USC’s biomass plant debacle
How the university’s green dream went bust after three ‘potentially lethal accidents’ and a host of other problems
By WAYNE WASHINGTON (The State Newspaper)
On June 28, 2009, an explosion rocked the biomass-fueled power plant on the campus of the University of South Carolina.
The force of the blast sent a metal panel some 60 feet toward the control office of the plant at Whaley and Sumter streets, according to documents obtained from USC by The State newspaper through a Freedom of Information Act request.
No one was hurt, but USC officials were concerned enough about the “potentially lethal accident” that they ordered an independent safety review and, in a strongly worded letter to the company that had built the plant, made it clear that university staff would not be allowed back into the building until the review was completed.
The blast underscored what some USC officials privately grumbled about for years: That the plant has been a $20 million disaster, a money pit that was poorly planned and built by a company that had never constructed such a cutting-edge “green energy” power plant before.
Interviews with USC officials and a spokeswoman for the company as well as a review of more than 1,800 pages of documents show that:
• USC, whose officials touted the plant “as the cat’s meow” before its startup in December 2007, closed it in March of this year after it had been shut down more than three dozen times. In one two-year period, the plant only provided steam – its purpose – on 98 out of 534 days, according to a USC review.
• There was no separate bidding process for the construction of the plant. The firm that built it, Johnson Controls Inc. of Wisconsin, was the only firm that included the construction of a biomass plant as part of its effort to win a competitively bid energy services contract. JCI won that $33.6 million energy services contract, then alone negotiated with USC the added cost of the biomass plant.
• USC paid JCI an additional $19.6 million for the plant. The university was to get its money back in energy savings or payments from JCI. So far, JCI has paid USC $4.3 million because the plant did not perform as promised. As things stand now, USC will recoup its $19.6 million investment by 2020 from payments by JCI.
• Despite a relationship that was, at one point, so acrimonious that USC hired outside legal counsel, the university continues to work with JCI. One option that USC now is considering is putting natural gas-fired turbines in the closed biomass plant to produce power, and JCI may be involved, a USC official says.
• Most substantively, however, the biomass experience led USC to change its structure of governance, giving a reformulated committee of its board of trustees responsibility for overseeing and vetting projects.
Now sitting idle, with spider webs and a thin film of dust replacing a plant’s hard-hat hustle and bustle, the biomass plant stands as a monument to the university’s failed push toward new, “green” technology, inadequate oversight and naïveté, some of its own officials acknowledge in internal documents.
The plant blemishes the legacy of the late Andrew Sorensen, the beloved, bow-tied president who was in charge of USC when the plant was conceived and constructed. And it also raises questions about whether USC’s revised system of oversight will be able to prevent future instances of idealism gone wrong that marred the biomass project from the beginning.
“A (expletive) mess with many layers,” is how William “Ted” Moore, a former USC vice president of finance and planning, described the plant in an email to Ed Walton, USC’s chief financial officer.
In another email, this one to USC president Harris Pastides, who succeeded Sorensen, Moore said: “The value of this thing may be scrap metal.”
That’s not the way JCI sees the project.
“We remain committed to the long-term success of the USC project, and the university has been supportive and appreciative of Johnson Controls’ efforts to fulfill its commitment,” said Karen Conrad, the company’s director of marketing communications.
Full story: http://www.thestate.com/2011/10/09/2001993/uscs-biomass-plant-debacle.html#ixzz1aKeVXkUU
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At least they finally (weeks late) complied with FOIA requests, unlike some public agencies we know:
About this story
More than 1,800 pages of records obtained by The State show the biomass project collapsed into delays, recriminations and frustration.
Click here to read excerpts of those documents
State senior reporter Wayne Washington requested documents, via the S.C. Freedom of Information Act, concerning USC’s biomass plant on June 29 from the University of South Carolina. That law allows public agencies 15 working days to respond to a request for public information.
University officials responded they would need additional time to fulfill the request. They also said, because USC is getting an increasing number of requests for public information, the university would exercise its legal right to charge for document production and copying.
USC supplied 1,816 pages of documents concerning the $20 million facility to The State Sept. 22, charging $255.80 to provide the information.
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h/t to WUWT reader Mike Whaley
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Ref – Rob says:
October 10, 2011 at 11:08 pm
It has much more to do with the circular thinking of Greenies, the waste of precious wood chips and sewage, and the extravagant burning of Chinese money, which we can ill afford to continue burning these days. They are not made of money you know. Well, not entirely. There is more to being an All-American 21st Century Scientist than flying kites in thunder storms or reverse-processing sewage in Columbia SC with a rather expensive collection of pipes and valves and guages. Please! Get with the program! (And, remember, we’re broke; in more ways than one. Have you been to Wall Street lately?)
From _Jim on October 10, 2011 at 4:50 pm: (out of sequence)
As memory serves me of the news coverage, it was unit 1 (going by your first link) they were looking at when the expert commentator mentioned the blowout construction, I remember that clean framework. It sure sounded from his tone that such would be expected at that plant.
From those pics, yes 3 and 4 do have reinforced concrete walls. But the roofing materials look to have been blown off cleanly, on unit 4 the framing survived rather well.
Thus it does appear that blowout construction was employed, with the design shifted between the units. Although given the damage I’d say the blasts were more powerful than expected.
Not “containment floors” but just the top of the building for the containment structure. That’s just semantics, not worth quibbling about.
Hydrogen, of course, is notoriously difficult to contain, leaking out of little tiny gaps and cracks. It is not realistic to assume the containment vessel will always contain all of it. Once escaped, it would rise due to being such a light molecule. A possible buildup at the top of the structure should be expected even under normal plant operations.
In such not-normal conditions, with the cooling system shut down, possibly compromised, and evaporation taking place (steam releases included), a hydrogen buildup should be viewed as a certainty. Planning for it is logical, and blowout construction makes sense.
In the big scheme of things is there really enough wood chips laying around to make a significant amount of energy that would ever displace the need for a real conventional power plant? I could see the actual wood processing plants, lumber yards, etc using the stuff on site but trucking this stuff around to college campuses (or campi) and other far flung destinations seems like a waste of time and diesel fuel.
paper and cardboard plants use houmoungas tonnages of “wood chips”. that is solid wood broken up into pieces about the size and thickness of a matchbook. they inspect the incomming loads and if there is bark, garbage, dead hogs, live fungus………..in the load they reject it. then the shipper has to get rid of it. i believe that the college system can use this stuff and if they can they probably will have a very large source of fuel for free. there was a raw pulp plant just west of missoula montana that accepted ~5000 tons of chips a day and they used to say that the really big outfits were in the south.
C
by the way if the college had said right from the get go that this was a semi experimental setup and not have claimed to be able to paint the moon with the “savings” they wouldn’t look half so dumb.
C
Bloomberg
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Files for Bankruptcy, Lawyer Says
October 12, 2011, 2:11 AM EDT
The state capital of 49,500 faces a debt burden five times its general-fund budget because of an overhaul and expansion of a trash-to-energy incinerator that doesn’t generate enough revenue.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-12/harrisburg-pennsylvania-files-for-bankruptcy-lawyer-says.html
wow and i though wind-farms was the most dangerous industry in the world. They have several times the injury and death rate per hour worked. And several hundred times if you look at KW/h generated.