NICE IDEA, BUT WHERE DOES IT GO?

 Clad in tennis shoes, sunglasses, and business-casual attire, the developers of a proposed biomass power plant met on Antelope Springs Road Tuesday to explore potential site options. Their dilemma: the privately owned sites they’d sewt their sights on are unsuitable for the project. 

West Biofuels is the project’s developer. The company’s Business Manager, Mackenzie Castruita, Chief Operating Officer Matthew Summers, and consultant Fred Tornatore led the tour. 

Among the attendees were Mono County Supervisors Jennifer Kreitz, Lynda Salcido, and Rhonda Duggan, who had heard a presentation from West Biofuels at their regular meeting earlier that day. 

The group parked along the paved road at 1:00 p.m. Tornatore greeted the attendees, and Castruita distributed two 11×17-inch paper maps to each person. One map displayed all six potential site options, while the other zoomed in on the first site. 

After a few minutes of mingling, the group proceeded up the road to the first site option: a parcel of land owned by Ormat, the company overseeing the nearby Mammoth Geothermal Complex. 

Ormat employees were present during the tour, as both energy companies hoped to collaborate on creating an “energy campus” on the land. Developing the project on Ormat’s private land would also facilitate a relatively straightforward permitting process for West Biofuels. 

However, as Tornatore and his colleagues explained, the land won’t work for the project. 

The first site is highly visible from Highway 395, and two Ormat facility pipelines cross through the area. The portion of the parcel out of view from the highway drops off on a cliff where the Casa Diablo hot springs are located. 

“Between land structure and visibility, I just think it’s a nonstarter,” said Michael Stallard, Ormat’s Maintenance Supervisor, during the tour. 

Another area they considered overlaps with a former shooting range, evidenced by bullet-riddled “no shooting” signs and trees, Stalled said. This was deemed an unsafe area by Ormat when determining the location for their power plant, and it still isn’t safe to build on. 

“There is buried live ammunition, and there’s lead and hazardous waste that would be quite a project to remove,” Stalled noted. 

Tornatore said the ultimate solution is to pursue the project on Forest Service land—an unconventional but seemingly feasible option. 

“That’s why we went through this site exercise: to show that we can’t proceed on private property,” he said. 

Everyone returned to their cars and continued up the road in a caravan through the forest, finally arriving at a plot of land off a dirt road on Forest Service land. 

“It looks like there’s a good three or four acres that could be utilized, which would be great because we have the power plant, and I think we’d be able to store some material there,” Tornatore said, pointing to different spots in the clearing. 

Mammoth Lakes District Ranger Fred Wong, who attended the tour, found the idea of continuing on Forest Service land to be ambitious. 

“It would have to make it through our screening criteria,” he said. “We have a two-level screening process before it can be accepted as a formal application.” 

Tornatore and Summers noted that pre-development permitting for the project would take at least 18 months, but Wong considered that to be an optimistic estimate. 

“Eighteen months on private land seems reasonable,” he said. “But on public lands, it could take years.” 

The project, being for commercial use, does not directly benefit the Forest Service, said Sheila Irons, Inyo National Forest Lands Specialist. 

“We don’t actively seek out commercial projects,” she said. 

Following pre-development, construction of the plant is expected to take three to four years. 

The biomass power plant is designed to primarily use fuel generated from forest-thinning operations, the green waste from which is currently being pile-burned, said Janet Hatfield, Forest Health Program Manager at the Whitebark Institute. 

Mammoth Lakes’ forest plan, reassessed in 2019, requires significant tree removal in the town, she noted. “There are piles everywhere, and they’re all going to be open-burned,” Hatfield said. “It’s the worst-case scenario, other than a catastrophic fire.” 

Emissions from biofuel are significantly lower than those from pile burning. “Pile burning is better than doing nothing, but it is far from a responsible use of that material,” she stated. “I am floored that California still allows it,” added Hatfield. 

The project has secured a $10 million grant from the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations to proceed. 

Whitebark has raised $900,000 in grants on its own to execute the forest thinning. 

If approved, the power plant will produce approximately 3.6 megawatts of energy, enough to power 3,000 homes, and operations within the facility. 

Notably, those three megawatts of energy would not necessarily lower rates. 

“We don’t have any influence over the rates within PG&E or SDE, but the plant can provide support for the electrical grid,” she said. 

The grant is contracted to keep the plant operating at the 3-megawatt capacity for 20 years. After that, the plant’s future is yet to be determined. 

There are a few options West Biofuels could pursue after the contract ends, Castruita explained. 

First, the plant could be decommissioned if there is no longer a need for it. 

“Most likely that won’t happen,” she said. “There will always be forest management work needed. In 20 years, it might be better managed, but it doesn’t mean it will be gone.” 

The plant could also be reduced to just one megawatt of production if demand lessens by the end of the contract. 

Under the contract, the raw material for the plant must be majority green waste from forest management, but some of it can come from other sources, such as construction.