Twenty years ago the woodburning power plant in the Burlington Intervale looked like the perfect solution to the “energy crisis.” Clean, reliable and cost-effective, its fuel source was not trapped under miles of sand in the Persian Gulf, but readily accessible in the woods of Vermont. Who would have known then — with gas lines a mile long — that the bottom would drop out of the oil market? Or that, two decades later, the McNeil Generating Station would update its technology yet again in anticipation of future energy needs?

The McNeil station — one of the largest wood-burning power plants of its kind in the country — is about to earn another superlative: It’s the proposed site for a new technology that promises to decrease global warming and provide more efficient electricity, all in one environmentally correct machine.

“Burlington was the best place in the world to do it,” George Sterzinger says of the combined-cycle gasifier, the first biomass generator of its scale. Formerly commissioner of the Vermont Department of Public Service under Governor Madeleine Kunin, Sterzinger heard about the project from a commercial developer who was looking for a site with a regular supply of “biomass” — wood — and residents interested in experimentation. Burlington came to mind.

“It seemed like a good place because of its commitment to environment — with a capital ‘e,'” Sterzinger explains. “People can understand the experiment and be enthusiastic about it.” Moreover, the project could translate into free gas for the city of Burlington. And royalties — Burlington will profit if any of the technologies developed in Vermont pay off.

The first phase of the project is fully funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and a private company — the Atlanta-based Future Energy Resources Corporation. The cost of hauling local wood chips, Florida sugarcane and Midwestern switchgrass is covered by a $14 million grant. “The gasifier gives us freedom from dependency on fossil fuels without financial risk to Burlington,” says Samuel Press, chair of the Burlington Electric Commission. “There is actually the potential of making a buck.”

At full power, the McNeil Plant can generate enough electricity to keep the city of Burlington — about 50,000 homes — in electric razors, televisions and microwaves. But for all its conveyor belts and mountains of wood chips, the plant currently operates at a fraction of its capacity. Wood must be chipped into tiny pieces and shipped into the plant, often by train, at a cost of $12-20 per ton. “We can’t pay our wood suppliers a reasonable price and produce electricity that’s economical,” says McNeil superintendent John Irving. “It’s cheaper and more efficient to burn fossil fuels, like coal.” At its most active, the McNeil plant burned 500,000 tons of wood. Last year, it burned only 150,000.

The gasifier, set to be completed at the McNeil site in about a year and a half, could potentially put the plant back at full power again. With conventional wood-burning power plants, wood is fed into a boiler and burned, heating water into steam, which powers a turbine that generates electricity. “It’s just inherently inefficient,” Irving says of the process. With hot sand, the new gasifier will allow wood chips to be turned into a product that is essentially natural gas. This gas powers a turbine — similar to those that power airplane engines — that produces electricity. The heat given off by the burning gas is used to turn water into steam in a separate boiler, which turns another turbine, generating more electricity. This technology is twice as efficient as its wood-burning equivalent, and better for the environment because the gasses given off are not ozone-depleters.

“If applied globally, it could have a material effect on reversing global warming,” Press says. “The carbon released through burning is returned in the form of new trees.”

Burlington has received funding for the first phase of the process and broke ground last month on the gasifier. Phase two — with a price tag of $10 million — involves the actual testing of the turbines within the gasifier itself and will not be implemented before a review. That the Burlington woodchip plant was already built and functioning made the test site even more appealing. In case things don’t work out, Sterzinger explains, “we needed a graceful exit strategy.”

But there is reason to hope this giant compost burner takes off — a smaller version is already functioning at Battelle Laboratories in Columbus, Ohio. Either way, the Intervale Avenue plant will probably continue to offer environmentally- sound electricity that costs more than that of its competitors. “We have not formally recognized in this country the true cost of fossil generation in terms of production and pollution,” Press says. Increased competition among utilities, he warns, is likely to promote similar “cheap, short-term solutions” and place alternative forms of generation such as this one under the gun.

This article appears in September 27 • 1995.