Chip burner plant

[Bruno of NH]

Big explosion and fire at the chip power plant last night
The plant is in the town I live in Springfield NH 
It don't look good.

[peakbagger]

I have worked there in the past. Good crew but they got bought by a bunch of sleazebags several years ago and the owners ran the place into the ground and eventually went bankrupt in 2023. The owners, Stored Solar, burned a lot of suppliers (including me) by not paying their bills. They used to make it in the news in Maine a lot for not paying suppliers. They had to liquidate the assets and their primary creditor ended up owning them. Not sure if the new owners have changed their operating approach but I doubt it. The only way those plants can make money is get subsidized for making "green power", the NH subsidies went to the new plant in Berlin for several years but even the Berlin NH plant recently went bankrupt and is under "reorganization". The Stored Solar plants were selling into other New England states but the subsidies that they used to get are targeted to other types of "green power" like wind and solar. 

Unlike other plants, the Springfield plant's fuel feed system is right on top of the silos, the silos butt up to the main boiler building. In most plants the fuel storage is kept separate from the actual boiler building so if there is fire it can be contained away from the expensive part of the plant which is the boiler, If they took out the silos and the fuel feed system that is going to be an expensive fix. Not sure if they are running the "sister" plant in Whitefield but it may be easier to just put that back online.  

It's pretty hard to have an explosion in a biomass plant. Unless it was electrical component like a transformer failing, it takes a lot to get a wet green wood chips to burn. I suppose they could have "blacked out" the boiler by tripping the induced draft fan or they had control system issue. If the boiler was full of fuel and running at full output, if the ID fan trips, the fuel air mixture can go rich and then if the fan is restarted, it could reignite causing an explosion. 

I hope no one got hurt.   

[Southside]

1980's Beaver Power Deja vu.  

[Bruno of NH]

No one got hurt
I hear from on of my friends that's a firefighter it was in a silo

[Ianab]

News is reporting it as a large fire in a wood chip silo.  No injuries, but I would guess a real pain to get under control.

https://www.wmur.com/article/springfield-new-hampshire-wood-chip-silo-fire-6824/61045547

[peakbagger]

BTW, like any other facility that handles wood, dust and chip buildup is a big issue. The buildings are typical structural steel frames with exterior metal siding attached to horizontal purlins. There are no interior walls, so all sorts of hard to access places for dust to form. The boiler and associated ductwork radiate a lot of heat and that dries out any dust which slower lowers its self ignition point. Lots of moving equipment for hot spots to form. The boiler is designed to run "negative" with a huge induced draft fan near the stack to keep the pressure inside the boiler above the room pressure. The boiler is run to maximize generation and typically the ID fan is the limiting factor. Its sucking through a lot of equipment and with an older plant, air leaks in the air preheater, ductwork and dust collectors are going to be high. That usually means that the actual boiler will be right on the hairy edge of going positive and when that happens sparks can blow out of odd places. Even if there are not sparks, dust pockets can self ignite. Once a fire starts there is pretty good air flow in the building due to convection and exhaust fans so a small fire can turn big in short period. 

Housekeeping is important in the long run but usually the daytime staff is chasing other more immediate issues that are frequently tied to lack of long term maintenance and long term underinvestment. It not unusual to see cracked expansion joints on ductwork, as long as the system is negative , its just a big air leak but when the boiler goes positive sparks will blow out. 

At night there is one boiler operator and that is it and he is required to be in the control room or making rounds so he really cant do any cleaning. The boiler building is usually 5 or 6 stories tall and the control room situated near the firing deck so even if there is a fire in the building, the operator may not see it unless they catch it on rounds. Turnover is high and having a full staff with any skills is rare so things like housekeeping gets forgotten. 

There are also one or two fuel handlers at night, but they tend to stay out in the yard in their equipment.  

[mike dee]

Big explosion and fire at the chip power plant last night
The plant is in the town I live in Springfield NH
It don't look good.

Dust explosions are very real

[peakbagger]

From an old mythbusters

MythBusters: Silo Explosions (youtube.com)


The thing an industrial risk insurer pointed out once is it can be double explosion. There is an initial small dust explosion which shakes the building and then a secondary larger explosion when years of collected dust falls off the surrounding structure.

[barbender]

 PB, I really appreciate all of your insights from experiences inside of biomass plants and pulp mills etc. Most of us in the forest products industry don't really know what's going on inside the buildings where we bring our wood, it's kinda "behind the veil", even though most of the mills around here do tours. I've been on a few as a part of our continuing education requirements, nut that still doesn't give you an idea of what's going on as far as maintenance etc. Industrial ack of maintenance seems to be a widespread problem that isn't limited to the wood products segment. 

 We had a refinery in Superior, Wisconsin that had some explosions several years ago and was taken offline. Apparently it could've been much, much worse. But people I know that were working in there were telling a similar story, companies buying these facilities and then just running them into the ground.

[peakbagger]

The biomass power industry is on its last gasps. It started in the late seventies and there was a last big last gasp during the Obama presidency, but it has fallen out of favor in the last decade. The EPA for many years supported it as low carbon intensity dispatchable power but with the changing of the guard at the EPA it gradually got lumped in as non renewable. Most of the original plants are now 40 years old and their emissions are not state of art. Some were upgraded at one point like the Springfield plant with Nitrogen Dioxide removal systems, but many just had 2 stage electrostatic precipitators. The new Obama era plants have far better emissions equipment installed but that cost a lot of money and made then even less completive.  

I was in college when the biomass power business started and am now retired to see the end of it. I always liked "playing" with these plants, they are fairly basic in their design from a thermodynamic perspective, far less complex than a combined cycle gas plant and a lot easier to get my arms around. They still are the only real low carbon power plant that can be dispatched, they can easily have 30 days of chips on hand and run regardless of the lack of wind or solar. They are two small for the regional grid operator to care about so when they go away, the regulators could care less. 

The seeds for the replacement for biomass power plants are starting to sprout, the old Madison paper Mill in Maine is making wood based insulation and there are grand plans for Limestone to make renewable jet fuel. The old Lincoln mill is looking at making a biodiesel additive/heating fuel, and biochar plants are starting to be talked about in other locations. The investors long ago made their money and went away, it is the locals who worked at the plant, drove the fuel supply trucks, the loggers who had another small market and the landowners that had a bit more revenue to justify precommercial thinning to improve their woodland that lost out.  

[Southside]

They tried that jet fuel thing in Lakeview, OR.  $300 million in grant money and they never even got the plant finished before things went bust.  My guess with Limestone is the pipeline is still in place down to the port that they got fuel from so that's the attraction.