Green power

Thunder Bay Hydro has jumped feet first into the anti-global warming game.

On Tuesday the publicly owned utility officially opened its $9.6 million Mapleward Renewable Generating Station, which will remove more than 263 million cubic feet of methane gas from the environment and instead use it to produce enough power to light 3,000 homes annually in Thunder Bay.

The venture is a win-win for the city, said the utility’s president Rob Mace, calling it a milestone moment.

"We’re doing it for a couple of reasons. Socially it’s a good thing to do. The city could just collect the gas and flare it off, and that’s fine. We’re also doing it because it’s a commercially attractive project," Mace said.

"We’ve formed a corporation – Thunder Bay Hydro Renewable Power. It’s there to run the facility and create a profit for our shareholder, the City of Thunder Bay."

The investment, using conservative projections, could net the city a total of $14 to $15 million dollars over the course of a 20-year contract signed with the Ontario Power Authority.

That deal could be extended at that point, as the equipment, housed in a warehouse-style facility at the landfill, has been designed to operate for up to 40 years.

"We hope to do much better than that … We’re looking for a commercial rate of return on this," Mace said.

The city will also profit, getting an unspecified amount of money for the gas itself, which it collects through a series of wells and blowers and now redirects to the renewable energy plant, created under the province’s Sustainable Electricity Energy Development program.

City general manager of transportation and works Darrell Matson said while the city isn’t the first to collect methane and use it to produce power, it is among the first.

He likes it for a couple of reasons. First it follows council’s clean, green and beautiful strategy and it takes a waste product and known greenhouse gas and turns it into an asset.

"And as the amount of methane produced increases, then there will be opportunities for expansion," Matson said. "Prior to this particular facility being built, there was no burning. The thermal oxidation flares were part of this project. Essentially it was just escaping into the environment. It was bad for the environment."

The methane collected – a provincial regulation makes it mandatory to dispose of it in an environmentally friendly fashion – is sent to a conditioning room where moisture is removed and it’s prepared for the generators. Low-emission internal combustion engines, similar to car engines, are then used to convert what remains into electricity.

"The engine produces approximately 2,300 horsepower of power. That in turn drives a 1,600 kilowatt generator. The electrical power that’s in the individual generators is harnessed and synchronized to our local utility here and then it goes out on the transmission lines," said Bruce Baxter, operation smanager with Toromont Energy Limited, whose company produced the engines.

Hydro officials said the project shouldn’t have an impact, negatively or positively, on its customers’ hydro bills.