WESTFIELD – Since last winter, the City of Westfield has been setting in motion plans to become a more energy-efficient municipality, with a European-style anerobic digester among the investments it was hoping to make.
Now it appears that this ambitious project has hit a snag.
City Water Department Superintendent David Billips said Tuesday that the project’s progress has been hindered by grant qualification issues.
“We were hoping we’d be able to get some grant money from the state’s CEC (Clean Energy Center),” he said. “We sent in a grant application, but I heard back that we’re not eligible because we get our power from the Westfield G&E, a public utility, and they don’t pay into the renewable energy trust, which is what they fund those grants out of. Basically we’re still in an investigatory stage.”
Billips said that the city is going back to the drawing board, and has consulted with other municipalities around the state which own and operate digesters.
“We’re doing more work on our own, looking into feasibility.” he said. “We’ve made a couple of visits. Fairhaven has a digester, we went out and looked at theirs. We’re moving forward, just not as quickly as we’d hoped.”
“I went to a seminar in Cambridge about three or four weeks ago,” he continued. “Deer Island has got a pilot program going for coal digestion, which is one of the things we’re looking at. Nobody else in Massachusetts is doing coal digestion.”
Billips stated that farmers in western Mass. have begun utilizing the process as well.
“Theres a farm digester in Hadley.” he said. “It works pretty well for farmers, as obviously they have everything right there on site. They’re using it for their own waste, not really generating energy.”
The seminar Billips attended also featured a presentation by Jordan Dairy Farm of Rutland that built a digester that was implemented by the Casella Organic Group of Portland, Maine.
Jenn McDonnell, director of sales and marketing for Casella, said Tuesday that these digesters have really taken off across the pond.
“They’re an application of technology that’ve been around for awhile. Europe uses them quite extensively for a number of different types of waste treatments,” she said.
According to McDonnell, anerobic digesters are enclosed systems that use microorganisms to digest the foodwaste and, as a byproduct of their digestion, create several types of gas, including methane gas, which can be used to produce electricity.
“So essentially you combine food stock in an enclosed environment and microorganisms, or bugs as we call them, eat it up and produce biogas that we can combust into electricity and can also recover heat from,” she said. “Wastewater treatment plants use a variety of different technologies to treat the water that comes into their facilities. All of them have digesters, but it’s not a requirement.”
McDonnell spoke of the Maine cities of Lewiston and Auburn, who implemented an anerobic digester at their shared wastewater plant about a year ago.
“Wastewater treatment is a pretty energy intensive process, so producing energy on site can be valuable and really economical,” she said. “Farm digesters are different. They combine manure from the dairy operation with farm food waste.”
“They’re capital intensive, for sure. Theres a number of different pieces to the system – pumps, tanks, covers, piping, engines and controls,” she said. “They really are pretty sophisticated from a technological perspective, and therefore, they are a significant investment.”
McDonnell said that the farm projects which Casella is involved in average out at about $3 million each, but that she didn’t know what a wastewater digester would cost.
“I would imagine they would cost a little bit more,” she said. “It depends on what kind of infrastructure is already at the site and how big you want the digester, and the engine, to be.”
Despite Westfield’s ineligibility for CEC grants, Ed Colletta of the Commonwealth’s Department of Environmental Protection said that the city can apply for a state loan this summer that could provide significant funding for the project.
“It’s a state revolving fund, which is money that comes in from the federal government, and it’s also state money,” he said Wednesday. “They’re used to award two percent, low interest loans over 20 years for cities and towns’ water and sewer districts.”
Colletta added that the funds are used to aid in the planning and construction of projects related to drinking water and waste treatment plants, water mains systems, and anerobic digesters.
“(Anerobic digestion) results in potentially renewable energy from it. They’re one of the pieces connected to wastewater treatment plants,” he said. “You take that sludge from the treatment plant, you put it into an AD facility, the little bugs do their thing, and this can result in renewable energy that can run the plant.”
Colletta said that the state announced $547 million in loans in March, and that awards can range between $150,000 to $200,000 for planning projects, all the way up to between $20 and $25 million for fully completed treatment plants.
Regarding the number of applications the Commonwealth receives for these loans, Colletta stated that they “get quite a few.”
“We issued around 80 communities or regional water districts that got $547 million worth of loans, 54 or 57 projects funded this year.” he said. “There is an application that needs to be filled out and turned in between June and August,” Colletta continued. “Throughout the fall and into early next year, we’ll be reviewing all the applications. Usually around the holidays, we put out a list of those that look like they’ll get funded.”
Colletta said that this preliminary list then circulates, receives public feedback, and is finalized in February or March of next year.
The SRS Program has been in service for clean water and sewer projects since the early ’90s, he said.
“This has been a longstanding program that has put out over $7.1 billion in low interest loans since 1991, just here in Massachusetts.” he said. “If Westfield is looking to do that (build an anaerobic digester), they really should check out the information. By mid to late June, the application will be available for the next round.”
