First woodchips delivered to Burgess BioPower plant

Commissioning has begun at the 75MW Burgess BioPower plant in Berlin, New Hampshire and on 28 August the facility received its first delivery of woodchips.

The power plant cost $273 million (€205 million) to build. It is located on the site of the Burgess Pulp Mill and has been designed to consume 750,000 tonnes of wood biomass annually – around 100 truckloads of woodchips a day.

The biomass plant is equipped with both a biomass-fired bubbling fluidised-bed boiler and a new air quality control system. Public Service of New Hampshire has a 20-year power purchase agreement in place.

Babcox & Wilcox Construction Co. was the main contractor for the project and the milestone meant it was able to test one of the three new truck dumpers at one of the two on-site tipping stations in the fully automated wood yard as part of its commissioning process.

The plant is slated to open towards the end of this year – either the end of November or the beginning of December – when it will be operated under Delta Power Services' six-year contract. Construction was originally scheduled to last for just over 25 months but this is likely to overrun to 27.

The number of workers on-site has dropped from over 500 during the construction phase to under 400 at the end of August.