Cate Street Capital Vice President Alexandra Ritchie said the 75-megawatt biomass plant is scheduled to come on-line by the end of the year.
On Wednesday there were 398 people employed on-site, down from the over 500 employed during the peak of construction. Ritchie said the construction phase is winding down as Cate Street hopes to get the plant operating by late November. She said the construction phase originally was projected to take 25.5 months but will probably end up taking closer to 27 months.
Once the plant is operating, it will employ 30 to 40 people. Ritchie said Delta Power Services, which will operate and maintain the biomass plant under a six-year contract with Cate Street Capital, has already hired the majority of those full-time employees.
Beyond those hired directly, she said the project should stimulate hundreds of jobs in the wood products industry through the purchase of 750,000 tons of biomass annually. Ritchie said Cate Street Capital has a 20-year agreement to sell the power generated the plant to Public Service of N.H. which should provide security to logging contractors.
Belanger explained the wood processing system for the plant. Truck dumpsters tilt the logging trucks and dump the biomass onto a reclaim conveyor, which transports the wood into the wood processing structure where it is screened and ground. The ground biomass is then fed into an A-frame conveyor that moves back and forth, depositing the wood in a pile under the conveyor. Under conveyors feed the biomass into a transfer conveyor that goes into the main boiler feed conveyor.