy matters at the Portland-based Preti Flaherty; Tim Schneider, Public Advocate for the state of Maine; Greg Cunningham, attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation; and Katherine Everett, registered mechanical engineer for Portland-based SMRT, an architecture, engineering and planning firm. Rockland Energy Committee Chairman Larry Pritchett moderated the discussion.

The forum last three hours, and questions were submitted in writing, passed forward to the moderator. (Click here to watch the entire forum)

It did not focus on specifics of the proposed EMI plant, because no plans have been filed, but the forum did provide a broad view of energy production and use in Maine. Panelists also noted that the EMI project is subject to fluctuating market forces, and ultimately depends on business and industrial demand from commercial entities in Rockland. 

How EMI even considered Rockland for a cogeneration plant is not fully understood, but hints of broader public policy at work emerged at the forum. Maine’s Public Utilities Commission has been discussing Non Transmission Alternatives (NTAs) for several years to reduce the load on electrical transmission lines.

And the Midcoast, including Camden-Rockland, has been using more power as its desirability as a place to live and do business grows.

The PUC, along with CMP and GridSolar, floated ideas in 2010 about easing the load on transmission lines and building a power generator locally for, Schneider said, “nontransmission alternatives.” 

The PUC, he said, is looking at proposals for how to address the long-term, how to ensure the Midcoast has reliable power. One result of the PUC directive has been the development of a energy storage facility in Boothbay. There, a valve-regulated lead acid battery storage plant is to be constructed and anticipated to be supplying energy to the grid by this September.

It is not a problem unique to the Midcoast. Much of New England needs more power production, said Schneider. The demand increases as oil and nuclear plants are closed and there is “massive retirements from the region's coal fleet,” he said.

Maine is a net exporter of energy, he said, with a large oil-fired power plant on Cousins Island just north of Portland, biomass burners at the paper mills, wind turbines and hydro power. Getting the power out of Maine efficiently is subject to the future buildout of transmission lines, he said.

Central Maine Power, a subsidiary of the Spanish power company, Iberdrola, owns the transmission lines. CMP no longer produces energy, the result of energy deregulation of more than 15 years ago. That deregulation created a complicated and competitive energy production market that is the business of geopolitics, finance and raw enterprise.

Maine currently uses electricity produced by fossil fuel, nuclear, hydro, biomass (primarily from Maine’s shrinking number of paper plants), and renewable energy, such as wind and solar. That electricity is carried throughout the region via the New England Power Pool, ISO New England, or more commonly known as the grid. 

Additionally, natural gas prices declined in 2008-2009, and the industry has muscled into markets that were predominantly dominated by oil and propane. That gas is being carried through the pipes from offshore Canada down to New England markets. The gas-producing states of Pennsylvania and others are sending their product via pipelines to the East Coast megalopolis. 

It’s an industry that Maine, largely through Governor Paul LePage and others, have chosen to support. Maine now gets 52 percent of its power from natural gas.

Anothony Buxton, an attorney with the Portland-based firm Preti Flaherty, was on the Aug. 19 Rockland panel. At the end of the discussion, he carried Schneider’s question further.

 “What will you do with it when it’s built?” he said. “Would you take advantage of it and build out pipes to residential homes?”

What are CHP/cogeneration/district plants?

Katherine Everett, mechanical engineer for Portland-based SMRT, an architecture, engineering and planning firm, told the audience Aug. 19 that her company was neither an opponent nor proponent of the EMI plant, “and frankly don’t have enough information about it.”

“We’re here tonight really to give a high level technical overview of CHP and district energy, and what the key components are that make them viable,” she said. “I’m hoping to provide just enough detail about the systems that you get the gist of the system without falling asleep.”

Everett used PowerPoint slides to illustrate what the plants look like and how they function. (Click on link or see attached PDF for illustrations of combined heat and power plants)

According to Energy.gov: “Cogeneration refers to a combined heat and power system provides both electric power and heat from a single fuel source. While most power plants in the U.S. create steam as a byproduct that is then expelled as wasted heat, a CHP system captures the energy that would normally be lost in power generation and uses it to provide heating and cooling to factories and businesses.”

The city has cited New York University in Manhattan and Longwood Medical Area, in Boston, as well as European cities, as using CHP facilities to supply power to local district energy system.

The CHP plant proposed for Rockland is large, but no public detailed plans yet exist. That’s because EMI, through its Rockland Energy Center LLC, has yet to go before the PUC with its proposal.

CHP plants, however, call for locationa close to customers’ facilities. Distances between the plant and customers can range up to three miles for thermal heat, and 15 miles for hot water, with pipes running from plants to customer buildings. This negates the need for customers to maintain their own heating and cooling systems.

Additionally, the CHP exhaust gases also have useful energies, Everett said. They produce high pressure steam, which is put into a turbine, where it expands and produces additional electricity. The cooling source is often a chilling tower, she said.

Combined heat and power, she said, is widely viewed as an efficient and clean method of producing electricity and thermal energy. It has been cited by President Barack Obama as building energy security, reducing energy demand, and emissions. In 2012, he signed the executive order “Accelerating Industrial Energy Efficiency,” to increase CHP capacity by 2020.

Those same principles are applied to smaller plants — to increase resilience and not be so dependent on the grid. The University of Maine, Bowdoin and Colby colleges, and the city of Montpelier, Vt., all have small district plants.

When residents asked about noise and odor pollution, Everett said that many of the plants she cited were smaller in scale and had noise controls.

“A lot of colleges and hospitals are [smaller], and come with acoustical controls,” she said.

The Rockland EMI includes gas and steam turbines, she said: “And those can be quite loud. It's an industrial process. You want to make sure noise controls in initial design and be specific about noise requirements.”

Is it a combined heat and power plant and base-loading thermal energy locally or is it a power plant, she asked.  Where is the thermal energy and electrical energy going? Is there a backup source of fuel?

Would the smell of gas be detectable a few blocks from the plant, asked a Rockland citizen.

“I don't know if I can answer that,” said Everett. “The scalability of a plant that large I am not that familiar with. My experience is with plants that are much smaller.”

The moral question

At a later point in the panel discussion, Buxton said the debate over fuel is a moral question. 

“How do we get to where we have to go to abate this enormous threat to our wellbeing, which is climate change,” he said. “How do you get that done?”

In Augusta, he said, the old adage is: “The energy policy in Maine is to debate energy policy in Maine.”

“We have to burn a fuel, and have to burn a fuel on most days on most hours,” said Buxton.

He gave a nod to energy conservation, but said fuel is necessary as a back-up while alternative energy is further refined and its use grows.

“The reality is that for manufacturing to stay in Maine it needs a reasonably priced kilowatt hour,” said Buxton.

He cited Denmark as pioneering wind power, and Germany as using district heat, and then storing that heat in water tanks. That pushes to lower carbon emissions.

“Maine is suffering because we have not had alternatives to oil,” he said. “The only alternative is wood but that has drawbacks.... The most certain energy source we can have is natural gas.”

Cunningham pointed out, however, that natural gas is not so clean, and its principal pollutant is carbon dioxide.

Although natural gas prices have decreased dramatically from 2008, how many years into the future its supply will hold is debatable; perhaps 30 to 40 years, with price increases.

“How much big infrastructure do we build out now when we know we have to wean off?” he said. “What are the cost benefits?”

But, he said, “CHP is among the most efficient and this region needs some form of additional energy.”

He suggested that Rockland influence the PUC permitting process. 

The financial reality

The bottom line will be which companies will contract with EMI if a plant is built in Rockland.

It is highly unlikely it would go forward withouth a long-term contract,” said Cunningham. “Would a buyer be a Maine utility? Who is buying the power? That is key.”

That’s when Schneider raised his point about identifying problems. 

“What is the problem you are trying to solve with the addition of this plant?”

The developer, he said, “has his own problem — to make some money.”

To those who want to move away from the burning of fossil fuels, Schneider suggested purchasing power through the Maine Green Power Program, an option that any customer of the grid can choose to support via monthly electric bills.

“Maine Green Power is a program offered by the Maine Public Utilities Commission,” the website said. “Maine Green Power’s mission is to ensure every Mainer is given the option to choose 100% Maine-made renewable energy. You can choose clean, 100 percent Maine-made renewable energy for your home or business by enrolling today. It’s an easy, affordable step that has a measurable, positive impact on Maine’s environment and economy.

By paying more each month, a customer can purchase renewable energy only. 

“There are ways that individual customers can be part of a solution on this one,” said Schneider. 

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Reach Editorial Director Lynda Clancy at lyndaclancy@penbaypilot.com